DARK HORSE

A behind-the-curtains glimpse at an often overlooked presidency, and at the cabals and conspiracies that brought it to an end.

John Garfield was something of an accidental president, a dark horse brought onto the national scene in the wake of the many scandals that rocked the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. Washington insider Ackerman, who has held various civil-service posts over the last three decades, has an evident appreciation for the Ohio Republican, who wasn’t exactly unwilling to see his hat tossed into the ring but hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to court high office, either. Garfield would have done better to stay on the farm, to judge by Ackerman’s engaging account of events, for Garfield found himself caught in the middle of a longtime feud between party bosses Roscoe Conkling and James G. Blaine, who hated each other with a fine passion and had been fighting for control of the Capitol for years. Garfield developed a platform of compromise that might surprise a few GOP loyalists today—including a staunch repudiation of “the pernicious doctrine of State supremacy”; support for federal funding for universal, secular education; and opposition to free trade and “doubtful financial experiments” such as federal intervention in the market. Still, for all his efforts at reconciliation, when Garfield was finally elected—and much of Ackerman’s account deals with his tortuous path to the White House—he had to maneuver his way between Conkling and Blaine, pleasing neither with his choice of lieutenants and initiatives. Enter Charles Guiteau, the assassin who gunned Garfield down in 1881; though often described as a disappointed office-seeker and lunatic, he pulled the trigger as a committed “stalwart” who wanted to see Garfield out of office and Garfield’s vice president Chester Arthur in—as did Conkling, who allegedly endorsed the murder. Did Guiteau act alone? Ackerman has some ideas about that, and about the condition of national politics 12 decades ago.

A welcome glimpse into the little-known time between the Civil War and the Gilded Age.