Twelve military generals have been elected President. Five party leaders in Congress have ascended to the chief magistracy. But only one President has been both. Only one has published an original mathematical proof. The man with all these striking accomplishments is James Garfield. The reason that he lingers in obscurity despite all his talents is the brevity of his presidential tenure. Garfield was shot three months after taking office and died ten weeks later, making him the President with the second shortest service after only William Henry Harrison.
Yet if his presidency is necessarily of limited interest, his life is fascinating both because of his multifaceted acumen and its window into mid-nineteenth-century America. It is thus worth having a modern account of the man, and President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier is an illuminating effort by a rookie biographer, C. W. Goodyear. Goodyear provides most of the information necessary for a balanced judgment of a politician who saw more deeply than most into the essential political fault lines of America in his day—even if he may have been too calculating in his need for popularity and power to repair them. But at times, Goodyear fails to fully investigate significant incidents in Garfield’s life, whether because of a misplaced sense of delicacy or political correctness.
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