Assassination Vacation (27 page)

O
n the Saturday before Easter, there is an empty bandstand set up at the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial’s steps. I ask a National Park Service ranger what it’s for. He replies that a church from suburban Virginia is hosting an Easter sunrise service here in the morning.

I snap, “How did
they
get permission to do that?”

He shrugs, nonchalantly answering, “They applied for a permit.”

Then I remembered that a couple of weeks from now there is an abortion rights rally scheduled to take place here on the Mall, that the pro-choice people probably applied for the exact same permit. I like that. I like that the Mall serves as our national Tupperware, reliable and empty, waiting to be filled with potluck whatever.

Besides, an Easter service at the Lincoln Memorial does make historical sense. Booth shot Lincoln on Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ’s crucifixion. By the next morning, Lincoln was dead. How stupid was Booth? What kind of moron does away with the president he hates at the kickoff of Easter weekend? Sunday morning, pulpits across the land shouted analogies comparing the martyred president to the martyred Christ. Richard Eddy, pastor of the First Universalist Church of Philadelphia, asked his congregation, “Was there ever since the death of the savior of the world, a more brutal, a more uncalled-for murder?” A D.C. local, J. G. Butler of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, called Lincoln the country’s savior, proclaiming,

He lives where the martyred men of all ages live — we believe, where the Great Martyr, our Lord Jesus, lives — in that heavenly City, whose air is not pregnant with treason and malice and death; but, where the heart, cleansed and inspired by the blood and spirit of Jesus, is in perfect and eternal sympathy with the great Redeemer, whose name is
love.

A controversial politician widely blamed for the casualties and hardships of war, Lincoln was suddenly and forever upgraded to the persecuted savior who died so that the country might live.

A poster advertising the sunrise service stops me cold. It assumes, “You’ve seen
The Passion of the Christ.
Now celebrate the resurrection of the Christ.”

I do enjoy a good movie tie-in. Plus, an event in the nation’s capital rejoicing in the holy trinity of Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and Mel Gibson witnessed on four hours of sleep — count me in.

The next morning, the Capitol dome is lit up white against the still black sky. I’m at the Lincoln Memorial by ten past six to strategize my seat location. Am I paranoid, or does the Easter service’s powerful combination of a major Christian religious holiday celebrated on the National Mall in a patriotic shrine at the deep fond center of the American heart make the event the perfect target for a terrorist truck bomb? Before I left my hotel room, I e-mailed a friend where I was and where I was going and that if he saw an explosion at the Lincoln Memorial on the news he should phone my parents and break it to them I’m probably dead. I added a halfhearted “ha ha” at the end of the e-mail in an effort to fake breeziness, but truth is, I’m nervous.

As I stand before the front row of seats making a threat assessment, I rule out sitting in the folding chairs closest to the bandstand; it’s fine if these born-again musicians want to call themselves the Resurrection Orchestra, but us nonbelievers flying without the net of an afterlife will be avoiding the blast radius of center stage.

Then, as if getting blown up is not enough to worry about, after I take a seat on the steps, I get a look at the choir. Thirty singers and from where I’m sitting it looks like only two of them are black. It’s not like I’m saying suburban white people shouldn’t sing. Because I love Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.” But as I suspected, at six-thirty sharp the choir does stand up to perform the first of their competent renditions of generic, mid-tempo pop ballads that sound like they were written by a computer using a database of Easter vocabulary. In fairness, I should mention that other people here love the choir. The crowd is clapping and swaying and raising their arms. For me, however, where gospel music is concerned, my taste is more conservative and narrow-minded than a Reverend Falwell commencement address at Oral Roberts U. Unless it’s an old holy-roller hymn Johnny Cash would have learned from his mama back in Arkansas, I’m not interested. So the only musical selection I sing along with is when the preacher, Amos Dodge, does a Martin Luther King and climbs halfway up the steps to lead us in an old-school, a cappella “How Great Thou Art.”

Before delivering his sermon cum Mel Gibson movie review, the folksy Reverend Dodge intones, “As the old southern preacher said, ‘If I don’t light your fire, your wood’s wet.’ ” It goes without saying that my wood is soggier than a sunken stump at the bottom of the Potomac. Still, I can’t help but like this guy.

“Everybody’s talking about
The Passion of the Christ,
” he says. “I left the movie with my heart pierced. My steps were slow. I wanted to remember every scene, remember what I felt when I saw the whip, the soldiers, and the blood. But today we have come to celebrate the resurrection of the Christ from the dead.

“No other religion in the world has a risen savior,” he brags, imagining that if the tombs of all the other historical religious figureheads were lined up “in a row at Arlington Cemetery across the river, they would all have ‘Occupied’ and ‘No Vacancy’ signs on the tombs, save one.” I know Dodge doesn’t intend for this to be a laugh line, but I crack up imagining one of the incarnations of the Buddha gunning down Nazis in World War II. “Only Jesus’s tomb,” continues Dodge, “would stand open and empty.”

Here I’ve been under the impression that every time I come here to the Lincoln Memorial, I’m cheating death. Because the whole time I stand around reading his speeches, searching his eyes, I feel like I’m bringing Abraham Lincoln back to life.

Pastor Dodge brags that because of the story it tells,
The Passion of the Christ
is so popular that it is currently the eighth-largest-grossing movie of all time. I look around me at all the heads bowed in prayer, praying to this god they think or hope rose from the dead two thousand years ago just so he could offer them — us — everlasting life. Even I can see how, in terms of cheating death, the Christians’ promise of everlasting life pretty much beats my staring-at-statues, reading-speeches-on-the-marble-wall method all to hell.

The service ends and I sit there on the steps for a while with “How Great Thou Art” stuck in my head. Elvis sang it, and I keep picturing the blue cover of his gospel album. It’s one of my mother’s favorites. She liked to put it on at Easter. She still does. For all I know, she was listening to Elvis’s rendition of “How Great Thou Art” at the very moment I was warbling it here on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Come to think of it, I can probably trace this whole morbid assassination death trip back to my parents’ record collection. Specifically, Buddy Starcher’s spoken-word LP
History Repeats Itself.
The title track hit number two on the pop charts back in 1966. When my sister and I were little, we used to scare ourselves by putting it on the record player and listening to Starcher rattle off a list of the spooky similarities between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations in a twangy accent while backup singers hum “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” underneath him as he talks.

Starcher’s inventory includes the important facts that Lincoln was elected in 1860 and Kennedy in 1960; that both their vice presidents were named Johnson, the first Johnson being born in 1808 and the second one in 1908; that John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839 and Lee Harvey Oswald in 1939; that the names Lincoln and Kennedy each have seven letters, the names Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson are thirteen letters each, and there are fifteen letters in the names John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. Starcher concludes, “Friends, that these things are verified facts prove that truth really is stranger than fiction and that history
does
repeat itself.”

Though Buddy Starcher has been forgotten, that list will never go away. Ann Landers seemed to get a column out of it every couple of years, most of which are easily found by typing the words “Landers” and “eerie” into a search engine. The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, which presents exhibits about the JFK assassination on the floor of the building where Oswald fired his rifle, sells it as a poster in the gift shop with pictures of the two presidents labeled “Lincoln-Kennedy Coincidence?”

While the list points out the fact that both presidential wives witnessed their husbands’ murders and had children who died while their husbands were in the White House, the list daintily ignores the fact that both women spent way too much money on clothes. And then there is the ridiculous detail about how Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and then escaped to a warehouse, while Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and then made haste to a theater. But Booth didn’t run to a warehouse. He ended up in a barn. A barn is the same thing as a warehouse if you think that a puppet is the same thing as a potholder.

Still, as a kid,
History Repeats Itself
terrified me, mostly because I was a God-fearing child. And I mean that literally. God scared me stiff, what with the turning human beings into salt and getting them swallowed up by whales, plus the locusts and famines and, not least, making sure his own kid gets nailed to death onto wood. Every time someone would die — a cousin or grandparent or Elvis — some relative or preacher would there-there it away by saying that God has a plan, and we simply have no way of knowing what that plan is. But we did know. We learned about His plan every week at Sunday school. It’s called Armageddon!

I think I saw the Kennedy-Lincoln coincidences as minor rest stops on the interstate to doomsday. I actually pictured God sitting on a cloud chuckling as He imagined blowing our miniature minds by making sure Oswald’s mom got knocked up in time for her 1939 due date.

I no longer believe in a Supreme Being in the sky producing cosmic episodes of
Presidential Punk’d.
So why does that Kennedy-Lincoln list still spark something inside me? Why do I detect butterflies in my stomach every morning noticing how the headlines seem ripped from the McKinley administration? Or get the chills about the heap of peculiarity surrounding John Wilkes Booth’s brother and Abraham Lincoln’s son — Edwin Booth picking up Lincoln’s plaster hands at that party, Edwin saving Robert Todd Lincoln’s life, Ford’s Theatre collapsing during Edwin’s funeral, and of course the seriously hexed Robert T.’s assassination cameo three-peat?

Well, cue the “Battle Hymn” hummers. Because as Buddy Starcher would drawl, Friends, these creepy historical flukes offer momentary relief from the oppression of chaos and that is not nothing. They give order to the universe. They give meaning. Of course, life is still pretty meaningless and death is the only true democracy. But Robert Todd Lincoln, huh?
Weird.

Time to go home. I walk down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial toward my uncle, then past the White House and the Seward plaque and on to Union Station and the train. Then to New York and my dead neighbors. From Penn Station to Madison Square Park to say hello to Chester Arthur. On to Gramercy Park to squint at fenced-in Edwin Booth, past Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace on Twentieth Street to Union Square, where Roosevelt’s grandfather used to own a house, where as a boy Roosevelt sat in the window watching Abraham Lincoln’s funeral cortege go by, where Emma Goldman gave a speech telling the parents of starving children to steal bread to feed them, where Henry Bacon, who built a Greek temple to Lincoln, built a bank, a Greek temple to money. Finally, turning toward home, I wave good-bye to Lincoln, whose bronze statue stands in the dead center of the square. Then I nod at Gandhi, whose bronze statue stands on the square’s western edge. They shot him too.

Acknowledgments

I cannot imagine writing a book without Geoffrey Kloske editing it to the point that I have begun to fear his death more than my own. Though I don’t know how I can keep my head from getting too big thanks to constant fawning praise from Geoff like, “I guess that idea isn’t
too
terrible.” I’m also cheerfully indebted to David Rosenthal, Rachel Nagler, Caroline Bruce, Laura Perciasepe, and Christopher Wahlers at Simon & Schuster; Karen Covington and Byrd Schas for transcribing tapes; Marcel Dzama for his illustrations; and once again, David Levinthal for his cover photograph.

Also propping me up: Jaime Wolf, Esquire; Kathie Russo, and Jaime Askin at Washington Square Arts; Kathryn Barcos, Eliza Fischer, and it goes without saying Steven “the Colonel” Barclay of the Steven Barclay Agency.

Thanks always and especially to: my parents, Pat and Janie Vowell; Greil and Jenny Marcus; David Rakoff, Dave Eggers, and Ira Glass, whose editorial mojo is so potent all I have to do is imagine him reading some dull and long-winded passage that I dutifully cut it down to a pithier point without being told.

As well as: Kevin Baker, Alex Blumberg, Eric Bogosian, Shelley Dick, Daniel Ferguson, John Flansburgh, Barrett Golding, Jonathan Goldstein, Robin Goldwasser, Jack Hitt, John Hodgman, Nick Hornby, Ben Karlin, Jon Langford, Lisa Leingang, Ben Lloyd, John Ma, Jim Nelson, Conan O’Brien, Kate Porterfield, David Sedaris, John-Mario Sevilla, Jeff Singer, Julie Snyder, the Family Sontheimer, Wendy Weil, and Ren Weschler. A welcome distraction from assassination conspiracies were these conspiracies I’m thrilled to be part of:
This American Life, McSweeney’s,
Pixar, Eating It,
Late Night,
the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, and 826NYC.

A special Shotgun! to my fellow travelers: my sister Amy Vowell; my nephew Owen Brooker; Fran and Quenton Barker; Nicole Francis; Brent Hoff; Matt Klam; Matt Roberts; and particularly the Lincoln-loving Bennett Miller, who is either a really good listener or a really good actor — he’s been this book’s best friend.

As this book was going to press, I was dismayed to learn of Gretchen Worden’s death. The director of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, she was only fifty-six. The world is a little less interesting without her in it.