American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [11]
Then there’s the matter of Booth’s diary. Yup, Oswald and Sirhan weren’t the first assassins to set down their thoughts ahead of the deed. Booth’s little red book was supposedly removed from his body after he was shot. The diary was taken to Washington and ended up in Stanton’s custody, at which point it disappeared for awhile. When it was located in time for the conspirators’ trial that summer, Lafayette Baker—the fellow who gave the diary, intact, to Stanton—said somebody had removed eighteen pages. Others who’d seen the diary testified that the pages had already gone missing when Stanton received it. But those were all underlings of Stanton’s at the War Department.
With Nixon, we’d have the infamous eighteen-minute gap in the White House tapes that his secretary Rosemary Woods, “accidentally” erased. In the same vein, who could have “erased” those eighteen diary pages of Booth’s? One story that surfaced about this came from a congressman, George W. Julian, who said that when he got summoned to the War Department ten days after the assassination, he discovered Stanton pacing back and forth and saying, “We have Booth’s diary, and he has recorded a lot in it.” Julian claimed that Senator John Conness from California showed up and, as he was checking out the diary, started mumbling: “Oh my God, oh my God, I am ruined if this ever gets out!” Then, according to the congressman, Stanton issued instructions to put the diary in his safe.22
What’s interesting is, Senator Conness was one of the so-called Radical Republicans, who wanted a much tougher Reconstruction policy toward the South than Lincoln was willing to go for. It was alleged that an envelope linking Conness to George Atzerodt, one of the conspirators, had been found in Atzerodt’s room, but Stanton didn’t choose to follow that up.23 When Stanton died on Christmas Eve, 1869, it’s pretty likely that a lot of secrets went with him.
This much we know for certain: Eight Lincoln conspirators were found guilty before a military court on June 30, 1865, and four of them were hanged—Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt. She was the least directly involved of any of them, but she owned the boardinghouse and tavern where the conspirators gathered—and she knew enough to have alerted the authorities about what was up. Her son, John Surratt, was a different story. He’d been deeply involved with Booth in the kidnapping plot. At first Stanton offered a $25,000 reward for Surratt’s capture but, after his mother’s hanging, seems to have lost interest. Surratt got to Europe before the Vatican corralled him, but he escaped. Eventually he did get caught and came back to be tried in a civil court. But the government didn’t have the evidence to convict him on a murder charge.
So where did Surratt end up? As a respected tobacco farmer in Maryland who earned extra money giving lectures and married the second cousin of Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.” Surratt lived to the merry old age of 74, when he died of pneumonia in 1916. He is said to have burned the manuscript of his autobiography a few days before that.24
One of the recent books has Booth portrayed as a rebel agent who, after Richmond fell, turned his thoughts from kidnapping to killing. A Confederate plot that went at least as high as their secretary of state, Judah Benjamin (who burned all his papers before he escaped to England and never returned), is today the most accepted of all the conspiratorial possibilities.25 The “lost confession” of Atzerodt, talking about Booth’s knowledge of a Confederate plan to blow up the White House, was discovered in 1977 and bolsters that theory.26 Still, I wonder if it’s a little too pat—kind of like the idea today that Castro had Kennedy assassinated in retaliation for the plots against him.
There are some other “out-there” theories, like Booth being a hired gun of big international bankers such as the Rothschilds, who didn’t like the president’s monetary policies.