Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [68]
Before stepping out of the carriage, Garfield turned to say goodbye to Blaine, who would not be traveling with him. The secretary of state, however, insisted on escorting him to the train. “I did not think it was proper for a president to go entirely unattended,” he would later explain. As the two men ascended the steps into the station, arm in arm, Garfield suddenly stopped and turned back to Kearney, who had lifted his hat and saluted. Responding with a warm smile and tip of his hat, the president disappeared inside the door.
As Garfield entered the station, Sarah White, the matron for the ladies’ waiting room, looked up from her position next to the room’s heater. She watched as the president and secretary of state strode by, Blaine slightly ahead of Garfield, Harry and Jim trailing behind them. Garfield walked with an easy, natural confidence—“absolutely free from any affectation whatever.”
He must have made a striking contrast to Guiteau, whom White had also been watching that morning. Not only was Guiteau nearly half a foot shorter than the president and seventy-five pounds lighter, but he seemed as uncomfortable and nervous as Garfield was at ease. As he shuffled soundlessly between the gentlemen’s and ladies’ waiting rooms, his shoulders bent, his head tilted at an odd angle, and his dark slouch hat sitting low over his eyes, Guiteau had seemed suspicious to White. “He would look in one door and pass on to the next door and look in again,” she remembered. “He walked in the room once, took off his hat, wiped his face, and went out again.”
When Garfield walked in, Guiteau was standing right behind him. This, Guiteau realized, was his chance to kill the president, and this time he was not about to let it slip away. Without a moment’s hesitation, he raised the revolver he had been carrying with him for nearly a month and pointed it at Garfield’s back. So complete was his composure that he might have been standing at the edge of the Potomac aiming at a sapling, instead of in a crowded train station about to shoot the president of the United States.
The Venezuelan chargé d’affaires, Simón Camacho, happened to be standing next to Guiteau at that moment, and he could clearly see the assassin’s face as he stood looking at Garfield, arm outstretched and unwavering. “His teeth were clenched and his mouth closed firmly,” Camacho would later recall. “His eye was steady, and his face presented the appearance of a brave man, who is determined upon a desperate deed, and meant to do it calmly and well.”
Garfield had walked only a few steps into the room, and was just three feet away when Guiteau pulled the trigger. The bullet sliced through the president’s right arm, passing through his jacket and piercing the side of a tool box that a terrified worker was carrying through the station. The sudden impact made Garfield throw up his arms in surprise and cry out, “My God! What is this?”
As Garfield turned to see who had shot him, Guiteau fired again. By now, however, his courage had abandoned him, as his thoughts seemed to have suddenly shifted from the president’s fate to his own. “The expression on [his] face had now changed,” Camacho said. “His calmness had disappeared.… He fired wildly this time and with a hurried movement.”
Despite the wave of fear that had washed over Guiteau, the lead bullet hit its mark, ripping into the president’s back. The force thrust Garfield forward, his long legs buckling underneath him and his hands reaching out to break his fall. As he sank heavily