Now it has all come out: Adam Schiff went after Donald Trump with particular intensity and fury because Hillary Clinton had promised him that once she became president, she would appoint him to head the CIA. Instead, Donald Trump won the election, Schiff stayed in the House of Representatives, and in his rage at being denied, joined lustily in the effort to frame Trump for collusion with Russia that never happened. Because Adam Schiff was a disappointed office seeker, he sought to bring down a president. The other famous disappointed office seeker in American history, whom Schiff now forever joins in a two-man group of embittered losers, was more successful.
James A. Garfield had only been president for four months when, on July 2, 1881, he and Secretary of State James G. Blaine were walking through the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, on their way to board a train to spend part of the summer in New Jersey, away from the heat of the capital. There were no guards with them; an assassin had cut down Abraham Lincoln sixteen years before, that was considered a wartime aberration. In a republic of free men, elected officials were not in danger amid the public.
And yet they were. As Garfield and Blaine strolled through the station, a man stepped up behind Garfield and fired his gun twice at the president, hitting him in the back and arm, and crying, “I am a Stalwart and now Arthur is president!” The Stalwarts were a faction within Garfield’s own Republican Party that opposed him; Chester A. Arthur, who was indeed a Stalwart, was vice president.
The shooter was Charles Guiteau, who has been described in so many history books as a “disappointed office seeker” that the label has practically become a Homeric epithet. A disappointed office seeker Guiteau undeniably was, but he was much more than that. After repeatedly pressing Arthur for a chance to campaign for the Garfield/Arthur ticket during the 1880 campaign, Arthur relented, likely just to end his harassment, and Guiteau delivered his speech, “Garfield against Hancock,” that is, Democrat candidate Winfield Scott Hancock, a single time.
As “Rating America’s Presidents” explains, Guiteau thought he was owed a federal office as a result, and had pestered White House officials repeatedly for a chance to see Garfield, who did meet with him at least once, and then Blaine in order to make his case for an appointment as consul to France. Guiteau was, however, not an ordinary office seeker. He wanted a position in France but did not speak French. There was also another big obstacle in the way of his getting the appointment he wanted or any other: he was crazy. His sister recounted that in 1875, six years before the assassination, he had raised an axe to her with a look on his face “like a wild animal.” She explained: “I had no doubt then of his insanity. He was losing his mind.”
In 1881, before the assassination, Guiteau also pressured Senator John Logan of Illinois for a federal job. Logan recounted: “I must say I thought there was some derangement of his mental organization.” There was. As he bought a pistol and hatched his plan to murder Garfield, Guiteau wrote: “The Lord inspired me to attempt to remove the President in preference to someone else, because I had the brains and the nerve to do the work. The Lord always employs the best material to do His work.”
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The wounds he gave to Garfield were not mortal, and the president lingered through the summer. This was, however, the age before sanitary practices were known to be necessary. On Sept. 19, 1881, Garfield died of infections his doctors had given him in probing the wound. At his trial, Guiteau stated that he was pleading “insanity, in that it was God’s act and not mine. The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency, and therefore I am not responsible for my act.” The jury wasn’t made up of modern-day leftists; it didn’t buy this for a second, and Guiteau was hanged for his crime.
Adam Schiff, of course, isn’t like Charles Guiteau in every particular. He didn’t try to kill Trump; he just tried to destroy him. And yet the parallels are clear enough. There are now two disappointed office seekers in American history who, in their rage and frustration, tried to bring down presidents. One succeeded. The other failed. That would be Adam Schiff.
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