A time to die.

Friend, Craig Thompson

The White House in Mourning: Deaths and Funerals of Presidents in Office. By Martin S. Nowak. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2010. 247 pp.

Killing the President: Assassinations, Attempts, and Rumored Attempts on U.S. Commanders-in-Chief By Willard M. Oliver and Nancy E. Marion. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. 235 pp.

As the most visible face of American politics, presidents have always served as celebrities, as persons of public character whose lives symbolize the vitality of American political culture. Consequently, presidents' deaths, particularly those resulting from assassination, have the power to shift political culture. The recent assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords is the latest reminder that all politicians risk their lives in service to local, state, and national politics. But none risk more than the president since, as the symbol of the American polity, he draws the most public attention. Martin Nowak's The White House in Mourning and Willard Oliver and Nancy Marion's Killing the President examine presidential deaths within the contexts of celebrity and political culture.

The White House in Mourning details the deaths and subsequent mourning and funeral rituals for each president who died in office: four of whom died of illness and four of whom were assassinated. Nowak dedicates a chapter to each man, providing a biography (including health history) and then exploring the cause of death, whether illness or murder. If assassination was the cause of death, Nowak includes a brief biography of the assassin. Nowak also describes the state funerals, elaborating on the expectations and plans for each, and the roles of the public and the presidents' families.

Nowak's introductory chapter nicely overviews the eight deaths, and it occasionally makes solid points about the relationship of presidential death to American life. When John Tyler assumed the presidency upon William Henry Harrison's death in 1841, he established the legacy of permanent vice presidential succession. Release of James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 indicate that the framers had intended the vice president to assume the presidential office temporarily until a special election replaced the president. The consequences have been significant. Tyler betrayed the Whig Party under whose banner he had won the vice presidency, exacerbating the emerging tensions between North and South. If Andrew Johnson had succeeded Lincoln only temporarily, the Radical Republicans may have faced a more formidable president when trying to impose Reconstruction on the South. If another man had been elected president and returned Harry Truman to the vice presidency, the atomic bomb may never have been dropped. And if Lyndon Johnson had not permanently assumed the presidential office, civil rights legislation may have languished another decade or longer.

Nowak also notes that between 1841 (Harrison's death to pneumonia) and 1963 (Kennedy's assassination), one of every three presidents died in office. Americans witnessed a death on average every 15 years. Nowak does not consider the consequences of this pattern, but the resulting sense of political instability certainly played a role in American political culture. One cannot help but wonder if the longevity of Ulysses Grant's, Teddy Roosevelt's, Calvin Coolidge's, Harry Truman's, and Lyndon Johnson's presidencies might be attributed partially to Americans' desire for political stability in the aftermath of a president's death.

The White House in Mourning is heavy on details and light on analysis. The stories are fascinating in themselves, but the reader is often left with the sense that there is so much more to be drawn from presidents' deaths. Additionally, Nowak's attention to the state funerals is not so much about mourning in the White House as much as the nation's grief. Anyone seeking a more social history of the mourning of First Ladies will not find it here.

While more intent on providing scholarly analysis, Oliver and Marion's Killing the President is equally heavy on details. Their interest is in presidential assassinations, assassination attempts, and rumored assassination attempts. In fairness, I had a visceral negative reaction to the book's cover: a scene of the White House with large crosshairs drawn across it--an image more appropriate to the National Enquirer than a serious scholarly endeavor. It sets a sensationalist tone to the book that is rather inescapable as one moves through the chapters.

Killing the President had the potential to be so much more than what it is. The authors came to this project through their shared interest in crime and crime-control policy. In the preface, they promise to draw larger conclusions about the impact of assassinations and assassination attempts on the law and on presidential security. But while the chapters are chocked full of fascinating information (including biographies of the targeted presidents, their assassins or would-be assassins, and events leading up to the moments of attack), the authors deliver on their promise only superficially. Statements such as "The passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1881 was a direct response to Garfield's death" (p. 52) and "The protection of the president by the Secret Service was greatly enhanced, especially in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt while President Truman lived in Blair House" (p. 112) are typical, leaving the reader with a sense that something resulted but not exactly sure what. Given the great detail with which the authors explored the actual assassinations and assassination attempts, the weakness of these concluding statements in each chapter is truly baffling.

Ultimately, while Mourning in the White House and Killing the President are encyclopedic in their detailed explorations of presidential deaths, neither offers much more than details. The reader finishes both books with the feeling that a president's death must mean significantly more to American political and popular culture than any of these authors allows.

--Craig Thompson Friend

North Carolina State University