The words “assassin” and “assassination” are both interesting nouns and a mouthful to articulate. There is a hiss in their enunciation that is strangely disquieting and sends a chill through the spine. Even without knowing their meaning, one knows, intuitively, that it points to something foreboding and dangerous. The word “assassin” is derived from the Arabic word hashīshīn (12th century), which means “eater of Hashish”. The term was an Arabic nickname for a small Ismali sect who lived around the 12th century during the Crusades. It was believed that members of this group would intoxicate themselves with Hashish before killing leaders of the opposition tribes, which was pretty standard practice among nomadic tribes during that time. Not all types of killings are called assassinations. It refers specifically to the murder of political figures or those ideologically connected with politics. To assassinate someone requires a special kind of daring. The killer has to be out of his mind, but, at the same time, should be sharp, well-planned, rational in a weird way, and, more importantly, completely focused in the moment. There are no second chances in a planned assassination, and the assassin should be prepared the hit the target under the glare of footlights and amid hundreds if not thousands of people. It is a job that demands suicidal courage, a sense of fanatical righteousness for a cause, and certain knowledge that, after the act, there is no looking back. I don’t think it is a mere coincidence that the etymological root of the word assassin is an intoxicant. Only in a state of intoxication – drug-induced or otherwise, or a schizophrenic disconnect from reality can drive one to commit an assassination. An assassin is perpetually on the run, a wanted man.
One cannot argue against the fact that committing an assassination requires meticulous planning. The ability to think through with clarity, not just about when the act should be done, but also what happens after it. Assassinations are rarely, in fact, never a spur-of-the-moment decision. They typically involve months and years of planning. Even though one man ends up committing the deed, an organization or allegiance to an ideology is behind the act. The act itself could be the consummation of the fury of one man, but the idea behind an assassination symbolizes the discontent of the many funneled through an individual. And there is a separate breed of assassins who will kill for money. To them, it doesn’t matter who the target is as long as the monetary compensation is good enough. These are the most dangerous assassins because they are not emotionally attached to the cause or the person they are recruited to kill. It is a job to be done, and they are paid for it. Frederick Forsyth, the great British author, drew the perfect sketch of such a professional assassin in his outstanding fictional work ” The Day of the Jackal”. The book was published in 1971, and a movie based on the book was released in 1973. The story is a work of historical fiction. It is based on a failed assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle, the French premier, in 1962, by Lieutenant Colonel Jean Marie Bastian. Bastian was part of a right-wing militant group that objected to granting Algeria its independence, which De Gaulle orchestrated, sanctioned, and brought into effect on July 5th, 1962. Forsyths’s book uses this fact as a starting point of his story and then goes on to weave a tale of how the French resistance group, pushed to the corner after the capture of Bastian, hires an English assassin ( whose true name is never revealed throughout the novel, but only referred to by his code name “the Jackal”) and entrusts the job of killing De Gaulle. The remaining story is how Jackal goes about his preparation. Edward Fox, the talented British actor, played the role of Jackal in the movie adaptation of the book. Forsyth draws a meticulous sketch of Jackal’s mind, his thinking, and his preparation for the assassination. In my opinion, such a portrait of a professional assassin is unparalleled in fiction to this day. The reader almost falls in love with the Jackal and begins to identify and empathize with him. Forsyths’ riveting narrative details the Jackal’s preparation: creating false passports, assuming different identities, ordering a custom-made gun with precisely cut steel tubes that could be packed and assembled with ease, using people, and mercilessly disposing of those who are dispensable to his goal, the calculated choice of the location to kill De Gaulle and the constant and subtle mental battles between the head of the French police, Claude Lebel, and Jackal. Page after page, the writing and tale keep us immersed. The jackal’s plan is thwarted in the final moments of execution. He had deceived the French police, found his perfect spot to shoot from, had his target and the gun aligned, and one more tug at the trigger was all it would have taken to finish the job, but that was not to be. When you close the book, your heart feels a little heavy for the jackal. He was so close, so meticulous and calculated; you wish he should have succeeded, after all. But this is fiction, and the author is at liberty to manipulate our empathy. Real life, however, is different and assassinations in real life often change the course of history.
The assassination of the sixteenth US President Abraham Lincoln on 14th April 1865 at the Ford Theater certainly did. Lincoln had just won the civil war that had been raging for years. The southern states, the states that fought to retain slavery had just surrendered to the forces of the North – the abolitionists as they were called, and the bloody war that Lincoln personally disliked but resolutely persisted in conducting was coming to an end. The president had visibly aged in the four years since the war began. The famous stoop of the six-foot man had become more pronounced and prominent, and his face carried scars of the emotional losses caused by the war – both personal and political. He had lost his son during the war, and his relationship with his mercurial wife Mary Todd was strained. There were times when he doubted the purpose and outcome of the war that was ravaging the country. Lincoln’s private thoughts on slavery were debatable, but he knew the fate of America depended on the union of the states and not on its secession. He also knew he had made a lot of enemies. There were still large sections of the southern states who resented the union and wished and planned ways to kidnap or eliminate Lincoln. But on April 3rd, 1865, when Richmond, the capital city of the Confederate states, fell to the Union forces, the war was nearly over. It was now only a matter of time before the rebellion was crushed. For the first time, since his reelection in 1864, Lincoln could relax in the fact that the war was indeed over, and the Union so preciously secured by the pioneers four score years ago was still intact. The United States of America would have taken a different turn if the will of the Confederate states had prevailed. And the price the nation paid for the unity of the country was the life of Abraham Lincoln.
Never in the history of assassinations has an assassin used art as such a precise weapon to strike a target as John Wilkes Booth did, when he planned and shot Lincoln. Let me explain. On the evening of 14th April 1865, Lincoln, Mary, and a couple of friends (whom the President had invited to join them) were at the Ford Theater to watch a popular comedy play “Our American Cousin”. Booth was a popular actor, tall, handsome, with dark intense eyes and a luxurious mustache, who had performed innumerable times at the Ford Theater. Everyone in the theater knew him well, and he had access to every part of the facility. Booth knew the layout of the theater like the back of one’s hand – the entrances, exits, underground passages, and the time it would take to move from one place to another. He definitely knew how to get to the President’s exclusive booth without a glitch. Unlike modern times, when access to Presidents is almost impossible, Lincoln had nobody securing him except an usher at the outer door to let his guests in. Booth mysteriously got past him by showing him a card. We still don’t know what that card was, or what it said. But that was not all, Booth also intimately knew the play that was being performed on the stage. “Our American Cousin” was one of the most popular comedies of that time, and Booth himself had at different times played various parts in “Our American Cousin”, and he knew every act in the drama, the length of each scene, every pause in the dialogue, every laugh it evoked, and literally every line of the drama. Booth also knew the actors performing that day who could instantly recognize him if they see him upstairs in the President’s corner with a gun in hand. He had to avoid that too. John Wilkes Booth had to choose just the right moment during the play when the stage wouldn’t be crowded by actors, and, equally the audience would be so immersed in the play that they wouldn’t notice anything else. Booth knew that Act 3 Scene 6 provided such an ideal moment. In that scene, Harry Hawk, the principal actor would stand alone on the stage to render a monologue filled with bawdy expletives that usually threw the audience into splits of laughter. Shooting the president at that moment will ensure that the sound of the gunshot wouldn’t carry far, or even if it did the sound would be muffled or drowned in the cacophony of laughter rippling across the hall.
Booth pulled the trigger exactly at the moment Harry Hawk rendered the following words:
“…. you sockdologizing old mantrap…..” ( I don’t know what this means, but it sure sounds funny )
Booth had only one chance, he was as close to the President as an assassin could ever come, literally breathing over Lincoln. He hoped to get the first shot right, If he missed it, then reloading his Deringer pistol would have taken at least thirty seconds, which wouldn’t have worked in his favor. But Booth didn’t miss ( even though the President stooped forward at the exact time, Booth fired his pistol.) The bullet struck Lincoln just below the ear on the left side, at the back of his head. It penetrated the skull and cleaved through his brain. The velocity of the bullet ( obeying Newton’s laws) progressively diminished as it forced its way through the wet matter in the brain, and finally came to a stop behind his right eye. Lincoln couldn’t have known what hit him. His head dropped forward, chin touching the chest, and his body sagged against the ornately upholstered rocking chair. It was the smell of burnt gunpowder and the hazy smoke it gave out that announced the deed first, and only after that did the echo of the gunshot reverberate in the booth and across the hall.
Booth was an athletic man, he jumped nearly ten feet to the ground and ran up to the stage, stood in the middle of it, and shouted ” Sic temper tyrannis” – the state motto of Virginia, which meant: “Thus always to tyrants”. Before anyone in the audience could react, Booth turned around and made his escape from the theater. He had a horse ready, and within an hour he had crossed the Potomac hoping to reach Virginia where he would be safe with the Southern sympathizers. What Booth did not know when he fled the theater was that Lincoln hadn’t died when he shot him. The president was previously injured, but he would go on to live for another seven hours at a nearby home, attended by four physicians and surrounded by family and friends. The identity of Booth was established within hours of the shooting and the manhunt to catch him had begun even when the President was fighting for his life. At 7.22 AM and 10 secs on April 15th, 1865, Lincoln drew his last breath. Edward Stanton, secretary of war in Lincoln’s cabinet, officially announced the assassination of the President and alerted the nation that Booth was a wanted man with a price on his head. For twelve days, Booth was on the run, hiding in forests, hiding from the army and search parties looking for him, expecting he would find redemption if he reached Virginia. But that was not to be. Booth would eventually be corned in a countryside home, locked inside a barn, and shot dead. The man-hunt for Booth was sensational in its own way and for a brief period during those twelve days, it looked like Booth had escaped without a trace.
James L Swanson’s 2008 book ” Manhunt – The 12-day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer” is a wonderful read. Only a Lincoln scholar and a passionate historian could have written such a book. If Forsyth’s book was about a fictional assassin, Swanson’s work is about a real assassin with documented facts. Booth comes out as a man who had everything going for him in life, except for the visceral hatred he felt for Lincoln and his effort to abolish slavery. Booth was an accomplished actor, a charismatic man, a lover of good wine and women, and a good human being too. But all that is shadowed by his ideology. Even before he planned to assassinate Lincoln, he had plotted to kidnap the President along with his Confederate friends. But the day Richmond surrendered, Booth’s patience gave way to raw fury. He knew he had to kill Lincoln for what he had done. And the opportunity presented itself when the President decided to attend the play at the Ford Theater. Booth took this to be a providential coincidence that the President was coming to a venue he intimately knew, and the fact that the President could be found alone and vulnerable. He took his chance and succeeded in what he set out to do.
Swanson’s book won the prestigious Edgar Award for Crime, an award usually given to crime fiction. Since the book recreated the assassination of Lincoln and the subsequent manhunt in such riveting detail without sacrificing the narrative energy required of a crime thriller, giving it the Edgar Award was the right choice. The book is a page-turner in the true sense of a crime thriller and deserves to be read. I bought this book years ago, and it has been sitting on my bookshelf since then, waiting for its turn; only last week, its time arrived. I finished it over the weekend. Every school-going kid knows that Lincoln was shot while watching a play, but the drama, the sequence of events, and the manhunt that followed to capture John Wilkes Booth was a revelation. I didn’t realize that Booth had committed a nearly perfect assassination and almost got away with it. History may remember Booth as a killer only, but Swanson’s book reveals a different side of Booth. Interestingly, Booth naively believed that killing Lincoln will make people see the man for who he actually was, but the contrary happened. The assassination only helped make Lincoln an iconic figure, a president larger than life, and a man who would go down in history as the greatest President the country has ever had. The manner of his death enhanced Lincoln’s reputation and image. When Booth knew that his time was running out, his biggest and perhaps only regret was that he had unwittingly made a hero of a man whose memory he wished to obliterate. That is the greatest irony of Lincoln’s assassination, of any assassination, in fact – the intended outcome is rarely achieved.