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American Brutus American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael Kauffman Knopf, 2004 598 pp., 29.95

"Oh, assassination of public officers is not an American crime," Abraham Lincoln once cheerfully assured Benjamin Butler.1 This would fit nicely under the category of famous last words, if we could be sure Lincoln actually said them. (Ben Butler was a notoriously unreliable hand at quoting Lincoln.) But the notion that democracies had no need to assassinate leaders, because elections got rid of the undesirable and incompetent in a much less ignoble way, was widely shared in Lincoln's day. Shared, in fact, by William H. Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, who also confidently explained that assassination was simply not in the American grain—and barely escaped becoming the second victim of the plot that killed Lincoln.

Three more presidential assassinations behind us, and we might be expected to have a more guarded expectation of democracies. But part of what makes presidential assassinations such a eerily fascinating topic is the persistent sense that this kind of event really does represent some form of bizarre and unfathomable deviation, a challenge to the very notion of democracy. The orderly sharing of power in American politics, beginning with Adams and Jefferson in 1801, has been the fundamental pivot of American politics. Disrupting it by violence is precisely the one thing which will render democracy itself impossible, unless democracy has planted itself very, very firmly in people's minds.

This is why two of the four American presidential assassinations—of James Garfield in 1881 and of William McKinley in 1901—have dropped harmlessly off the screen of public curiosity. Garfield was shot by a certifiable lunatic, Charles Guiteau, who could be written off as an isolated aberration. McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz, a Polish-born anarchist who, both for being Polish and an anarchist, could be absorbed and forgotten since he was not-American anyway.

But then there remain Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth. Both were American-born, both embraced causes that assaulted their country—and, inconveniently, both were killed by their pursuers (Jack Ruby, Boston Corbett) before the mystery of their motivations could be cross-examined. Booth and Oswald represent a demonic breakdown in democratic forbearance, Americans gone mysteriously and ideologically bad, and the unease this inspires is what turns us back again and again to Dealey Plaza and to Ford's Theater, and not to Union Station or the Buffalo Exhibition.

Not that we have not tried to salve that unease by squeezing John Wilkes Booth into the same easily dismissed pigeonhole as Czolgosz and Guiteau. Booth was an actor, but he must be a disappointed actor, a critical flop, and that will explain it. He was from a family of actors, and his notoriously poor relations with his father, Junius Brutus Booth, and his envy of a highly successful brother, Edwin Booth, drove him into a murderous rage, and that will explain it. The band of conspirators he drew around him were a collection of losers, which means that Booth was a loser himself, and that explains it. Actually, all of those things were true. But they explain nothing about John Wilkes Booth and why he put a derringer to the head of Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865.

Michael W. Kauffman, in his new book on Booth, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies, offers Booth as Booth wanted to see himself: a tyrannicide, a noble Roman raising his dagger to strike down a monster, crying (as Booth did) sic semper tyrannis. Kauffman will not allow us to shoo away Booth's shadow with comfortable assurances that J.W.B. was one of life's failures who saw no other path to marquee stardom except by an act of sensational political killing. Kauffman firmly reminds us that Booth was the up-and-coming star of the Booth family, bursting with potential at age 27 to become the greatest Shakespearean of his day and the next matinee idol of the American stage. (Picture Matt Damon as a presidential assassin, and you have a fairly good notion of what it meant for Booth to be Lincoln's assassin.) Even more, Booth was a slow, steady, and careful plotter. While virtually all the rest of the Booth family either sympathized with the North, or else kept their sympathies to themselves, John Wilkes was heart-and-soul a racial bigot and an ideological partisan of the Southern Confederacy—a political system based, as Alexander Stephens so unapologetically put it, on the cornerstone of human slavery.

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