The Garfield Orbit

James Garfield is doubtless best known for being assassinated four months after his 1881 inauguration as president, but this biography--along with Allan Peskin's (see below), the first full-blown study in over 40 years--gives a sense of the man's stature. The first two-thirds of the book, written by Pulitzer prize-winning historian Margaret Leech, present a rather florid, exhaustively detailed account of Garfield's youth, his increasingly warm marriage, and his Civil War experience. A frontier intellectual like Lincoln, Garfield came from the Ohio stronghold of militant Republicanism and individualistic Protestantism; a passionate young man, he suffered complicated love affairs and physical afflictions, while grounding himself in Greek, Latin, and German classics and gaining his first taste of political maneuvers (especially well described by Leech) as chief of staff to the volatile General Rosecrans and the protege of wartime Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase. Harry J. Brown, an editor of the Garfield diaries, concluded the book after Leech's death with a compact chapter on Garfield's ascent to GOP Congressional leadership, a dramatic account of his unexpected nomination for the Presidency, and a quick section on his White House tenure emphasizing the swords-drawn fights over appointments rather than the new policy initiatives. What Brown has also fortunately done, however, is to append a selection of Garfield's letters, almost half again as long as the book, which provide an unexpectedly absorbing sense of Garfield's anti-bombastic simplicity (rather than what Leech calls his ""misty sentimentality and idealism"" as a youth), his integrity, the scholarship so respected by his colleagues, and his political horse sense. If you must choose between this biography and Peskin's, choose this one.