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James Garfield's dying wish was to be taken to his cottage by the sea so that he could once more gaze upon the expanse and serenity of the ocean and die in the peace of a familiar place.
His doctor finally relented and a special train was prepared for him...
James Garfield, America's twentieth president, lasted only two hundred days in office-the last eighty in bed.
A man, mad with self-importance, shot him, though it was his doctors that actually killed him.
Fifteen years before, a European physician had discovered the invisible infestation of something called "germs." Thus, across the ocean medical doctors were increasingly in the practice of washing their hands before surgery. Their American colleagues, however, were stubborn and slow to change. Many of them scoffed at this so-called "invisible enemy" and equated it with the hocus pocus of battling unseen evil spirits.
But if the doctors who tended Garfield had simply washed their hands, he would have survived. The bullet didn't kill him, infection did. When he died his entire body was riddled with it.
This story is brilliantly told in Candace Mallard's 2011 book, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President.
Before being elected president, Garfield had served as a Union general in the Civil War and won nine consecutive terms in Congress.
Though more polished, he seemed quite Lincolnesque in his disposition. He was an honest man, a listener, and a consensus builder. He cared deeply for the human beings around him.
He was for every man. For example, he wasn't just for the freedom of the black man, but he wanted equality for the black man. He was working toward that end when he died.
In addition, he uncluttered the United States Postal Service of systemic corruption and set the ground work for massive civil service reform. Not bad for a few months work.
But it was how he suffered, I think, that spoke most of the man.
Garfield once wrote, "I have sometimes thought that we cannot know any man thoroughly well while he is in perfect health. As the ebb-tide discloses real lines of the shore and the bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring out the real character of a man."
His own words foretold his greatest revelation.
After being shot, he suffered constant pain and incompetent doctors. He endured procedure after procedure as doctors tried in vain to locate the bullet still lodged in his body, all the while infection attacked him causing agony and debilitating discomfort.
In the quiet of the night, when he was alone with his thoughts he was sometimes depressed, sometimes discouraged.
But when people were around he was an example of great strength. He refused to whine and complain and was bright in his disposition. He made the people around him feel better by how he interacted with them. His personality remained the same in the midst of his grueling ordeal. By all accounts he was kind, patient, and grateful for the efforts made on his behalf.
These are virtues of great leadership: courage in the face of agony and uncertainty and cheeriness to lift the spirits of others while forces seem aligned personally against you. No attention seeking, demoralizing self-pity.
Great leaders engender strength in others at their most challenging times. And people respond to that kind of leadership...
When Garfield was finally lifted, bed and all, from the remote area of the White House where he had lain for over two months to be taken to his special train, the White House staff pressed against the windows watching, tears welling. To them he gave a small smile and a final wave. "A last token of amity," said one, "from a man who loved the world and the people in it."
Crowds lined the tracks at every town his train passed through on his way to the sea. Men doffed their caps and bowed their heads; women wept. As he approached his final destination, Elberon, New Jersey, he was switched onto a track that was laid just the night before. Thirty-two hundred feet laid by two thousand volunteers just for him.
The path of the tracks had to cut through a garden for which the surveyor apologized to the owner. "I am willing that you should ruin my house," she replied, "all I have-if it would help to save him."
And then, well, I'll let Mallard tell the rest:
"Before the train could reach its final destination...it stopped short. The cottage sat at the top of the hill, and the engine was not strong enough to breach it. No sooner had the problem become apparent than, out of the crowd of people who had waited all day in the tremendous heat for Garfield's arrival, two hundred men ran forward to help. 'Instantly hundreds of strong arms caught the cars,' one witness wrote, 'and silently...rolled the three heavy coaches up the hill.'"
Indeed, a leader who bears the hearts of others when facing adversity will be borne at some point by the people he or she leads.
Just days later the President would be dead, his bed facing the window, his last view his beloved ocean.
We'll never know what kind of president James Garfield would have been. But I have an idea...
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