‘President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier’
By C.W. Goodyear
Simon & Schuster, 624 pages

“Let us not burden our remembrance with a heaviness that’s gone”—Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” as quoted in Garfield diary for January 9, 1878

James A. Garfield (1831-81) often drew on Shakespeare to bolster his own temperament, which tended toward reconciliation and away from bitterness. Siding often with the Radical Republicans of his party, he nonetheless made friends with Democrats.

Garfield’s genial personality made him suspect in the partisan post-Civil War era. Many thought him too pliable and conciliatory, giving President Johnson, say, the benefit of the doubt for much too long — even if, in the end, Garfield realized that Johnson had destroyed Lincoln’s vision of Reconstruction.

Garfield came from a poor family, but benefited from his early education and his own powerful intellect. He proved an effective and courageous officer in the Civil War, even though he had no military experience to begin with.

Garfield strongly supported President Grant’s efforts to secure the rights of African Americans, but he despaired over Grant’s phlegmatic attitude toward corruption and the spoils system personified by that peacock of a New York senator, Roscoe Conkling.

If Garfield was a man of high principle, he was also a politician who sometimes compromised with the corruption he realized could not be eradicated in a term of office. Whenever he deviated from principle, he was criticized not for crafty politics but for hypocrisy.

At Garfield’s side — that is what it feels like — is C.W. Goodyear, a biographer who provides an intimate and moving account of the decisions Garfield had to make that seemed in the nation’s best interests.

Garfield studied his predecessor, Rutherford B. Hayes, and realized that it did no good to act as though the president was above it all, forbidding alcohol in the White House, and having no truck with Conkling’s machine politics.

On the contrary, Garfield, with that canny political pro, Senator James G. Blaine, beside him, did battle with Conkling’s cadre of what were called New York stalwarts, but also made deals with them when necessary to advance important policies.

This much we learn from Mr. Goodyear, who never second-guesses Garfield, never speaks of opportunities missed, because Mr. Goodyear is so thoroughly absorbed in the Garfield sensibility.  

Of course, Garfield made mistakes and contradicted himself, as all politicos do, and, as his biographer makes plain. But what is so refreshing about this presidential biography is that the biographer allows Garfield room to be Garfield.

To put it another way, Mr. Goodyear recognizes that Garfield had the courage to change course to consort with his opponents, not merely as a shrewd political move, but in the spirit of a man who believed in comity and had to demonstrate it in his own person.

Garfield was brought down by an assassin’s bullet, and the nation grieved not only for him but for the prospect of a vice president, Chester Arthur, who had been Conkling’s right hand man, and the very epitome of corruption.

It is typical of Mr. Goodyear not to dwell on why Garfield chose Arthur as his running mate. That the choice was an effort to unite the Republican Party is obvious, but given the biographer’s vision of Garfield, it has to be wondered if Garfield saw something more in Arthur than a machine-made man.

To everyone’s surprise — including Arthur’s — he did a decent job as Garfield’s successor. What good Garfield may have seen in Arthur we will never know, which is perhaps why Mr. Goodyear does not speculate.

Yet here is another thought about these two men that could form the basis of another biography: Mr. Goodyear does nothing with Garfield’s many quotations from Shakespeare in his diary except allow them to resonate, by themselves, in his biography. Fair enough, I suppose.  

Nonetheless, I wonder how Shakespeare made Garfield a better man than most of his contemporaries and might have made him the greatest president since Lincoln, if only Garfield had more time as president to put his reading of Shakespeare into practice. 

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”