Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,41

“Let us go into the Executive mansion,” he wrote. “There is nobody to bar our passage, and the multitude, washed and unwashed, always has free egress and ingress.”

Garfield realized with a sinking heart that a large portion of his day, every day, would be devoured by office seekers. His calling hours were 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and he faced about a hundred callers every day. “My day is frittered away by the personal seeking of people, when it ought to be given to the great problems which concern the whole country,” he bitterly complained. “Four years of this kind of intellectual dissipation may cripple me for the remainder of my life. What might not a vigorous thinker do, if he could be allowed to use the opportunities of a Presidential term in vital, useful activity?”

For Garfield, who treasured time not just to work but to read and think, the situation was untenable. “My God!” he wrote after a day spent wrestling with office seekers. “What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?” So voracious were the people who prowled the halls of the White House searching for a job, that they sounded to one member of the administration like nothing more than “beasts at feeding time.” “These people would take my very brains, flesh and blood if they could,” Garfield wearily told his private secretary.

Nor was the White House the only point of attack. In the opening days of Garfield’s administration, so many people came to see Blaine at the State Department, asking for an appointment, that before the week was out their audacity no longer surprised him. “Secretary Blaine is especially sought after,” reported the Washington Post, “and it requires all the paraphernalia of messengers and ante-rooms for which the State department is noted, to protect him.”

Conkling, naturally, was delighted. The annoyance that the spoils system caused Blaine and Garfield only made him more determined to defend it. Not that he needed any encouragement. During Hayes’s administration, Conkling had taken every opportunity to belittle the president’s efforts at civil service reform, which he jeeringly dubbed “snivel service.” “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Conkling told reporters, “he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘Reform.’ ”

Although Garfield found the relentless flow of office seekers maddening and time-consuming, he did not consider them dangerous, and he brushed off any suggestion that he might need protection. Even had he wanted bodyguards, he would have had a difficult time finding them. The Secret Service had been established sixteen years earlier, just a few months after President Lincoln’s assassination, but it had been created to fight counterfeiting, not to protect the president. Over the years, the agency’s duties had broadened to include law enforcement, but no particular attention was given to the White House. Then, the year before Garfield took the oath of office, Congress cut the Secret Service’s annual budget nearly in half, to just $60,000, and restricted its agents, once again, to investigating counterfeiting cases.

While the president of the United States was allowed to walk the streets of Washington alone, as Garfield often did, news of assassinations continued to come in from across the sea. In 1812, the British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, had been shot and killed while he was standing in the House of Commons. A series of assassins had tried to kill Queen Victoria at least half a dozen times. Emperor William I of Germany survived an assassination attempt in the spring of 1878, only to be seriously wounded in another one just a month later. Soon after taking office, Garfield sent a “strong dispatch of sympathy and condolence” to Russia following the assassination, on March 13, of Czar Alexander II. The czar, despite the fact that he had abolished serfdom in his country twenty years earlier, had been the target of several previous assassination attempts.

Americans, however, felt somehow immune to this streak of political killings. Although in his dispatch to Russia, Garfield made “allusion to our own loss in the death of Lincoln,” Lincoln’s assassination was widely believed to have been a tragic result of war, not a threat to the presidency. Americans reasoned that, because they had the power to choose their own head of state, there was little cause for angry rebellion. As a result, presidents were expected not only to be personally available to the public, but to live much like