The ratio of presidents to assassins is vanishingly small, so it can be hard to make broad assertions about what kind of person the average assassin is. Nonetheless, Crooks fits a surprisingly common pattern among presidential assassins (would-be and successful alike): aimless misfit with scant interest in politics before a fateful decision. This does not describe America’s inaugural presidential assassin, John Wilkes Booth, who was a committed Confederate sympathizer and white supremacist. Future assassins, however, were more in the mold of Charles Guiteau, who shot James Garfield in 1881.
Guiteau’s life story is uniquely pitiful. He joined the Oneida, New York, free-love commune in the 1860s but left in frustration over the other members’ lack of interest in him. After a failed marriage and an unsuccessful stint as a wandering preacher, he became convinced that if he campaigned hard enough for then-candidate Garfield, he would be rewarded with a consulship to France (years before, he had similar notions about Democratic candidate Horace Greeley, who lost to Grant in 1872). After he was rebuffed by Secretary of State James Blaine, he shot the newly elected president on a train platform, causing a series of infections that would take more than two months to kill him. At the gallows, he denounced Garfield’s running mate, Chester Arthur, the man he had made president, as “a coward and an ingrate.” Then he recited a hymn of his own writing, assuming a falsetto voice, until the hangman pulled the lever.
The remaining successful assassins are somewhat grayer areas. Neither of them could be called apolitical per se. Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated William McKinley in 1901, was an anarchist won over to the cause by the legendary oratory of Emma Goldman. Lee Harvey Oswald, the (bear with me here) presumed assassin of John F. Kennedy, had previously defected to the Soviet Union. But they shared their fellow travelers’ frustrated ambitions and struggle for purpose. Oswald wrote in his diary in 1961 to lament that the USSR had “no night clubs or bowling allys [sic] no places of recreation acept [sic] the trade union dances” and began the process of repatriating shortly after. Czolgosz, even as he attempted to participate in anarchist politics, was so awkward and curious about basic anarchist doctrine that an anarchist paper published a warning that he was a spy seeking to entrap them.