Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

with a photo of the brutalist white building. It boasts, “Curved at every point, the hotel is shaped like a seagull in flight.” It reminds me more of a spatula about to scrape a bowl. Then there’s a list of all the reasons a person should want to stay here — shuffleboard for instance — but no mention of the reason I want to. This is where Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981.
    Because of the news footage of the shooting, I’ve seen that bowed rock wall in the driveway, heard the shots hundreds of times. And looking at it I feel reverent, though not so much about Reagan, partly because he’s a person I find difficult to revere, but mostly because of the cheery way he yukked it up during his recovery. Not that I blame him. Just as he cracked to the doctors who were saving his life that he hoped they were all Republicans, the one time I came to in an ambulance (following a bike accident in which I hit a parked car) was during Reagan’s successor’s administration. The medic asked me who the president was and I answered, “George Bush, but I didn’t vote for him.” It pains me that, like Reagan, faced with the profundity of death my first conscious impulse was to act like a smart-alecky partisan jackass.
    The reason I well up with liturgical emotion on seeing that entrance to the Hilton is not because Reagan was attacked here, but because his press secretary, James Brady, was. That Brady will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair is cause enough for empathy. That he and his wife, Sarah, turned this rotten luck into the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is downright heroic. And not the soft-focus treacle that “heroic” often implies. I’m on their mailing list, and the most impressive, lovable thing about them is their rage. The last mailing I got, seeking help to close the gun show loophole laws that allow terrorists and criminals to purchase all the firearms they want as long as it’s at folding tables set up at fairgrounds, featured a letter from Jim that opens, “I’m sitting here in my wheelchair today, mad as hell, trying to control my anger,” and another one from Sarah in which she tells a story about how right after Jim was shot, her son was playing with what he thought was a toy gun in a family member’s truck, but it turned out to be real and when she learned this she stormed over to the phone and called up the National Rifle Association, telling them, “This is Sarah Brady and I want you to know that I will be making it my life’s work to put you out of business!” Unbelievably, two years after the assassination attempt President Reagan addressed the NRA’s national convention — the only sitting president ever to do so. Who should have known more than he that backing an organization lobbying against (especially) the control of handguns is against the self-interest of every president. After all, only John F. Kennedy was shot with a rifle; the other three successful presidential murders (and the attempted assassinations of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford) were committed with handguns. In fact, Booth’s dainty derringer is on display across town in the Lincoln Museum at Ford’s Theatre. It’s downright pretty until you remember the damage it did.
    The next morning, Klam arrives in the driveway where Reagan’s car had been waiting. We’re going to pick up where we left off on the John Wilkes Booth escape route tour. We’re heading to the spot where Booth died.
    Not far from Port Royal, Virginia, there’s a sign. It reads, “This is the Garrett Place where John Wilkes Booth, Assassin of Lincoln, was cornered by Union soldiers and killed, April 26, 1865. The house stood a short distance from this spot.”
    Booth’s sidekick David Herold surrendered to the soldiers, so he would live to hang. Booth, however, holed up in the barn with a gun, refusing to come out. So the soldiers lit it on fire. There are conflicting reports about who fired on Booth —