The streamer’s new historical drama looks back on the often forgotten story of US president James Garfield whose progressive political career was cut horribly short
T
he descendants of James Garfield, the 20th US president, were proud of his life but rarely spoke of his death. “We knew what had happened, that he was shot in a train station,” says James Garfield III, his great-great-great grandson. “We read about the story in books but, in one way or another, we just glanced over it.”
That changed in 2011 with the publication of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, a book by Candice Millard that revived interest in Garfield’s unfinished life. Her work has now inspired a Netflix drama, Death by Lightning, starring Michael Shannon as the president and Matthew Macfadyen as the drifter who gunned him down.
The series promises to shine a light on Garfield, who rose from poverty to the presidency in the Gilded Age only to fall victim to its toxic political divisions. His tenure was cut short after only 200 days not only by the assassin’s bullet but by medical malpractice – an event now forgotten as surely as the killings of Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy continue to fascinate.
