Mr. Booth Goes to Washington

In the end these and other factual contortions don't really matter to Glamorous Assassin, for its lesson is not one of addresses and dates but of the American character. A flag, crucifix and bottle of booze - these could well be the inventory of a modern crime scene as props for a historical one-man show, for in some ways Booth was also the first angry white man, his conspiracy predating by several years General Nathan Bedford Forrest's founding of the Ku Klux Klan. Booth became the villain of the hour immediately after shooting Lincoln, but today he occupies a much more ambivalent place in our minds. To our thinking, Benedict Arnold may rhyme with treason, but Booth, whose act was far more heinous for its total lack of abstraction (he committed murder in a public place) and its abject futility, has receded into the misty bayou of folklore.

Booth was a dreamer, we reason, a drinker, a romantic, a Southerner- he didn't act with the contemptible sangfroid of General Arnold. And for some in this paranoid age, when even a baseball score is greeted with the suspicion once reserved for the Warren Commission Report, Booth has joined that eternal lineup of sympathetic patsies who had been set up by awesome conspiratorial forces. (It goes without saying that some even believe he escaped his Union pursuers following the assassination, finding in Richard Garrett's razed tobacco barn the smoke screen of a cover-up.)

Perhaps it's more accurate to describe Booth, who, after all, was no coalition builder, as our first politicized actor rather than our first political one. He certainly was the first to entwine fame, politics, violence and celebrity sex appeal (his captors found the pictures of five women on his body); it's difficult to recalculate the sensation value his crime would have in today's electronic, celebrity-mad America. An equivalent event might be one in which one of the Baldwin brothers murders Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Perhaps the lesson we should get from Glamorous Assassin is that celebrity is politics by other means.