Well, Guiteau shot Garfield on a train platform in 1881, with the idea that he was going to benefit the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Guiteau...

I don`t, off the top of my head, no.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Frick was a steel executive, and he was a colleague and business partner Andrew Carnegie. And during a strike, he was trying to break a union, and an...

Berkman was, in all probability, romantically involved with Emma Goldman. And certainly, he was philosophically simpatico with Goldman. They were both...

OK.

Czolgosz, I think, yes.

Sure.

Well, on September 6, 1901, Czolgosz went to a public reception that William McKinley was holding at the grounds of the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo,...

What we`re looking at here is the Edison Company`s film of the outside of that building, the Temple of Music at the Pan American Exposition, and the...

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

He shoots Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as Roosevelt is on his way to give a campaign speech. This is the presidential campaign of 1912,...

You mentioned that there are others, and let me mention some of the others because it`s important to the McKinley assassination to put this in a slightly...

Well, I originally got into it for sort of academic and scholarly reasons. As time wore on, I discovered personal reasons to be interested in it, as...

I discovered on doing this that my father`s grandfather, Shlomo Kanagel (ph), who`s one of the people who`s referenced on the dedication page, arrived...

That`s my grandfather, my mother`s father, who is the most recent male migrant in my direct ancestry, who came to this country from Germany in the 1920s.

The September 7 coincidence?

Fairly late in the process. Ellis Island put its records on line not too long ago, and I looked them up, just as a matter of course, and found that...

This is my second book.

I live in Davis, California.

I teach at the University of California at Davis.

I had been teaching for three years at Oxford, in England.

U.S. history.

Where was I born?

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. For the first six years of my life, we moved around a bit, lived in Louisiana, New York. I grew up mostly in St. Petersburg,...

At Cornell and then at Stanford.

Yes.

Well, that`s the central question of the book, Who was Leon Czolgosz? People thought, when they saw that this young -- he was about 28, some accounts...

It was about 4:00 in the afternoon, a little bit after 4:00 in the afternoon in Buffalo, New York, where there was a Pan American Exposition, a kind...

As you can see, this was an electrified exposition, and the Edison Company had contributed to the "tower of light" at the exposition, and there were...

Well, he was just starting his second term. He had been elected president in 1896 and had taken office in March of 1897, then was re-elected in 1900...

Well, he was tremendously popular, I mean -- or -- judging by the vote, anyway. He was re-elected by a comfortable majority. In 1896, it had been a...

There were Secret Service. There were a variety of New York detectives and military men who had been detailed to the fair, and they somehow failed to...

He had had a revolver in his hand, an Ivor-Johnson (ph) .32. And he had a white handkerchief wrapped around it. And he simply stood in line until he...

Yes, people are waiting for the president to come out. And you can see some of the various helmets being worn by the exposition military detail in the...

Right. Well, afterwards, one of the Secret Service agents gave testimony that he had seen a swarthy man with a mustache in the line and that he thought...

Well, there was a strong chance that the swarthy guy with the mustache could have been James Parker, who was somebody the Secret Service man later said...

Is supposed to be Parker, yes. This is -- this is a representation that was done by an artist a few years later. I mean, the presence of Parker was...

He was shot twice.

Well, they went into the abdomen. One of them, it seems, was deflected by the president`s sternum and so didn`t actually penetrate his belly. The other...

Yes. When I was looking into the book, I talked to a Buffalo doctor, a pathologist, who said, Well, you know, when I was doing my residency here, there...

He was in Vermont, at the Vermont Fish and Game Club, and he was doing what vice president presidents tended to do in those days, which was not very...

The president`s body was laid out in Buffalo first. It was eventually put on a...

Oh, right. Yes, of course. Well, he had been taken to the -- he was -- first he was worked on at or near the exposition by some doctors who were present,...

Not that I know. There is a sort of a -- within the community of medicine, there`s a sort of controversy as to whether all had been done that could...

Well, ultimately -- I mean, ultimately, he died because he had this sepsis in the abdomen, it appears, but I mean, the proximate cause was the gunshot....

He was at that time -- let`s see. He had been born in 1843, so he was 58.

And she was -- she was by the president`s side by this time, yes.

Czolgosz? Well, first they took him away to the Buffalo police headquarters for interrogation, and then he -- his movements are not entirely clear during...

Right.

I have. Yes.

Yes. Again, this is the Edison Company, and it`s the same thing as the footage that we saw at the exposition. The Edison Company couldn`t really get...

Oh, no, no.

They had been electrocuting people since 1890, 1890. They`d -- in New York state. The first electrocution a man named called William Kindler (ph), also...

Again, you know, this is the Edison Company`s impression of what might have happened. And if they hit him once and they hit him again, they may be trying...

I don`t know how many days. It`s late October when he`s electrocuted, yes.

It`s some weeks, yes.

Yes. A little over that, yes.

Oh, yes. I mean, you know, once -- once he`d been sentenced to death and was simply awaiting death, there was a sort of a lull in the coverage of the...

Well, it would have been a grave within the grounds of Auburn prison, and the body isn`t there anymore.

William McKinley had an elaborate state funeral. You seem to have footage of it there. Yes. He was taken to lie in state in Washington and then to his...

Right.

Well, it provided, as these kinds of elaborate ceremonies can, a sense of the orderly transition of power, in that, you know, they were grieving for...

Well, that depends who you ask, doesn`t it? McKinley`s friends were, many of them, very nervous. As I said before, Roosevelt was a very independent-minded...

There were a couple just in the last year or so, since it was the centennial in 1901, and there have been one or two in the earlier part of the century....

Well, in about November of 1901, not too long after the assassination, a Boston doctor named Walter Channing (ph), who had in his employ another doctor...

Well, again, people looked at him, and they saw this name that had a lot of consonants in it, and they saw this young man, this sort of disaffected...

Yes, Thomas Penney.

He came from Britain.

Yes.

Came from what was then part of Prussia, a town called Possan (ph), it appears. And Czolgosz, some people say, may be Hungarian in its ethnic origins,...

Czolgosz? Leon Czolgosz was born in Detroit.

Eight or nine, it appears. It`s -- again, that`s not quite clear, but somewhere in that range.

Well, they interviewed several of his brothers. Leon`s brother, Waldeck -- or Valdeck, I`m not really sure how you pronounce that, either, frankly --...

Well, it was not -- it was not unusual. He`d -- he`d grown up in this family that came to Michigan. There were an awful lot of Poles and other Eastern...

That`s Paul Czolgosz there, that`s right. That`s photograph taken shortly after the assassination. Your children would probably have to work in order...

It came on the wake of the 1893 panic and depression, which was a really epochal event in American history -- this -- this panic, which came on the...

Emma Goldman was an anarchist who -- also an immigrant, who had come to this country in the 1880s, and the event that provided her political awakening...

What`s an anarchist? Well, this is a fair question, because the anarchists at that time would not have agreed what an anarchist was. There is a kind...

Well, she -- she under the sort of almost religious awakening in the wake of the hay market ...

You actually know, she traveled around so much; I don`t know -- actually know where she was based.

Oh, she was widely known as an anarchist figure. Indeed, suspicion lit on her immediately after the assassination in 1901 because she was -- she had...

Frick (ph).

Oh, there was a tremendous amount of comment, and it was regarded as from terrorism. That was the word that they used quite wildly in assessing Czolgosz...

Well, I don`t think there is -- I don`t think there is any evidence that he was insane in the sense that he should have been committed rather than executed....

Yes.

Berkman (ph) served 14 years in prison, I think, of a longer sentence.

Schrank was committed, because, they say, he was insane, because he said a vision of William McKinley had come to him and told him that Roosevelt was...

I may have said that. Yes, he did live -- he did live into Franklin Roosevelt`s presidency.

Yes. This is -- this is in my mind a critical difference between the two assassination attempts. The first one -- I mean, the first successful assassination...

Well, he -- it wouldn`t -- it wasn`t going to technically going to be a third term, it would have appeared to be a third term because he had served...

…and…

That`s right, you know. Taft came in third place. It was -- it was actually a four-way election in many people`s minds, because there was also the socialist...

I don`t. It was -- it was very close to the election.

Yes.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And he was - he was getting out of -- or getting into a car at his hotel on his way to the auditorium where he was going to give...

Roosevelt made a joke about that. But I can`t remember what the joke was. He said, it was -- it was not a large enough caliber to kill a Bull Moose...

I believe it was just the once.

Right. Well, the bullet went through his speech, as I say, which is in his breast pocket and hit him in the fleshy part of the chest, it appears, and...

Well, he -- he stood before the audience and he pulled out the text of the speech, so that people could see that the bullet had passed through the speech,...

Then he went to the hospital and then he was given some medical attention, and it turned out it hadn`t been quite so bad, and he was laid up -- he wasn`t...

He did very well in the popular vote. Yes.

Possibly until Ross Perot; I`m not sure about that, but yes.

Vernon Briggs.

It`s no secret. Briggs published a book called "The Manner of Man That Kills" in 1921 drawing off of his notes, and one of his case studies was Czolgosz....

They did have a falling out.

Walter Channing was, as I think Bostonians would say of the Boston Channings, he was of a very eminent Boston family. He was a descendent of William...

They both concluded that Czolgosz was insane, although for different reasons. Channing basically said what I have just said to you, as I can`t imagine...

They each published their separate versions of the report, and then as you say they went their separate ways.

Well, the real cause of the falling out is somewhat mysterious. As I say, they had very different views of how to treat their patients, and they were...

It was a very intense trip. He was on the road for some weeks, and then he came back and wrote it up.

To my mind the best material comes from his visit to Cleveland, where he met Czolgosz`s whole family and a lot of the people who knew him when he was...

Yes.

In fact, it appears that he almost missed them. He lit upon them as they were moving, and I`m not sure he would have known where they were going to.

Yeah.

Well, he was trying to talk to Paul Czolgosz, the father, and the various siblings who were in the home at the time, which wasn`t all of them but there...

Channing published a paper in 1902 and Briggs published his own in a book much later in 1921. They gave -- they gave public papers in 1902 very shortly...

Right.

In the trial?

He didn`t -- he didn`t say but, I think, one sentence, which was -- he tried to plead guilty and the judge wouldn`t admit the plea, apparently because...

Well, this is very interesting to me. Thomas Penny (ph), we`ve already talked about the Buffalo D.A., impaneled three doctors to determine Czolgosz`s...

You know, there have been attempts to connect them. I don`t know that I find any of them persuasive. The sort of the high-water mark of attempts to...

Thank you.