Adam Schiff Joins an Elite Group of Two Notorious Losers

New in PJ Media:

Now it has all come out: Adam Schiff went after Donald Trump with particular intensity and fury because Hillary Clinton had promised him that once she became president, she would appoint him to head the CIA. Instead, Donald Trump won the election, Schiff stayed in the House of Representatives, and in his rage at being denied, he joined lustily in the effort to frame Trump for collusion with Russia that never happened. Because Adam Schiff was a disappointed office seeker, he sought to bring down a president. The other famous disappointed office seeker in American history, whom Schiff now forever joins in a two-man group of embittered losers, was more successful.

James A. Garfield had only been president for four months when, on July 2, 1881, he and Secretary of State James G. Blaine were walking through the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, on their way to board a train to spend part of the summer in New Jersey, away from the heat of the capital. There were no guards with them; an assassin had cut down Abraham Lincoln sixteen years before, but this was considered a wartime aberration. In a republic of free men, elected officials were not in danger among the public.

And yet, they were. As Garfield and Blaine strolled through the station, a man stepped up behind Garfield and fired his gun twice at the president, hitting him in the back and arm, and crying, “I am a Stalwart and now Arthur is president!” The Stalwarts were a faction within Garfield’s own Republican Party that opposed him; Chester A. Arthur, who was indeed a Stalwart, was vice president.

The shooter was Charles Guiteau, who has been described in so many history books as a “disappointed office seeker” that the label has practically become a Homeric epithet. A disappointed office seeker Guiteau undeniably was, but he was much more than that. After he repeatedly pressed Arthur for a chance to campaign for the Garfield/Arthur ticket during the 1880 campaign, Arthur relented, likely just to end his harassment. Guiteau delivered his speech, “Garfield against Hancock” (that is, Democrat candidate Winfield Scott Hancock), a single time.

As “Rating America’s Presidents” explains, Guiteau thought he was owed a federal office as a result, and he pestered White House officials repeatedly for a chance to see Garfield, who did meet with him at least once, and then Blaine, to make his case for an appointment as consul to France. Guiteau was, however, not an ordinary office seeker. He wanted a position in France but did not speak French. There was also another big obstacle in the way of his getting the appointment he wanted or any other: He was crazy. His sister recounted that in 1875, six years before the assassination, he had raised an axe to her with a look on his face “like a wild animal.” She explained, “I had no doubt then of his insanity. He was losing his mind.”

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