[NOTE: Let’s assume for the moment that alleged killer Mangione is guilty, for the sake of this post.)
Luigi Mangione and John Wilkes Booth: what on earth do they have in common?
Well, it’s a stretch, but there are some odd commonalities. They were both from prominent families. They were both raised in Baltimore. They both shot their victims in the back – for Booth and Lincoln, it was the back of the head. They both escaped after the shooting but were caught a few days later: 12 days for Booth and 5 days for Mangione (one big difference is that Booth was killed and Mangione taken peacefully). And they were both 26 years old at the time.
One of many big differences is that John Wilkes Booth was already a huge celebrity when he killed Lincoln, and Mangione was not. And of course Lincoln was also a far more prominent man than Thompson. But Booth’s celebrity status points to another thing he had in common with Mangione: he was considered extraordinarily handsome.
Now, a caveat: I don’t consider Mangione extraordinarily handsome. But he’s a fairly good-looking guy, and a certain female mostly leftist (and not just female) segment of the internet has gone wild about his “hotness.” So I’ll just stipulate that he’s handsome.
Booth, on the other hand, was an old-fashioned bona fide “matinee idol” of startlingly good looks. I recall the first time I ever saw his photo; I was shocked by how classically handsome he was. He was actually often called “the handsomest man in America” at the time:
John Wilkes Booth wasn’t the best actor in the Booth family: he was outshone by his father, Junius Brutus Booth, and by his brother Edwin. But John Wilkes was the most beautiful of the Booths, the handsomest man in all America, it was said: lithe and feline, with dark Fauntleroy curls and a leading-man mustache.
Indeed, and many fans – and there were many, prior to the assassination – had photos of Booth such as this one:
“The stage door was always blocked with silly women waiting to catch a glimpse” of “this sad-faced, handsome boy,” Reignolds wrote. Booth was the first celebrity on record to have the clothes torn off his body by crazed fans.
Of course, that was before he became an assassin. For Mangione, the crazed and lusting women came after.
I sometimes think about what a stupendous shock Lincoln’s assassination must have been, even more shocking perhaps than any other presidential assassination. Not only was he the first US president ever to be assassinated, but he was killed only five days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender. And to top it all off, Lincoln’s killer turned out to be the Brad Pitt and Robert Redford and Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power of his day all rolled into one. We accept the strange event as a given because we learned about it as children and it was just history, long ago and far away. But at the time if occurred, it wasn’t history, it was news.