Assassination Vacation

Sarah Vowell recounts attending a musical by Steven Sondheim, Assassins, featuring various presidential assassins, like John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz, and Lee Harvey Oswald, singing “Everybody’s Got the Right to Be Happy.” While at a bed and breakfast, Vowell has an awkward conversation with a couple from Connecticut and a man from England about the musical. She discusses with them the musical’s love subplot between Czolgosz and the anarchist writer Emma Goldman.

Vowell notes that the director of Assassins, Timothy Douglas, wrote that he was inspired by his anger against the administration of George W. Bush, especially his disagreement with the Iraq War. Douglas reflected, “how far away I am from the ‘invisible line’ that separates me from a similar or identical purpose” (6). Similarly, Vowell writes that her own hatred of George W. Bush has colored her work on Assassination Vacation, remarking, “my simmering age against the current president scares me” (6-7). Although she is “a more or less peaceful happy person” (7), her own angers helps her understand how someone could become a presidential assassin. Becoming an assassin requires a certain “egomania” (7), but an egomania that people who become presidents also have.