Book cover titled 'The President and the Assassin' by Scott Miller, featuring a black and white photo of a man with a serious expression and a cityscape, including Big Ben, at night in the background.

Pub. Date: June 2011
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Format: Hardcover, 432pp
ISBN-13: 9781400067527
ISBN: 1400067529

The President and the Assassin

McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century

A sweeping tale of turn-of-the-century America and the irresistible forces that brought two men together one fateful day.

In 1901, as America tallied its gains from a period of unprecedented imperial expansion, an assassin’s bullet shattered the nation’s confidence. The shocking murder of President William McKinley threw into stark relief the emerging new world order of what would come to be known as the American Century. The President and the Assassin is the story of the momentous years leading up to that event, and of the very different paths that brought together two of the most compelling figures of the era: President William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who murdered him.

The two men seemed to live in eerily parallel Americas. McKinley was to his contemporaries an enigma, a president whose conflicted feelings about imperialism reflected the country’s own. Under its popular Republican commander-in-chief, the United States was undergoing an uneasy transition from a simple agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse spreading its influence overseas by force of arms. Czolgosz was on the losing end of the economic changes taking place—a first-generation Polish immigrant and factory worker sickened by a government that seemed focused solely on making the rich richer. With a deft narrative hand, journalist Scott Miller chronicles how these two men, each pursuing what he considered the right and honorable path, collided in violence at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

Along the way, readers meet a veritable who’s who of turn-of-the-century America: John Hay, McKinley’s visionary secretary of state, whose diplomatic efforts paved the way for a half century of Western exploitation of China; Emma Goldman, the radical anarchist whose incendiary rhetoric inspired Czolgosz to dare the unthinkable; and Theodore Roosevelt, the vainglorious vice president whose 1898 charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba is but one of many thrilling military adventures recounted here.

Rich with relevance to our own era, The President and the Assassin holds a mirror up to a fascinating period of upheaval when the titans of industry grew fat, speculators sought fortune abroad, and desperate souls turned to terrorism in a vain attempt to thwart the juggernaut of change.

  • “10 must-read summer books” selection.

    —Newsweek and The Daily Beast

  • “William McKinley’s presidency, and the era it spanned, tends to be forgotten, yet it was in those years that the modern American nation, economy, and presidency were forged. Scott Miller describes these years through the world of McKinley and the man who assassinated him. The result is a marvelous work of history, wonderfully written, told from the top down and the bottom up.”

    —Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and Editor-At-Large, Time Magazine

  • “Scott Miller vividly traces the intersecting trajectories of (McKinley and his assassin.)”

    —The New York Times

  • “Miller’s fast-moving and richly detailed work…vividly explains the forces of history that were ending one century and beginning another.”

    —The Buffalo News

  • “Miller’s polished and vivid narrative of these complex, dissimilar men makes this piece of Americana appear fresh and unexpected.”

    —Publishers Weekly

  • “The President and the Assassin is a real triumph.”

    —Roger Bishop, The Book Page

  • “Veteran journalist Scott Miller has done something very interesting in his first book: He has conjoined two kinds of histories to create a portrait of the United States at the turn of the 20th century as a country divided between worldviews so radically dissimilar that they hardly seemed to be describing the same reality.”

    —Los Angeles Times

  • “Absorbing” “…with a flair for presenting complicated issues and personalities as an intelligible whole, Miller examines the social, economic and political forces that underlay the transformation of the U.S. after the Civil War from a feeble newcomer in world affairs to the global power we know today in a way that keeps you learning and turning pages at the same time.”

    —The Oregonian

  • “This book casts some welcome light on a stretch of American history that has grown dim.”

    —The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  • “Scott Miller deftly uses the twentieth century’s first presidential assassination as a literary device to paint an engaging, entertaining, and revealing portrait of America at a crucial turning point in its history.”

    —The Washington Independent Review of Books

  • “Scott Miller has written a vivid and insightful story about a nation rich in energy and contradiction on the verge of greatness. A fast-paced read about an astonishing time.”

    —Evan Thomas, author of The War Lovers