Lincoln and Booth: More Light on the Conspiracy

The 138-year manhunt continues in this engrossing but tendentious and inconclusive reassessment of Lincoln assassination conspiracy theories. Winkler (The Women in Lincoln's Life) draws on a wealth of recent scholarship to examine every circumstance and person surrounding the assassination. He makes a credible case that John Wilkes Booth was part of an extensive Confederate plot--perhaps reaching up to Jefferson Davis--to kidnap or kill Lincoln. But his attempts to implicate high officials in Washington are unpersuasive. At various moments, suspects include Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and even Lincoln's wife, but Winkler turns up little beyond a chain of unfortunate coincidences--some the fault of Lincoln himself--that left the President virtually unguarded on that fateful night at Ford's Theater. He insists that Booth must have learned of the President's vulnerability from highly placed informants, but it's more plausible that Booth simply counted on the well-known and habitual laxity of Lincoln's security arrangements. Winkler amasses much colorful detail about the Confederate underground that aided Booth, and gives a fascinating account of the secret Civil War of espionage, bio-terrorism (Southern plotters tried to spread yellow fever in the North) and what a later age would call""covert ops."" Ultimately, though, the relevant collusion was between Booth's fanaticism in an already lost cause and Lincoln's fatalistic disregard for his own safety. Despite Winkler's dark intimations of betrayal and cover-up, this story is more tragedy than mystery.