Manhunt (Swanson)

Author Bio 
James L. Swanson is an attorney who has written about history, the Constitution, popular culture, and other subjects for a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, American Heritage, Smithsonian, and the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Swanson serves on the advisory council of the Ford's Theatre Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Campaign and is a member of the advisory committee of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. (From the publisher.)

His own words
From an interview with the Washingtonian (Feb. 2006):

Q: You say a mythology has elevated Lincoln's assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, to a "fascinating antihero" and that a similar reverence toward Lee Harvey Oswald would be deemed obscene. How do you explain that?

First, Lincoln's assassination happened 140 years ago, and a lot of the emotional impact has withered. Second, it's partly due to Booth's excellence as an actor. He performed the assassination in such a dramatic way that we perceive it not just as a horrible crime but as theater. In part, we've bought what he was selling.

Q: Does your style of storytelling, largely from Booth's point of view, risk perpetuating that myth?

I certainly didn't want the reader to sympathize with Booth. He was a racist, and he was a murderer. It was very important to me to write in the epilogue what I think his legacy really was.

Q: What does Lincoln mean to you?

One of the great things about Lincoln is that he truly empathized with other people. He once said, "I shall do nothing through malice; what I deal with is too vast for malice." He had an uncanny ability to see problems through the eyes of others. When you came to him and wanted something, he already knew what you wanted, he knew why you wanted it, he knew what he could give and what he couldn't.

He saw it all when he was a lawyer—divorce, murder, property disputes, slander. He saw the heights and depths to which people could go, how they could tell the truth and how they could lie. In many ways, he was an amateur psychologist.

Q: Movie rights to your book have been sold, with Harrison Ford slated to play one of Booth's hunters. If it were up to you, who would play Booth?

Johnny Depp would make a terrific Booth. There's a trick in casting, because Booth was considered one of the handsomest, most popular men of his time. You'd have to cast a Booth-like person who would exude the same characteristics. (Interview found on author's website.)