Imagine for a moment that the president of the United States has just been murdered in your workplace by one of your most admired and charismatic colleagues, as you stood nearby. Picture the chaos that erupts around you as your mind races, fearing for your own safety and of being thought complicit, recollecting in panic any ill-chosen words you ever uttered that could be construed as hostile to the president, as well as the times you were seen socializing with the assassin â?? as recently, in fact, as the drink you took with him a few hours ago in the bar next door.
From that instant onward, your world would never be the same. You would be interrogated, perhaps imprisoned; you would have to provide testimony â?? scrupulously accurate and consistent â?? and endure interview after interview for weeks, months, years, constantly retelling and reliving every detail of an event that occurred in less than thirty seconds. For the rest of your life, you would move frequently, avoid reporters, and perhaps change your name. â??That nightâ? would define the rest of your life and headline your obituary.
Precisely that scenario became the terrifying new reality for forty-six all-too-human individuals employed by Fordâ??s Theatre in Washington, D.C., on the night of April 14, 1865. The events of that night have been told and retold ever since, etched deeply into our national consciousness. But this is not the story of its two central figures, John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln, and the catastrophic four years that brought assassin and martyr together. Rather, it is that of the largely anonymous actors, managers, and stagehands of Fordâ??s Theatre on that fateful night and what befell them afterward.
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