David Frum

Matthew McFadden plays the assassin Charles Guiteau.

There's both humor and heartbreak, and it's really lovely.

And I'm not here to be a total buzzkill about the series, just a little bit of one.

There are some historical inaccuracies.

I'm going to let them go.

I'll mention a couple of them.

When we first meet James Garfield, he's working on his farm.

He seems a man of the soil.

He sees someone far away from the dirty word of Washington politics, utterly surprised that he's invited to speak at the Republican Convention of 1880.

You wouldn't know from the opening of the series that he was, at that time, a ninth-term congressman who had just been elevated to the United States Senate and whose main residence was a three-story townhouse at the corner of 13th and I in Washington, D.C.

Okay, let that go.

Nor am I going to complain about the hilarious depiction of his vice president, Chester Arthur, as a thuggish boozer.

Although actually, Chester Arthur was quite a gentleman and had been in his day a pretty serious scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

I think he was one of the stars of his class at Union College in upstate New York, and he made Phi Beta Kappa.

So now I'm not going to quibble about those things.

But what I am concerned about is this show introduces viewers who probably don't know that much about it to an important period in American history.

But at the price of deleting what made the period important, what the politics were about, it shows a lot of very personal quarrels.

And many of these quarrels were indeed very personal, like the famous quarrel between Senators James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling, which was driven very much by ego and mutual dislike.

So yes, that's all true, but it obscures because it's just too difficult to explain what drove the politics of the period.

And I want to talk about that today because it confronts us with the tragic choices that people in the past have faced and helps us to maybe understand or have some patience for the tragic choices that we will face in our own time.