“[Garfield] never had, as he termed it, ‘presidential fever’…[W]hen he was given the Republican nomination for president, he wasn’t a candidate…He had gone to the…convention in 1880 to give a speech nominating another man, but that speech was so powerful and so stirring..everybody just went crazy,” says Candice Millard, author of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President.