Netflix’s Death by Lightning true story: Fact vs. fiction in the new James Garfield series.

This article contains spoilers for Death by Lightning.

Poor James Garfield. Although he is one of the four American presidents who were assassinated, he has never had so much as a commemorative airport or a tunnel, let alone a huge marble memorial (although his family home in Ohio is a national historic site and there are a boulevard and park in Chicago named after him). Instead, he is remembered, if at all, as one of the four “lost presidents”—Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, and Harrison—mid-to-late-19 th -century figures notable for their imposing facial hair and substantial physiques, now largely relegated to the bottom half of the presidential league tables.

However, Death by Lightning (a reference to a glib assessment of a president’s chances of being assassinated) aims to pull Garfie