On the morning of July 2, 1881, a wildly delusional shirker shot President James Garfield as he was walking through a Washington railroad station. As the President lay grievously wounded, pandemonium broke out. Murder of a President recounts the story of the assassination and the excruciating final months of Garfield’s life, tracing Garfield’s unlikely journey from a log cabin in rural Ohio to the Oval Office. The film also recounts the historical moments that occurred because of the assassination. As he lay dying, the North and South came together to pray for his recovery; the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, worked feverishly to invent a contraption that would locate the bullet still lodged in the President’s torso; the famed explorer, John Wesley Powell, helped construct the nation’s first air-conditioning system to keep Garfield cool in the sweltering heat of a humid Washington summer. And when the end seemed near, engineers designed a special railroad car to take the President to the New Jersey shore so that Garfield could die within sight of the sea.