The High Victorian train station on what is now the National Mall was virtually empty when the president and his secretary of state walked inside to catch a train north. But on this steamy July day in 1881, the president would not make his train. Instead, James Garfield was shot twice by a disgruntled madman. He would spend the next two months in agony as inept doctors rummaged around his organs looking for the bullet and his insides became infected until he died. For weeks, the nation, the memory of Lincoln’s assassination still fresh, waited. Waiting was all they could do, and that went for Vice President Chester A. Arthur,…