Alcoholism saved America's VP

Fortunately, his friends were even worse assassins than he was

I don’t know about you, but the impression I always got of Lincoln’s assassination was that John Wilkes Booth was an actor who really, really hated the president and so in the middle of his show he snuck into the president’s box and BANG! Zoom! Straight to the Moon. But John Wilkes Booth was actually the leader of a much larger conspiracy that started weeks, maybe months earlier with at least six other men.

George Atzerodt was the man tasked with murdering Vice President Andrew Johnson. He booked a room in the same hotel, directly above the VP’s. At the same moment that Booth takes Lincoln’s life, Atzerodt is walking by Johnson’s door with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other… and he keeps walking. He goes to the bar downstairs and orders a drink, starts talking to the bartender to see what he knows about Johnson. He wants to do this right, okay? So the bartender tells him what kind of a guy Johnson is and all that, it’s maybe a little weird that this guy is asking so many questions, so Atzerodt orders another drink for courage. And a third for good luck. Cut to two in the morning when all of D.C. is on a manhunt for Booth and Atzerodt is swaggering through the street piss drunk until he stumbles into another hotel, books a room and passes out.