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Past and potential Presidents are yet another category. In 1912 former President Theodore Roosevelt was in Milwaukee about to make a speech when a man named John Schrank shot him in the chest at almost point-blank range. Roosevelt was saved from death because the bullet hit his spectacle case and the folded copy of his fiftypage speech before lodging in muscle. Always the apostle of strenuousness, he characteristically insisted on finishing the speech before going off to the hospital.

In 1933 Giuseppe Zangara fired at President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, missing him but mortally wounding Chicago’s mayor, Anton Cermak, who was standing next to Roosevelt’s car.

That’s ten Presidents out of forty. And not a poisoner among the killers.

Moving out of the presidential spotlight, 1 did find a governor—Frank Steunenberg of Idaho—blown up in 1905 by dynamite, which was easily available in the state’s many mining regions. But that seems to be an exception. Bombs at the time were—well, the Russian way.

In the end I discovered one alleged and one genuine poisoning of unusual interest. The first involves President Warren G. Harding, who died in 1923 of a suspected heart attack or thrombosis following a case of ptomaine poisoning. The uncertainty is because his widow permitted no autopsy. Seven years after his death, in a book called The Strange Death of President Harding , one Gaston B. Means claimed that he had worked for Mrs. Harding as a private eye to check on Harding’s infidelity. He insisted that she poisoned her husband because she knew of the impending scandals in his administration and wanted to spare both of them the horror of impeachment. But Means, according to all reliable evidence garnered by Harding’s biographers, was a convicted felon, a con man, and a perjurer par excellence , whose credibility is zero. And I do hope that no one is waiting, shovel in hand, to take the matter further.

But what about the one genuine case? That involves George Wythe (1726-1806), a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a most distinguished Virginia jurist, the nation’s first professor of law, and the private law tutor of Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay. In his eightieth year Wythe was living at home in Richmond with two slaves whom he had freed: a woman named Lydia Broadnax and her partly white son, Michael Brown, who took care of him. Wythe provided for their support in his will and, what was more, left an income to be applied to educating Michael under the guardianship of Wythe’s old pupil and friend, Jefferson.

Also in the household was a grandnephew of Wythe, one George Sweney, who appears to have been a consummate villain and thief and who, unbeknownst to the old man, had forged checks in his name. Wythe had innocently willed Sweney some income and provided as well that if Michael died, Sweney should get Michael’s share of the estate. Sweney managed to find this out and on a May morning sprinkled arsenic into the morning coffee of Broadnax, Michael, and Wythe.

Michael, according to Sweney’s plan, perished. But Lydia survived, and Wythe lingered in agony long enough to realize what had happened and to disinherit his wicked and murderous relative.

It is a black tale, and in time was made more lurid by accusations that Michael was really the son of Wythe and Lydia. Fawn Brodie repeated these rumors as fact in her 1974 study of Thomas Jefferson’s alleged miscegenation with his slave Sally Hemings. Wythe’s latest biographers most indignantly deny the story and seem, to me, to offer some convincing refutation. But one way or another, George Wythe remains probably the most distinguished person I am aware of to die at a poisoner’s hand, a most unusual American fate.

And what happened to the outrageous Sweney? He was arrested and indicted for the double killing. But the evidence linking him to the poison came largely from Lydia, and Virginia did not permit the statements of “negroes” to be used against whites. So her testimony was withheld from the jury, which returned a not-guilty verdict, and Sweney went free.

Now that was the Southern way in 1806.