Did Rathbone get blamed?

[RJNorton]

Laurie and I contacted Tom Mallon about this thread. He graciously replied as follows:

"I hope you'll forgive me if I don't join the group--I'm in the thick of a long novel set during the Reagan years, and aside from being terrified by the looming deadline, I'm finding that the 1860s have begun to evaporate from my mind.

I did check out the discussion forum, and it seems you have a great group. In case people are interested, Henry and Clara was re-issued earlier this year as a Vintage paperback from Random House. (My novel about the Watergate scandal did pretty well, so the publisher brought back some of my old stuff.)

One small point I noted: one fellow said that, in contrast to the historical record, I made Clara younger than Henry in my novel. Actually, I did the opposite: almost all published histories mentioning the two of them have her being the younger one, but I discovered--via two sets of census records up in Albany--that she was older. In this respect, if in few others, my work of fiction ends up being more accurate than most of the nonfiction! In more basic respects, it's quite fanciful: I have no evidence at all that Henry saw Booth enter the box, let alone that he deliberately allowed him to do what he did. But I was led to give him a "motive" for his moment of complicity by thoughts of the war he'd endured; the resentments against his stepfather that seemed plausible to me; and the anger he might have felt in the spring of '65 while writing out reports about the success of the "commutation" program. Beyond all this, my instincts told me, early on, that Henry was troubled and angry even before the war began."

Tom Mallon