Political appointments in the United States federal government until 1883. In 1820 Congress limited federal administrators to four-year terms, which led to constant turnover; by the 1860s and the Civil War, patronage had led to widespread inefficiency and political corruption. Although it used to be confined to cabinet positions, department heads, and foreign ambassadorships, by the 1860s patronage had spread to low-level government positions. This meant that when the incumbent political party lost a presidential election, the federal government underwent wholesale turnover. On July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau, a disaffected and mentally unstable political office seeker, assassinated President James Garfield. This highlighted how much the
Interview with the Assassin Assassin" were so egregiously in error, I had to stop watching it." Interview with the Assassin Interview with the Assassin is a 2002 drama/pseudo-documentary starring Raymond J. Barry and Dylan Haggerty. An unemployed cameraman, Ron Kobeleski (Haggerty), is asked by his reclusive neighbor, a retired Marine named Walter Ohlinger (Barry) who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, to document a startling confession: that he, not Lee Harvey Oswald, killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. A stunned Kobeleski learns that the conspiracy theory that says there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll is