If James Garfield had never existed, Aaron Sorkin would have had to invent him.

America’s 20th president was born in a single-room log cabin, fatherless by the age of two (he was raised on the frontier by his mother), and employed early in life as, by turns, a mule driver, a carpenter, and a janitor. Nevertheless, he rose to become a minister, a college president, and a major general in the Union army. In his free time, Garfield could be found devising an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem, conducting agricultural experiments on his farm, and greeting German visitors to the property by quoting poetry in their native tongue. This is all before we get to him being the youngest member of Congress upon his election in 1862—or getting elected president in 1880 without so much as pursuing his party’s nomination.

That litany alone makes Garfield seem primed for the kind of rehabilitation that recent biographies have given traditionally second-tier presidents like John Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, and Calvin Coolidge. Just one problem: James Garfield also had the second-shortest administration in American history, holding office for only about six months. Nearly 40 percent of his presidency was spent in an ultimately failed convalescence from an assassin’s bullet.