The things you never knew about presidential assassinations and attempts
President of the United States may be the most dangerous job in America.
About 75 percent of all the presidents who have served since 1900 have been the known targets of would-be assassins. Altogether, there have been more than 40 attempts or plots intended to kill a president.
Four of the 45 men who have served as president have been shot and killed while in office – Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963. A fifth, Ronald Reagan, was shot and nearly killed in 1981.
But this column is mostly about a few of the lesser-known assassination attempts and plots and the surprising facts surrounding some of the assassination plots and attempts. The discussion here also includes the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of two presidents who may or may not have been assassination victims.
For the first 45 years of American history under our present Constitution, there were no known attempts to take the life of any of the seven men who served as president during that time.
The first attempted assassination of a president came in 1835. President Andrew Jackson was calmly returning to his office in the Capital from a House member's funeral service in the House chamber. Suddenly, he was attacked by a delusional house painter who had made his way into the surrounding crowd of onlookers. The man believed he was the unrecognized heir to the British throne and that the U.S. treasury actually belonged to him. He had tried unsuccessfully to arrange a meeting with Jackson several times to discuss the issue.
Now, he approached Jackson, pulled a single-shot pistol, and squeezed the trigger. Misfire. Jackson, a thin, frail man, though only 67, charged him with his walking stick as the man, approaching almost to point-blank, pulled a second single-shot pistol and fired again. Misfire again. The assailant then was stormed and subdued by men from the surrounding crowd, including Congressman Davy Crockett. Yes, that Davy Crockett. The two misfires later were determined to be a one in 125,000 longshot. But Jackson would not be the last president whose life would be saved from a would-be assassin by a stroke of luck. More about that later.
The first suspected possible assassination of a president occurred 15 years later, although it officially went down as an accidental death from cholera. President Zachary Taylor, 65, was attending the dedication of the Washington Monument on July 4, 1850, where he snacked on cherries and iced milk. He then returned to the White House and drank several glasses of water. He soon became extremely ill – fever, chest pains, cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting. Doctors prescribed opium, quinine, and a mercury compound.
He was dead within five days.
The conventional wisdom of the time was that he died of cholera, a bacterial infection usually resulting from contaminated water. However, at least two of the medications he received – mercury and opium – could have been toxic. Mercury, in particular, seems an odd choice, given that the president appears to have already been suffering from diarrhea, which was one of the major consequences of mercury as a medication.
From the beginning, cholera seemed a questionable cause of death. Other possible causes discussed at the time included food poisoning, gastroenteritis, and typhoid fever. Over time, some came to think he may have been poisoned – assassinated – given his adamance against secession by southern states, vowing to personally lead the attack against any state that tried it. In any case, rumors persisted for some 160 years.
Then, in 2014, a descendant of Taylor’s who wanted to know the truth requested that Taylor’s body be exhumed and tested. The medical examiner in Louisville, Kentucky, where Taylor is buried, approved the request. Extensive tests were conducted. No evidence of poisoning was found. His descendants said they were relieved. However, at least one scientist alleged that the tests were flawed.
The other president who died under mysterious circumstances, and long thought by many to have been the victim of poisoning, was Warren G. Harding in 1923.
Harding had undertaken a trip to Alaska, then headed south through Canada, the Pacific Northwest, and into northern California. He died somewhat mysteriously a week after suffering what most thought was food poisoning in British Columbia on his way south. But it soon was reported that he had pneumonia. The cause of death was described by some as a heart attack, by others as a stroke. His widow, perhaps not his biggest supporter in his later years, given his widely known adulterous habits, refused to allow an autopsy. But suspicion of murder has surrounded his death for a century now. The one thing that is generally agreed upon is that he was in good health until that train trip to Alaska.
Another president saved by a stroke of sheer luck was Theodore Roosevelt, who survived an assassination attempt in 1912 as he was running for what would have been his second elected term after being out of office for four years. This part of Roosevelt’s story bears similarities to the Donald Trump assassination attempt a couple of months ago when a shot fired at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, knicked his ear, just inches from a much more serious injury.
Roosevelt was in Milwaukee, campaigning on a third-party ticket, when he was shot twice in the chest at close range by a politically disgruntled New York saloon keeper, who contended that he was ordered to act in dreams in which the late President McKinley told him that Roosevelt had engineered his (McKinley’s) assassination.
TR was saved by his optometrist and his own prolixity.
He carried his eyeglasses in a metal case in his breast pocket. He also had double-folded his 50-page campaign speech and placed it in the same pocket.
The bullet entered his chest on his right side, but its impact, blunted by the speech and the glasses case, failed to penetrate deeply.
Roosevelt quickly determined that his wound was not serious. He was not spitting blood, which he correctly concluded meant that the bullet had not penetrated his lung. He proceeded to deliver his speech – 84 minutes while he was slowly oozing blood – concluding with an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot . . .”
He subsequently spent two weeks in the hospital recuperating as his doctors determined that surgery to remove the bullet would be riskier than leaving it in place. He carried it in his chest until his death, from an unrelated cause, seven years later. The eyeglasses in the metal case and his copy of his speech from that day are on display at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace Museum in New York City.
The other Roosevelt, Theodore’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was involved in an assassination attempt 17 days before his first inauguration. He was riding in a parade car in Miami that was attacked by a gunman-assassin. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, riding with him, was fatally shot; Roosevelt was uninjured. The presumption was that Roosevelt had been the target. Speculation later emerged, however, that the gunman may have been a contract killer commissioned by Al Capone to murder Mayor Cermak for having led a crackdown on Capone’s gang in Chicago
In at least one of the four assassinations of a sitting president, the fatality was assured not by the bullet that entered the chest of President James Garfield, but by the actions of attending physicians who tried to save him. Garfield was shot at a railroad station a few months after he took office. Physicians unknowingly assured the President’s death by groping with bare hands into the wound, attempting – unsuccessfully – to retrieve the bullet. The importance of handwashing had not yet become widely and fully understood, even among doctors.
Garfield died of an infection 2½ months after he was shot following substantial pain and suffering.
Assassins and would-be assassins over the years have been said to have had a wide range of reasons for their actions. One of the weirdest: John J. Hinkley, who shot and wounded President Reagan, said he did it because he wanted to impress someone he never had met – actress Jodi Foster.
The planned means of assassinations also cover a lot of ground. Guns have been by far the most common, but pipe bombs, poisoned letters, and – wait for it – theft of a forklift to be used in overturning the presidential limousine – also have been tried.
At least two Iowans played substantial roles in the aftermath of two presidential assassinations.
One was Colonel George B. Corkhill, a Mount Pleasant, Iowa, lawyer who eventually moved his practice to Washington, D.C., where he became district attorney. Corkhill was the lead prosecutor in the two-month trial of Charles J. Guiteau, who assassinated President Garfield. Giteau was convicted and hanged.
The other was a Des Moines lawyer, David Belin, who was a counsel to the Warren Commission in its investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. The commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, had acted alone. Oswald was murdered as he was being transferred in jail shortly after he was arrested.
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Sources for this column include, but are not limited to, the following: Andrew Jackson Dodges an Assassination Attempt, 180 ago, history.com; President Zachary Taylor dies unexpectedly, history.com; Death of Zachary Taylor solved; courier-journal.com; United States presidential assassination attempts and plots, Wikipedia. org.
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Interesting story. I read this about the Rooseveld assassination attempt.
https://dgardner.substack.com/p/elon-musks-true-test-of-character?r=2v0arj&selection=794f661b-b945-44c8-9b4f-42f3d870b4a5&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true#:~:text=His%20name%20was%20Franklin%20Delano%20Roosevelt
Great column. We also should not forget those killed or wounded in the line of duty protecting our presidents from assassination attempts, like Leslie William Coffelt, a Secret Service agent killed in the 1950 assassination attempt on President Truman in a shootout with the would-be assassins, and Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and Washington D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty, both wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan along with Press Secretary James Brady. Agent McCarthy positioned himself between Reagan and John Hinckley in a spread stance and literally took a bullet for the president.