The Most Dangerous Game

by Jack R. Johnson 08.2024

Running for the United States presidency is a dangerous occupation. The assassination attempt on Presidential candidate Donald Trump was only the most recent in a long line of nearly missed murders (and some occasional hits) of presidents and presidential candidates.

The first recorded assassination attempt of a sitting U.S. president was on January, 30, 1835.  At the entrance to the Capitol Rotunda, a disgruntled  house painter named Richard Lawrence tried to shoot President Andrew Jackson with a derringer single-shot pistol. Lawrence stepped out from behind a column and took careful aim at Jackson’s heart and fired. The cap exploded, but the powder failed to ignite. Jackson was old and needed a cane to get around, but as Lawrence pulled a second pistol and tried to fire again, Jackson charged his assailant with his cane. Miraculously, when Lawrence tried to fire the second pistol, it also misfired. Jackson beat him with his cane until bystanders tackled the would-be assassin to the floor and the agitated president was hustled away.

Curiously, when the pistols were test fired later, they both worked fine.

Lawrence was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a mental institution until his death in 1861. 

Perhaps the most famous successful assassination of the U.S. president happened four years later, in 1865.  The 16th president, Abraham Lincoln was watching the play, Our American Cousin at the Ford Theater with his wife in Washington, D.C. when he was shot in the back of the skull by the relatively well-known actor, John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln was given medical treatment, but died of his wounds the following day at 7:22 am in the Petersen House opposite the theater.

He was the first U.S. president to be assassinated and his funeral and burial were marked by an extended period of national mourning.

About 15 years later, James Garfield, our 20th president, was shot while walking through a train station in Washington D.C., six months after taking office. President Garfield suffered two gunshot wounds on July 2, 1881, but did not die until 80 days later of complications from sepsis. He might have survived had his injuries not been contaminated, either by the gunshots themselves or doctors propping the bullet entry wounds with unwashed fingers. The idea of antiseptic wash was years away, still.  “Yes, I shot the president,” said Charles Guiteau, Garfield’s assassin. “But his physicians killed him.”

Death came on September 19, 1881, two-and-a-half months after he was shot.

In 1901, William Mckinley became the third president murdered by an assassin’s bullet. He was shot at point-blank range after giving a speech in New York. Initially, McKinley was expected to make a recovery, but gangrene set in around the bullet wounds and he died eight days later. A 28-year-old man from Detroit, Leon F Czolgosz, admitted to the shooting. He was executed a few weeks after the assassination.

There have also been unsuccessful attempts. Perhaps one of the most famous involved Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. At the time, he was running as a candidate for the Presidency on the Bull Moose ticket, in one of the more interesting elections of the decade.  He kept a speech of some 50 pages folded double to fit into the breast pocket where he had also tucked his metal spectacles case. As Roosevelt stood to wave his hat to the crowd, a man five feet away fired a Colt .38 revolver at Roosevelt’s chest.

The assailant, John Schrank, was an unemployed saloon keeper. He was tackled and quickly taken away. When Roosevelt saw that he was not bleeding from the mouth, he concluded that the bullet had not entered his lung. Roosevelt told the driver to head for the auditorium. His companions protested, but Roosevelt held firm. “I am going to drive to the hall and deliver my speech,” he said.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, “there was a dime-size hole in his chest, below his right nipple, and a fist-size stain on his shirt. He requested a clean handkerchief to cover the wound and headed for the stage, where one of his bodyguards attempted to explain the situation to the audience. When someone shouted, “Fake!” Roosevelt stepped forward to show the crowd his shirt and the bullet holes in the manuscript. “Friends,” he said, “I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot—but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” The bullet remained in his chest for the rest of his life.

Another notable Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the target of an assassination attempt in Miami by an Italian immigrant, Giuseppe Zangara. Roosevelt was unharmed, but Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, was killed in the attack.

Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman  was attacked on November 1, 1950, by Puerto Rican pro-independence activists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola. They attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman at the Blair House during the renovation of the White House. Torresola mortally wounded White House police officer Leslie Coffelt, who killed him in return fire. Torresola was standing to the left of the Blair House steps when President Truman looked outside his second floor window, 31 feet from the attacker while Secret Service agents shouted at Truman to get “the hell away from the window.”

Afterwards, Truman commented that he was not frightened by the attack: since he was a combat veteran of the First World War, and he "had [already] been shot at by professionals.” Collazo was convicted in federal court and sentenced to death, which Truman commuted to life in prison.

By the time we get to the sixties, things get more violent, in swift succession; John F. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding his motorcade through downtown Dallas. He was hit with a high-powered rifle and died in the hospital a few hours later. Police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald. Two days after the arrest, as Oswald was being taken to jail, he was shot dead by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. Conspiracies regarding the assassination are debated to this day.

In 1968, Robert F Kennedy, the younger brother of John F, Kennedy was campaigning for the Democratic nomination and had just won the 1968 California primary election. Right after he gave his victory speech, he was shot dead by Sirhan Sirhan. The killer was arrested and was sentenced to death. That was commuted to life in prison, and his petition for release, in 2023, was denied.

Four years later, in 1972, George Wallace was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination when he was shot four times during a campaign stop in Maryland. One of the bullets lodged into his spinal column that left him paralyzed for the rest of his life. The man who shot him was Arthur Bremer. He was convicted and sentenced to prison and later released in 2007.

A number of assassination attempts occurred in the seventies and eighties. In 1975, President Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts within seventeen days, both in California and both carried out by women: Lynette Fromme (of the Manson clan) and Sarah Jane Moore. They received life sentences. 

In 1981, Ronald Reagan was leaving a speech in Washington, DC when he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. The bullet pierced Reagan’s left lung, narrowly missing his heart. Reagan survived the attempt on his life, quipping to his wife Nancy Reagan that he “forgot to duck.” Hinckley was arrested and found not guilty by reason of insanity and was confined to a mental hospital.  

In 1994, Bill Clinton was inside the White House when Francisco Martin Duran fired at the building using a semiautomatic rifle. Clinton was unharmed, but Duran was convicted of attempting to assassinate the president and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

In the 21st century, things have not improved. In 2005, George W. Bush was attending a rally in Tbilisi with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili when a man named Vladimir Arutyunian threw a hand grenade towards the podium. It did not explode and no one was hurt, but Arutyunian was sentenced to life in prison.

Finally, in 2024, presidential candidate and former president, Donald J. Trump’s right ear was apparently nicked with an AR-15 bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Fifty year-old Corey Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter and father, was killed shielding his family from the shooting. Secret Service agents fatally shot Thomas Mathew Crooks, the assassin who attacked with an AR-15 from an elevated position outside the rally. 

That’s the very latest assassination attempt in the United States for this year. One hopes it’s the last. The FBI said the investigation into this latest attempt is ongoing.