On July 13, 2024, there was an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. This has shocked people around the world. But it’s worth noting that there is a long history of both assassinations and assassination attempts against US Presidents going back to the early days of the Republic.
The attack on Trump immediately reminded me of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 6, 1968, while he was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Although politically and temperamentally, I couldn’t imagine a bigger difference between two politicians: Trump and Kennedy.
Robert Kennedy’s older brother, John F. Kennedy, had been elected US President in 1960 and was assassinated on November 22, 1963, while driving in a cavalcade through Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald. That murder sparked a slew of conspiracy theories that persist to the present day. Robert’s assassin was Sirhan Sirhan who, at the time of writing, is still in prison aged 80 and was recently denied parole by California governor, Gary Newsom.
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Four US Presidents assassinated
Most people know that two American presidents were assassinated: John F Kennedy in 1963 and Abraham Lincoln in 1865. But in the century in between, two other US Presidents were felled by an assassin’s bullet. President James Garfield was shot by a disgruntled speech writer and fantasist, Charles Giteau, at a railroad station on July 2, 1881. It took Garfield seventy-nine days to die and he might have survived with modern medical care and attention. Instead, doctors stuck their dirty fingers into his wounds with fatal consequences.
More fascinating in my view was the assassination of President William McKinley by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, while attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6, 1901. This was during a wave of anarchist-inspired political murders across the world that saw the Russian tsar, French president, king of Greece, Empress of Austria, and king of Italy assassinated by anarchists.
In France, the tone of political debate had soured considerably with violent rhetoric on all sides leading up to the murder of President Marie François Sadi Carnot on June 25, 1894. Something to note for our time. Following McKinley’s death, Czolgosz was arrested and imprisoned then subsequently sent to the electric chair – an early recipient of this new form of execution. The incident led to a shake up of American law enforcement and the security surrounding the president.
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US Presidents who survived assassination attempts
On March 30, 1981, there was an attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Junior. One of the bullets bounced off the presidential limo and hit Reagan under the armpit. Hinckley was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity and was detained in a psychiatric unit for three decades. He was reportedly obsessed with the actor Jodie Foster. However, at the time, there was speculation about links to the Iranians. All these attacks on US Presidents have sparked rumours of dark political forces being involved and that will undoubtedly be the case with the Trump shooting.
Gerald Ford became US president in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon resigning from office. Ford was only in the White House for a short period but was subjected to two assassination attempts in 1975. The second was by a woman, Sara Jane Moore, on September 22. She shot Ford after he had delivered a speech to the World Affairs Council. The president survived as he had been wearing a bulletproof trench coat after a former member of the murderous Charles Manson cult – Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme – had tried to kill him just a fortnight earlier.
In 1912, there was an astonishing assassination attempt on former president Theodore Roosevelt who was running for office again as a candidate for the Progressive Party. His assailant was a saloon bar owner, John Schrank, whose bullet struck Roosevelt in the chest. Fortunately for him, he had a copy of his very long speech and his glasses case in his pocket, which slowed the impact of the bullet. As an experienced game hunter, Roosevelt judged that he was not fatally wounded and continued talking – waving away attempts to assist him. Only once he had concluded his remarks did he seek medical attention.
