William BorstThe list of regime changes and assassinations in the history of the world is long and dynamic. It is and has been part of the flow and change in countries around the globe. Few nations have been exempt from this historical fact. A week ago, I stumbled over the obituary of Harrison Ruffin, in the New York Times. At the ripe old age of 96, Ruffin was the last surviving grandson of the 10th president of the United States, John Tyler. Tyler was unique for a few reasons. He had two wives* who presented him with a total of 15 children.
The prolific Tyler family also parallels the history of the United States to this point, as Tyler was born just after George Washington became the nation’s first president 236 years ago. He was also the first American president who had not been elected to the office. He only became president with the death of the country’s ninth president, William Henry Harrison, who caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia after his inaugural address on March 4, 1841. He gave his address, of over 90 minutes, in the midst of a steady rain,
Harrison’s presidency had lasted a mere month. With his death Tyler became the first Vice-president to assume the office of the presidency. Since there was no precedent and the rules on succession were somewhat unclear, the vice-president seized the moment and declared himself as president. Pundits of that time started calling him His Accidency.
Since 1841, seven other men were in similar circumstances, three of them by natural causes. This included the 13th president, Millard Fillmore who was sworn in after the demise of President Zachery Taylor in 1850. In 1923, Warren Harding succumbed to an illness and was replaced with Calvin Coolidge. More than two decades later, Franklin Roosevelt was the fourth and last president to date, to die of natural causes. He died of a stroke and congestive heart failure in Warm Springs, Georgia. Harry S Truman was his vice-president who assumed the office.
Of the 45 men to have sat in the president’s seat, four have been murdered. Andrew Johnson became the first president to advance to the presidency due to an assassin’s bullet, which claimed President Abraham Lincoln’s life in 1865. Three other presidents came into the office similarly with the assassinations of James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963. There have also been several other plots and attempts on the lives of other presidents.
The killing of our presidents can be evenly broken down into two types, namely the lone assassin and a bone fide conspiracy. President Garfield, and McKinley were murdered by a disgruntled office-seeker and a foreign dissident, respectively. Several books have been written about the Lincoln and Kennedy Conspiracies.
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln took place in Ford’s Theatre in the nation’s capital on Good Friday on April 14, 1865. The president and his wife Mary were there to see the play Our American Cousin. Booth, who had contacts within the Confederate secret Service, easily entered the Lincolns’ box and shot Lincoln in the back of his head with a Derringer pistol. **
During Booth’s escape he also stabbed Major Henry Rathbone who had been in Lincoln’s box with his fiancée. Now limping badly on a broken leg injury, suffered when he jumped down out of the balcony, Booth also stabbed the orchestra leader, William Withers, Jr.
This conspiracy also targeted Vice-President Andrew Johnson in his apartment in Kirkwood House and Secretary of State William H. Seward at his home that evening. Seward had been injured in a carriage accident and had a steel brace supporting his neck. It probably saved his life as his assassin, Lewis Powell kept slashing at his throat but the neck brace prevented any penetration. Johnson’s assassin failed to follow through, while Booth was later shot to death by cavalry soldier Boston Corbett some 70 miles south of Washington. Eight conspirators were apprehended with four dying on the gallows.***
James Garfield’s assassination took place in the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad Station in Washington on Saturday morning, July 22, 1881, fewer than four months after his inauguration. This elevated his vice-president Chester A. Arthur as the 21st president. As the train was arriving at the station, writer and lawyer Charles Guiteau shot the president twice with a revolver.
William McKinley was hosting a political event, on September 6, 1901, in Buffalo, New York, when Leon Czolgosz shot him in the abdomen with a revolver, which he had concealed in his handkerchief. As the president offered his hand, the assassin shot him twice with the first ricocheting off either a button or an award medal on McKinley’s jacket while the second proved to be the fatal wound. Czolgosz was restrained before he could fire again.
Although the president appeared to be recovering a week later, gangrene set in and he died shortly after on September 14th. For his crime, the anarchist died in the electric chair in Auburn prison on October 29th just weeks after killing the president. In the aftermath, Congress directed the Secret Service to protect the president as part of its duties. Theodore Roosevelt became the country’s new president.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas during a presidential motorcade in Dealey Plaza. He was riding in an open limousine with Governor John Connolly and their wives. The governor had also been shot but survived his wounds. Kennedy was rushed to the hospital but it was obvious that his head wound had been fatal. Vice-president Lyndon Johnson succeeded him as president.
The aftermath of the assassination was filled with additional violence and death. The alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald was fatally shot by police groupie and Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby while Oswald was being transferred from the city jail to the county jail. Before being apprehended Oswald killed Dallas police officer, J. D. Tippit. People’s imagination had a field day since the killing of the president was surrounded in mystery, enigmas and suspicion.
To this day many of us have serious problems with the final word on the historic event, the Warren Report, which to many of us seemed like a Whitewash Report. I think many of us who grew up during the Kennedy administration still have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Government officials acted too swiftly to blame it on Oswald. His murder while in police custody only adds flame to this fire and adds credence to Oswald’s claims that he was a patsy.
The closest failed attempt to kill a president was that on the life of President Reagan. Ronald Reagan escaped death, early in his first administration after being shot near the rear entrance to a Hilton hotel in Washington, D.C. Three others in his party were seriously wounded. All survived the rapid shooting of John Hinckley who fired six shots from his revolver.
Reagan came within a few minutes of dying, as the bullet, which ricocheted off his limousine entered his left underarm, breaking a rib, puncturing his lung and causing serious internal bleeding. He was quickly taken to George Washington University Hospital. While in great pain, Reagan never lost his characteristic sense of humor. Two quotes perfectly capture his state of mind.
When in the hospital as he was being wheeled into surgery, he told his wife Nancy I forgot to duck! Moments later just before the operation, he asked his doctors if they were Republicans. The chief surgeon’s reply was: Today Mr. President we are all Republicans. Hinckley was arrested and gave his bizarre motive for shooting the president was so he could impress actress Jodie Foster. He was released from psychiatric care 35 years after the shooting.
Theodore Roosevelt had already served seven years as the nation’s president, leaving office in March of 1909. Three years later he was a Third party candidate for the presidency, running on the Bull Moose Party ticket when he suffered a gunshot wound while campaigning in Wisconsin. New York saloon-keeper John Schrank shot him in the chest with a Colt Police Special.
Fortunately, Roosevelt was a voluminous orator and his life was saved when the bullet was slowed down by the bulk of his printed speech which he had folded over twice and put in his breast pocket. The crowd immediately seized Schrank and might have lynched him on the spot, had not Roosevelt beseeched them, not to harm him. The courts judged him legally insane and he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions. In his dramatic fashion Roosevelt assured the crowd that even though he had just been shot, it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.****
A handful of other presidents nearly entered the danger zone but were duly warned before. They included William Howard Taft who endured serious threats in Mexico. There were also rumors about a plot to kill him in Boston, Massachusetts. President-elect Herbert Hoover was in South America in 1928 when an assassination plot by Argentine anarchists was thwarted. The group planned to blow up his train as it crossed into Argentina’s central plains.
President-elect, Franklin Roosevelt was in Miami, Fl, 17 days before his first inauguration in 1933 when Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at him as he rode in a motorcar. The shots missed FDR but hit four others in the car, mortally wounding Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, who was sitting next to him. Zangara was electrocuted in 1933. Rumors spread that Cermak had been the target and not Roosevelt and the hit ordered by Al Capone who wanted to stop his crack-down on Chicago gangsters.
Many presidents have received letter bombs. Nixon dodged an assassin in 1972 during a motorcade in Ottawa. Another assassin planned to crash an airliner into the White House. Gerald Ford was the target of two possible assassination plots just 10 days into his presidency.
A member of the notorious Manson Gang, Squeaky Fromme pointed a revolver at Ford as he offered her his hand but she had not chambered a bullet so his life was spared. Just 17 days later, in San Francisco, radical Sarah Jane Moore fired a shot from a crowd but a by-stander grabbed her arm, deflecting the shot. Her second bullet wounded a cab driver. Moore spent 32 years in prison.
In 1951 Puerto Rican nationalists were thwarted from their attempt to kill President Truman. There were also violent threats directed at George H. W. Bush from people identified as working with Saddam Hussein, who had smuggled explosives into Kuwait for a car bomb while the president visited Kuwait University. In 1994, Ronald Gene Barbour, who hated the Clintons, plotted to kill Bill Clinton while he was out jogging. He was sentenced to five years in prison but was released earlier in 1998.
Osama bin Laden was believed to have recruited Ramzi Yousef the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to kill Clinton. Fortunately, during all of this, the Secret Service and the FBI’s intelligence service combined to thwart all of these plots. Their success rate causes one to look more closely at the attempt on former president Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania last year.
Millions saw Trump’s escape from certain death. Thanks to what may have been a deus machina, Trump, who was standing at his podium saw something behind him that distracted him and slightly moved his head to the left. The former president would have been the fifth president to have been assassinated in American history. As a result, the bullet only grazed his right ear instead of striking him in the side of his head.
Trump was at his most dramatic self as he raised his fist in the iconic photo yelling Wait, wait! and while turning to crowd of stunned on-lookers Fight, Fight! Though not an overtly religious man, Trump saw the hand of God in his deliverance from assassination by 20-year old Pennsylvania man Thomas Matthew Crooks. Later he humbly admitted It was God alone, Who had caused him to turn his head.
One big difference from this assassination attempt was that it marked the first time in my memory where another person, other than a couple of the assassins died. I am speaking of former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore, who succumbed to his wounds.
In the aftershocks of both his survival from an assassin’s bullet and his re-election, there have been other disturbing things which have surrounded Trump’s second successful attempt at the presidency. I am referring to the dangerous behavior of many journalists, television and radio commentators and countless celebrities, who have been recklessly calling for his assassination. Many of them seemed disappointed when Crook’s bullet failed to kill Trump. This is not the sign of a healthy society. No matter how much people may despise some politicians, there is never a valid excuse for calling for his death.
As I have briefly mentioned, Crooks assassination attempt is also suspicious because of the failure of Trump’s secret service officers to properly judge the possible threats that abounded from the environment of this political season. Crooks was on their watch list of possible threats yet he was able to walk down the city streets, carrying a rifle. Lets pray that our 47th president will be spared another trip to the emergency room or even worse.
*Letitia Tyler died of a stroke, making her the first president’s wife to die while in the White House.
** Lincoln died the next morning at the Petersen house across the street.
*** The four who were hanged, included Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold and Mary Surrat, the first woman ever executed by the U.S. Government.
****The doctors never removed the bullet from his chest since it would have been more dangerous than just living with where it was. So, Roosevelt took the bullet to his grave.
