Operation Assassination: A Bit of Hits and Misses

We're celebrating Operation Assassination, a trivia-laden white paper I compiled 25 years ago that indirectly spawned this blog. In 2000, I combined my original paper with material I found online that I published on a GeoCities account. As part of this retrospect, I revisited what I found and republished the information.

If there were so many comparisons between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations – those trivial things I referred to as Lincolnisms and Kennedyms – then why couldn’t there be a list of information about the two other American presidents who died from an assassin’s bullet? It turns out there was, according to this unsourced news clipping:

A computer programmer at the University of Texas suspected that comparable links might be found for any pair of U.S. presidents.  To test this, he fed data on presidents into a computer and came up with a profusion of correspondences among them that were just as remarkable, and hence just as unremarkable, as those between Lincoln and Kennedy. Presidents William McKinley and James Garfield, for example, were both Republicans who were born and bred in Ohio. They were both Civil War veterans, and both served in the House of Representatives. Both men were ardent supporters of protective tariffs and the gold standard; both were assassinated while in office, and both of their last names contained eight letters, and on and on and on.

Operation Assassination switched gears and began collecting information on Garfield and McKinley and then the attempts on the lives of a few other presidents of the years, including:

• The first attempt on the life of a president was in the rotunda of the Capitol on January 30, 1835, while President Andrew Jackson attended the funeral services for Representative Warren Ransom Davis of South Carolina. As Jackson was about to go to the portico, Richard Lawrence, a mentally unbalanced house painter, fired two pistols at Jackson from a distance of only six feet. Both weapons misfired and Jackson was unhurt. Lawrence thought he was the king of England and believed Jackson owed him money. Lawrence was tried on April 11, 1835, in the United States Circuit Court at Washington D.C. and was committed to jail and mental hospitals for life. He suffered from chronic monomania and was found insane at the time of his act.
  
  
• An attempt to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln was made when his inaugural train left Springfield, Illinois, bound for Washington, D.C., on February 11, 1861. Conspirators planned to kill him at the Calvert Street Depot in Baltimore, Maryland. A commotion was to be staged that would engage the attention of the police, during which time the assassin would carry out his plan. The plot was discovered, and Allan Pinkerton, a detective assigned to guard Lincoln, prevented the crime.
  
  
• Serving less than 200 days as chief executive (199), President James Garfield was the second president struck down by an assassin’s bullet. On July 2, 1881, Garfield prepared to leave Washington, D.C., to attend the twenty-fifth class reunion at Williams College. As he stood at the Potomac Railroad Station, a stranger stepped out and fired two pistol shots at him: one struck his arm, the other his back. Garfield fell and the assassin, Charles Julius Guiteau, cried out," I am a Stalwart and Arthur is president now." Surprisingly, Garfield stayed alive for several months (about 80 days) with doctors unable to locate and remove the bullet, since the x-ray was only fourteen years away. Garfield was moved from D.C. to Elberon, New Jersey, where he later died. After a trial, at which Guiteau acted like a madman, and his attorney argued that he was innocent because of insanity, it was shown that the assassin was not acting as part of a conspiracy by the Stalwarts. Guiteau was hanged on June 30, 1882.
  
  
• On September 5, 1901, President William McKinley delivered one of the most important speeches of his career at the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The next day, McKinley held a public reception for hundreds of guests, many of whom waited to shake hands with him. In the crowd was a neurotic young anarchist named Leon F. Czolgosz. Czolgosz extended his left hand to shake hands as McKinley approached. Two bullets were fired at the president from a pistol concealed by a handkerchief in his right hand. One bullet grazed the skin while the other entered the body. McKinley fell forward, gasping, "Am I shot?" The crowd turned their attention to the assassin and began beating him. McKinley was later moved to a private residence after being discharged. After several days, he seemed to be recovering until the morning of September 14. Czolgosz, who explained that he had shot the president because he wanted to kill a "great ruler," was tried and electrocuted.
  
  
• When President Theodore Roosevelt was leaving the Hotel Gilpatrick in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 14, 1912, en route to the Auditorium to make a speech during the presidential campaign, saloon owner John Nepomuk Schrank attempted to assassinate him. Roosevelt was shot in the chest. The assassin was opposed to Roosevelt's attempt to capture a third term. Although the bullet tore through his coat and his shirt was covered with blood, Roosevelt said, "I will deliver this speech or die, one or the other." He began, "Friends, I shall ask you to be very quiet and please excuse me from making you a very long speech. I'll do the best I can, but, you see, there is a bullet in my body. But, it's nothing. I'm not hurt badly." He spoke for about fifty minutes and then went to the hospital. Five alienists decided that Schrank was suffering from insane delusions, and on November 13, 1912, he was declared insane.
  
  
• An attempt on the life of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was made in Miami, Florida, by Giuseppe Zangara, a bricklayer whose shot killed Anton Joseph Cermak, Mayor of Chicago, who was with FDR on February 15, 1933. Cermak died on Mark 8, 1933. Zangara's shot wounded four other persons. Zangara was electrocuted on March 21, 1933, at the Florida State Prison in Raiford.
  
  
• President Harry S Truman escaped assassination on November 1, 1950, when Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, two Puerto Rican nationalists, tried to shoot their way into Blair House. Leslie Coffelt of Arlington, Virginia, a White House guard, was killed, and two others were wounded. Torresola was killed and Collazo was wounded. One hour after the shooting, President Truman dedicated a memorial to British Field Marshal Sir John Dill at the Arlington National Cemetery. Collazo was sentenced to die, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
  
  
• The first threat on the life of President Gerald R. Ford as president was made by Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme (age 27) on September 5, 1975, when she pointed a loaded pistol at the president as he moved through a crowd in a park on hundred yards from the California State Capitol in Sacramento. Larry Beundorf, a secret service agent, jammed his hand over the .45-caliber pistol, preventing the weapon from firing. Later it was found that the weapon's chamber was empty. Fromme, who described herself as a follower of convicted murderer Charles Manson, was charged with attempted assassination. She was tried in Sacramento, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
  
  
• The second attempt on Ford's life was by Sara Jane Moore (45) when she fired a single shot at the president as he was leaving the Saint Francis Hotel in Sacramento on September 22, 1975. The bullet, from a .38-caliber revolver, missed him by five feet, striking a taxi driver, who was not seriously wounded. Moore was disarmed by Oliver Sipple, a former Marine, and police officers Tim Hettrich and Gary Lemos. Charged with attempted assassination, Moore pleaded guilty. Her plea was accepted on December 16, 1975, by Judge Samuel Conti of the U.S. District Court of San Francisco, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. The day before the shooting, Moore had been arrested for carrying an illegal handgun, questioned by the Secret Service, and released after the weapon was confiscated. She had ties with radical groups in Berkeley and had been employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as an informant. On February 5, 1979, Moore and another inmate scaled a 12-foot fence and escaped from the Federal Reformatory for Women, a minimum-security prison in West Virginia. The two women were recaptured after four hours.
  
  
• President Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest on March 30, 1981, as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel. His assailant, who fired six explosive bullets from a .22-caliber pistol, also wounded the President's press secretary, James Scott Brady; secret service agent Timothy J. McCarthy; and District of Columbia policeman Thomas K. Delahanty. The President was rushed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where later in the afternoon, he underwent surgery to remove a bullet from his left lung. Vice President George Bush, cutting short a speaking trip to Texas, flew back to Washington to be able to take over the duties of the president should Regan be unable to carry them out even for a short period. However, Regan's recovery was quick. He joked with his wife and doctors before surgery and signed a piece of legislation. the next day. Regan returned to the White House on April 11, though he remained in considerable pain while continuing to mend from the wound. The other three victims, all severely wounded, survived the attack. The assailant, John Warnock Hinckley (25) of Evergreen, Colorado, was overpowered and arrested at the scene of the crime. He had no accomplice. Shortly after midnight, Hinckley was charged with attempting to assassinate the President and shooting the three others. He was sent to Butner Federal Prison near Raleigh, North Carolina, for psychiatric testing. On June 21, 1982, a jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity. He was confined for an indefinite period in Saint Elizabeth's Hospital, an institution for the mentally ill. Reagan left office in 1989.