History Of Lone Wolves

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Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who opened fire at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, failed to assassinate the former president, only wounding him in the ear. But the gunman, whose motive and state of mind are still unknown, killed one bystander and seriously injured two others before being shot by the Secret Service himself.

Crooks’ attack was the 16th of its kind in American history. According to a 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service, 15 “direct assaults against presidents, presidents-elect and candidates” took place between 1835 and 2005, resulting in the deaths of five politicians: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. (Other assassination plots have targeted such presidents as George Washington, Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama, but authorities uncovered these conspiracies before the would-be killers could take action.)

The driving forces behind these attacks differ widely. Some assassins sought to kill the president to make a political statement. Others had more self-serving reasons, seeking fame or notoriety. Many struggled with mental illness.

The political ramifications of a failed assassination attempt have varied. The attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life, for example, endeared him to the public and temporarily unified the nation. While it’s impossible to know how the attack on Trump will affect the outcome of the election, if it does at all, history offers some guidance. Looking back, Grinspan says that the public “mostly moved on and forgot” these failed assaults on American leaders. The general trend, the curator adds, is one of “outrage, and then forgetting.”

As the fallout of this past weekend’s events unfolds, here’s what you need to know about ten other failed attempts to assassinate an American president or presidential candidate.

1. Andrew Jackson, 1835

The first commander in chief to survive an attempt on his life was President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat who became notorious for expanding executive power. On January 30, 1835, an unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence shot at Jackson as he was leaving a funeral held at the U.S. Capitol. Lawrence’s pistol misfired, allowing the 67-year-old president to lunge at his assailant with his cane. “Let me alone! Let me alone! I know where this came from,” Jackson reportedly cried. Lawrence drew another gun, but it similarly malfunctioned. An expert later found that the chances of both pistols misfiring were incredibly small, approximately 125,000 to 1.

Bystanders—among them Davy Crockett, then a Tennessee congressman—subdued the would-be assassin, then rushed Jackson into a carriage and brought him back to the White House. Speculation on Lawrence’s motive ran rampant, with some observers attributing the attack to discontent over Jackson’s efforts to dismantle the national bank. The president himself chimed in, accusing a longtime political rival of hiring Lawrence to kill him.

“Before two hours were over, the name of almost every eminent politician was mixed up with that of the poor maniac who caused the uproar,” wrote British social theorist Harriet Martineau, who witnessed the assassination attempt. Ultimately, the gossip proved partially correct: Lawrence believed he was the English king Richard III, and he blamed Jackson’s opposition to the bank for depriving him of land owed to him by Congress. A jury found Lawrence not guilty by reason of insanity, and he died in an asylum in 1861.

2. Theodore Roosevelt, 1912

An attempt to kill Theodore Roosevelt on October 14, 1912, offers a clearer parallel to the July 13 attack on former President Trump. At the time, Roosevelt, himself a former two-term Republican president, was running for election as a third-party candidate, seeking to return to the White House after a four-year absence. As Roosevelt left his hotel in Milwaukee, unemployed saloon owner John Schrank shot him in the chest with a Colt .38 revolver. Members of the crowd tackled Schrank, and if not for Roosevelt’s intervention, they might have killed him on the spot.

Luckily for Roosevelt, his glasses case and 50 pages of notes for a planned speech saved him from a fatal injury, preventing the bullet from piercing his lung. Undeterred, the Progressive Party candidate proceeded with his speech, telling the audience, “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.” Less than a month after the assassination attempt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson defeated Roosevelt and incumbent President William Howard Taft in the 1912 election.

Schrank, for his part, claimed that McKinley, another assassinated president, had appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to shoot Roosevelt. A jury found Schrank not guilty by reason of insanity, and he spent the rest of his life in a state hospital.

3. Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933

On February 15, 1933, just two weeks before Inauguration Day, Italian immigrant Giuseppe Zangara shot at President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt while he was speaking at a rally in Miami. Lillian Cross, a housewife who happened to be standing near Zangara, reacted instinctively to thwart the shooter. As she later recalled, “I said to myself, ‘Oh, he’s going to kill the president! I had my bag in my right hand, but in less time than it takes to tell, I switched it to my left hand and caught him by the arm.’” Other bystanders quickly intervened, stopping Zangara from shooting the president but failing to keep him from firing a total of five shots, which injured four people and fatally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

Zangara told authorities that he’d tried to kill Roosevelt because he hated “all presidents, no matter from what country they come,” as well as “all officials and everybody who is rich.” He was convicted of Cermak’s murder and executed by the electric chair just weeks later, on March 20, 1933.

4. Harry S. Truman, 1950

On the afternoon of November 1, 1950, a commotion awoke President Harry S. Truman, who was taking a nap before a scheduled visit to Arlington National Cemetery. Peering out of a window at Blair House, a rowhouse across the street from the White House, which was undergoing renovations, the president was “waved back quickly by frantic guards,” the Associated Press reported the following day.

Unbeknownst to Truman, a deadly confrontation was unfolding outside of his suite. Secret Service agents were attempting to stop two men, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, from killing the president as part of a broader uprising in favor of Puerto Rican independence. The gunfight, which lasted less than a minute, injured two guards and left two people dead: Torresola and White House police officer Leslie Coffelt, the only Secret Service member killed while protecting the president from an assassination attempt.

Collazo was captured and sentenced to death, but Truman commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, bemoaning the “unnecessary” loss of life caused by the attack and stating that he was “never in danger.” After serving 29 years, he was paroled, and he died in Puerto Rico in 1994. In the aftermath of the shooting, Congress passed a law permanently authorizing Secret Service protection of the president, his immediate family, the president-elect and the vice president.

5. George C. Wallace, 1972

On May 15, 1972, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, a notorious segregationist deemed “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America” by civil rights leader King, stopped in Laurel, Maryland, during his campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination. While Wallace shook hands with supporters at a local shopping center, Arthur Bremer, a self-described “unemployed malcontent who [fancies] himself a writer,” drew a gun and shot the presidential hopeful in the stomach and chest. Bremer also wounded a Secret Service agent, Wallace’s personal bodyguard and a campaign volunteer.

The attack left Wallace paralyzed from the waist down, effectively ending his campaign, though he did run again in the next election cycle. Bremer was convicted of the shooting and was imprisoned until 2007, when he was released on condition of continued evaluation. The assassination attempt drew widespread condemnation, reminding the public of the recent murders of the Kennedy brothers. “We must all stand together to eliminate [this] vicious threat from our public life,” President Richard Nixon said in a statement. “We must not permit the shadow of violence to fall over our country again.”

Wallace’s near-death experience prompted a self-reckoning. Losing the use of his legs forced him to “sit still and reflect on his politics and his own mortality,” Peggy Wallace, the governor’s daughter, told Smithsonian magazine in 2022. “He had a real awakening, a change of heart.” Though Wallace had previously sought to maintain “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he reversed his stance after the shooting, publicly seeking the forgiveness of Black Alabamans and civil rights leaders like Congressman John Lewis.

5. Gerald Ford, 1975

See: https://youtu.be/quKqCkbW8BA?si=hpaJJO8s_GSLGT9J

6. Ronald Reagan, 1981

See: https://youtu.be/quKqCkbW8BA?si=hpaJJO8s_GSLGT9J

7. Bill Clinton, 1994

While President Bill Clinton watched a football game at home on October 29, 1994, a man in a trench coat started firing at the White House through the bars of the fence surrounding the estate. By the time a group of passers-by tackled the gunman, Colorado resident Francisco Martin Duran, he had fired nearly 30 rounds with an assault rifle.

Though none of the bullets injured anyone, particularly the president, officials dealt with Duran severely. As Ronald K. Noble, who oversaw the Secret Service at the time, wrote in a letter to the judge presiding over Duran’s trial for attempted assassination, the incident was “the first shooting directed at the White House in over 150 years,” and Duran’s actions “were an assault on all people of the United States, as well as on the president.” The judge sentenced the shooter to 40 years in federal prison, where he remains.

8. George W. Bush, 2005

A visit abroad in May 2005 marked President George W. Bush’s closest brush with an attempted assassin. While the Republican politician was giving a speech in Tbilisi, Georgia, on May 10, a Georgian national named Vladimir Arutyunian tossed a grenade toward the podium where Bush was standing. It landed 61 feet away, near the area where American first lady Laura Bush, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and the Georgian first lady were sitting. The grenade failed to detonate, as a red handkerchief wrapped around it stopped the firing pin from deploying quickly enough. Though Arutyunian escaped the scene of the crime, the FBI worked with local authorities to track him down and indict him. A Georgian court sentenced Arutyunian, who accused Saakashvili’s administration of being a puppet of the U.S., to life imprisonment.