[Edit, 07/28/2024: Somehow, the assassination attempts on Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman eluded my knowledge despite my voluminous reading, excess of formal education, etc. The 1950 attempt on Truman was closer to the incidents early in Clinton’s first term not detailed here, but I have added the attempt on Roosevelt and slightly edited two other paragraphs. Thanks to the inestimable El Gato Malo for bringing this to my attention.]
As has been widely reported, someone attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last night. A shooter, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, wounded Trump and others and killed at least one, ensuring that this attempted assassination was more tragic than others. I am unaware of an assassination or attempted assassination in this country in which someone else was instantly killed, although James Brady died decades later from the lingering effects of wounds he suffered when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Trump was treated and released and appears to be on his way to a full recovery.
Mark Steyn, as usual, has incisive and trenchant words about yesterday’s shooting and its cultural and media context. He is correct when he writes that, at the very least, the Secret Service egregiously failed to provide security for Trump. The sniper was seen on nearby rooftops and managed to shoot an AR-15 approximately one hundred fifty yards from the former president and current candidate. Steyn’s reference to John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate is entirely apposite, and Billy Beck wrote on X/Twitter, “A bunch of cowboys from a Gary Cooper movie would have done a better job on Trump’s security,” but these references to now-classic cinema are likely entirely lost on generations that, to paraphrase Cicero, know nothing about what happened before they were born.
But classic cinema is not something else that is foreign and alien to today’s culture, at least until last night. Excepting long-forgotten incidents during the Clinton and Obama administrations that were not public, resulted in no injuries, and involved few or no firearms, this is the first assassination attempt on a major political figure in the United States in over four decades.
They used to be unexceptional, even common.
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators carried out their plot to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. He died the next day.
Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield on July 2, 1881. Garfield died two months later.
Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley on September 6, 1901. McKinley died eight days later.
John Schrank shot former president and then-presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt on October 14, 1912. Roosevelt survived.
These were all public shootings directed at Republicans within a decade or two of each other. Over twenty years passed without incidents like this. (Even if President Warren Harding was poisoned in 1923, speculation is that his death in a San Francisco hotel room was a non-political domestic killing.) Then, things started to change.
On February 15, 1933, Giuseppe Zangara attempted to assassinate President Franklin Roosevelt while he was giving a speech in Miami. Bystanders diverted his arm after one shot and Roosevelt was unharmed, but he fired several more wild shots, wounding five people, one of whom was Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. Cermak died nineteen days later.
President John Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. (While neither a candidate nor president, this should be considered with the other assassinations.)
Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968 and died the following day. His son, Robert Kennedy, Jr., is currently running for president and has been denied the Secret Service protection he requested, reportedly by the Biden Administration. Several people were known to be injured on June 5; all of those known to be wounded survived and recovered except for Kennedy. Kennedy, in an outlandish coincidence, spent his final night at the Malibu home of John Frankenheimer, the director of The Manchurian Candidate. Regardless of the many assertions to the contrary in a dishonest culture, the three preceding assassinations are unsolved.
Presidential candidate George Wallace was shot on May 15, 1972. He survived. Arthur Bremer is reported as the shooter, though certain “conspiracy theorists” assert that one is also mysterious. During the previous decade, assassinations and assassination attempts became common, and Democrats were targeted, which would shortly change again. (Not much is known about King’s party affiliation, if any—Billy Beck has told me he thinks he was a Republican—but King certainly leaned left, at the very least.)
There were two attempts to assassinate Republican President Gerald Ford in 1975. Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme shot him in Sacramento on September 5, and Sara Jane Moore shot him in San Francisco on September 22. No one was injured in the first attempt; a taxi driver was slightly wounded on the 22.
John Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. Reagan, White House press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and District of Columbia police officer Thomas Delahanty were wounded. Brady died in 2014, and his death was determined to be a homicide caused by Hinckley’s assassination attempt.
Cultural and historical knowledge and awareness is hardly the only thing that has declined since 1981. The rhetoric during presidential campaigns by candidates and their supporters is another. But one aspect of culture and politics over the ensuing forty-three years that did improve was the absence of violence like this. The two phenomena are not entirely unrelated.
It was the longest period of such relative tranquility.
And few seem to reflect on that, perhaps because of that paucity of historical knowledge.
As someone who finds no one on today’s ballot worth supporting, I can hardly use yesterday’s unnerving, historic tragedy as some kind of rallying cry for Donald Trump, but I am glad he is apparently not seriously wounded, I mourn for the other victims, and I hope this stops.
Here is Ben Bayer on X/Twitter, quoting Ayn Rand’s reaction to President Kennedy’s assassination: “It’s horrific that violence has re-entered American politics as in the 1960s. I agree 100% with Ayn Rand’s take on 1963 …”
While popular culture in general (if not serious culture) was incomparably better, more benevolent, and more humanistic from 1963 to 1981, no one should welcome this return.
Good piece providing factual historical context of this horrible event in our American political story. Such context is rare ‘these days.’