Trump joins long list of US presidents and candidates targeted by assassins
Donald Trump joins a long line of US presidents and candidates for the White House who have faced attempts on their lives over more than 150 years.
Abraham Lincoln was the first US president to be killed while in office, when he was shot in the head from behind while attending a theatre in Washington, in 1865. Lincoln died the next day.
His murderer was John Wilkes Booth, a former actor and fervent supporter of the pro-slavery Confederate side in the US civil war, which was ongoing at the time.
Sixteen years later, in July 1881, James Garfield, who had been a civil war general, was assassinated after serving just six months in office. He was shot while walking through a station in Washington and died of complications a few weeks later.
Garfield’s killer, Charles Guiteau, who had been turned down for a diplomatic posting, had been stalking the president for weeks. He was later hanged for the crime.
President William McKinley, who had also fought in the civil war, was shot in the chest at point blank range in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901 and died a few days later of gangrene caused by the wounds.
His killer was Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. It was after McKinley’s assassination that Congress passed legislation giving the Secret Service the formal role of protecting presidents.
The assassination of John F Kennedy, captured on broadcast footage as he travelled through Dallas in a motorcade in November 1963, has been the subject of countless books, documentaries and conspiracy theories.
The gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself shot dead two days later while in the custody of police, as he was being taken to the county jail. Kennedy was succeeded by his vice-president, Lyndon B Johnson, who was re-elected by a landslide a year later.
John F Kennedy’s brother, Robert F Kennedy, known as Bobby, a key figure in JFK’s White House, was shot while running in the Democratic primaries as a potential presidential candidate in 1968.
He had been addressing supporters at a hotel in Los Angeles, and died the following day. His son and namesake, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is running as an independent in the current presidential race, with his policies including opposing vaccines.
As well as these five successful assassination attempts, several other presidents and former presidents have been targeted over the years, most recently Ronald Reagan.
In March 1981, Reagan was leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington, where he had been addressing trade unionists, when several shots were fired, one of which hit the president under his arm. He spent 12 days in hospital and later said that “getting shot hurts”.
Other presidents who were targeted include Theodore Roosevelt, who was shot and wounded in 1912, after leaving office, while campaigning to return to the White House.
A bullet passed through Roosevelt’s glasses case and a copy of his 50-page speech to lodge in his chest. Judging that he had not been seriously wounded, Roosevelt delivered the speech before submitting to medical examination.
Roosevelt had become president in 1901 after McKinley was assassinated. The man who attempted to murder him, John Schrank, believed he had been instructed to do so by McKinley’s ghost.
Gerald Ford survived two murder attempts in a single year in 1975, both by women. The first failed because there was no bullet in the firing chamber, and the second because a bystander grabbed the arm of the would-be assassin Sara Jane Moore as she was about to fire.
