How Many Assassination Attempts on our Presidents has There Been?

photorandy2023

2 years ago

I have written several articles on our Presidents and Vice-Presidents. A list of the links have been provided at the bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address additional Presidents and their places in history.

Number of assassinations and assassination attempts on U.S. presidents from 1835 to 2005, by outcome

Throughout U.S. history, there have been countless plots and attempts to assassinate U.S. presidents. The first known case was a failed attempt on Andrew Jackson’s life in 1835, where both the assassin’s guns misfired due to moisture in the air, and Jackson then beat the culprit into submission with his cane. More recent attempts include separate, high-profile cases in October 2018, where sixteen bombs were sent via mail to prominent Democrats (including presidents Obama and Clinton), Trump critics and news outlets; while another culprit sent letters laced with ricin to President Trump and senior U.S. military figures. In the two centuries since the first attempt, the majority of plots have been uncovered or prevented, however several have come close to achieving their aims, and four have resulted in the successful assassination of a sitting president.

Successful attempts

The first successful assassination attempt occurred in 1865, when Confederate sympathizers and spies plotted to kill the three highest-ranking figures in the Union, in an effort to re-ignite the American Civil War. Of the three targets only Lincoln was assassinated, after being shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln died within twelve hours of being shot; this was much sooner than the second presidential assassination, where James Garfield took almost four months to eventually die from his wounds, after being shot in a train station in 1881. The third U.S. president to be assassinated was William McKinley, who was shot twice while meeting members of the public, just six months into his second term. The attempt was not immediately fatal, and McKinley was even able to stop bystanders from killing his attacker; however one of the bullets was never found and McKinley passed away one week after the attack. The most recent U.S. president to have been assassinated was John F. Kennedy, who was shot by former marine and defector to the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of a nearby warehouse during a public motorcade in Dallas, Texas in 1963, and Kennedy died almost immediately. Although official investigations, forensic tests and eyewitness accounts corroborate the official story that Oswald acted alone, a high number of conspiracy theories surround the event, and a large share of the US population believes that the assassination is part of a larger plot or cover-up, orchestrated by either the CIA, mafia or foreign entities (among other theories).

Close calls

While on the 1912 campaign trail, former president Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest before giving a speech; Roosevelt knew that the injury was not fatal, and then proceeded to deliver an 84 minute speech before seeking medical attention. In 1981, a gunman shot six bullets at Ronald Reagan as he was meeting a crowd outside a Washington hotel, injuring the president and three others in the attack. One bullet had ricocheted off the side of a car, punctured the president’s lung and caused severe internal bleeding. The president almost died en route to the hospital, but doctors were able to stabilize him and remove the bullet; Reagan returned to the White House less than two weeks later. Another close call was where a gunman fired shots at President-Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt’s car in 1933, missing the President but killing the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, in the attack.

Coincidentally, the only female culprits in these attempts both tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, in two unrelated attacks in California in September, 1975. The first (who was a member of the Manson Family) was stopped before she could get a shot off at the president, while the second was restrained after shooting twice and injuring one bystander; Ford was unharmed in both attacks. Another near miss was an unsuccessful attempt on Abraham Lincoln’s life, nine months before his successful assassination; the bullet went through his distinctive, stovepipe hat as he was riding to his summer cottage one evening. The only attempt included here that did not involve a firearm and did not take place in the United States was when a grenade was thrown on stage in Tbilisi, Georgia, as George W. Bush was making a speech there in 2005. Although the pin had been removed, the handkerchief used to conceal the grenade was wrapped too tightly around it for the lever for it to detach; nobody was injured in this attempt, however the culprit did kill one agent as he was being arrested two months later.

Being the president of the US is not only prestigious but also the most dangerous jobs in the country. The president is the most guarded individual in the country and the most powerful person in the world. Four out of 45 presidents have been assassinated while six nearly perished in the process. Several others escaped assassination attempts thanks to diligent guards, heroic bystanders, sheer luck, and misfiring pistols. Take a look at the presidents who have faced assassination.

Many assassination attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, were motivated by a desire to change the policy of the American government. Not all such attacks, however, had political reasons. Many other attackers had questionable mental stability, and a few were judged legally insane. Historian James W. Clarke suggests that most assassination attempters have been sane and politically motivated, whereas the Department of Justice‘s legal manual claims that a large majority has been insane. Some assassins, especially mentally ill ones, acted solely on their own, whereas those pursuing political agendas have more often found supporting conspirators. Most assassination plotters were arrested and punished by execution or lengthy detainment in a prison or insane asylum.

Since the vice president, the successor of a removed president, usually shares the president’s political party affiliation, the death of the president is unlikely to result in major policy changes. Possibly for that reason, political groups typically do not coordinate such attacks, even in times of partisan strife. Threats of violence against the president are often made for rhetorical or humorous effect without serious intent,^[5] while threatening the president of the United States has been a federal felony since 1917.

Attempts And Plots Made On U.S. Presidents

20. Andrew Jackson

On a humid dreary day in January of 1835, a man by the name of Richard Lawrence approached Andrew Jackson with the intent to kill him. Lawrence raised two pistols and attempted to fire only for both weapons to misfire in turn. The assassination attempt took place just outside the US Capitol and happened in front of a crowd of government officials attending a state funeral.

It seems the damp weather caused the pistols to misfire and if they had not it is very likely that the president could have been badly wounded if not killed. In the end, Lawrence was beaten into submission by President Jackson before being subdued by the crowd. Upon investigation, it was learned that Lawrence had slowly been descending into a deeper state of mental illness for some time and no clear motive for his actions could be found. Lawrence was institutionalized for the remainder of his life.

Richard Lawrence was the first reported person to try and assassinate a sitting president of the United States.

19. Abraham Lincoln

During the twilight of the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth sneaked into Ford’s Theater in Washington with the intent to kill Abraham Lincoln. The assassination took place on April 14th, 1865. Unlike the previous attempt, Booth was successful in his endeavor.

After gaining entry to the presidential balcony, Booth fired a shot into the back of Lincoln’s head at point-blank range. Lincoln was mortally wounded and perished after languishing in a coma for eight hours.

Booth was tracked down and killed by a Union soldier twelve days after his daring escape from the theater. John Wilkes Booth was a strong Confederate sympathizer and was moved to action by the rumors that the end of the Civil War was going to see increased rights and freedoms for African Americans.

The assassination of the president was part of a larger plot to try and overthrow the Union government and ultimately failed. Booth was killed in the field and four others were tried and hanged for treason for their involvement in the plot.

The assassination of President Lincoln was the first presidential assassination in history.

You may not have realized that prior to being assassinated, there were at least two other attempts on Lincoln’s life. The first was on February 23, 1861. Known as the Baltimore Plot, this was a plan to assassinate Lincoln en route to his inauguration. There is still some debate as to how real the threat was, but either way, Lincoln’s security team did a good job ensuring his safety by sneaking him into Washington at night.

February 23, 1861: President-elect Abraham Lincoln passed through Baltimore amid threats of the Baltimore Plot, an alleged conspiracy by Confederate sympathizers in Maryland to assassinate Lincoln en route to his inauguration, being carried out. Allan Pinkerton‘s National Detective Agency played a key role in protecting the president-elect by managing Lincoln’s security throughout the journey. Although scholars debate whether the threat was real, Lincoln and his advisers took actions to ensure his safe passage through Baltimore.
August 1864: A lone rifle shot fired by an unknown sniper missed Lincoln’s head by inches (passing through his hat) as he rode in the late evening, unguarded, north from the White House three miles (5 km) to the Soldiers’ Home (his regular retreat where he would work and sleep before returning to the White House the following morning). Near 11:00 PM, Private John W. Nichols of the Pennsylvania 150th Volunteers, the sentry on duty at the gated entrance to the Soldiers’ Home grounds, heard the rifle shot and moments later saw the president riding toward him “bareheaded”. Lincoln described the matter to Ward Lamon, his old friend and loyal bodyguard.

18. James A. Garfield

President James Garfield only served in his position for six months before being fatally shot in 1881. As the president arrived at a train station on July 2nd, 1881, in Washington DC, Charles J. Guiteau fired and hit the president twice in the back with a revolver. President Garfield went down and would languish from his wounds for another two and a half months before succumbing to numerous infections that racked his body.

Charles J. Guiteau was deemed mentally unstable at his trial. His motivations for assassinating the president stemmed from a perceived slight after his election. Guiteau imagined himself having an outsized role in the election of Garfield and was angered when he was passed over for an ambassadorship.

Charles J. Guiteau’s influence on the election is seen to have been negligible and the slight at which he suffered was inflated in his own mind. It has also been said that Garfield might very well have survived if his doctors had taken better sterilization precautions but their lack of proper sanitary controls while treating the bullet wounds led to the infections which ultimately killed him. Instead, he passed away on September 19th, 1881.

President Garfield only actively served as president for four months before the shooting. Guiteau was hanged for his crimes.

17. William McKinley

Assassination of President McKinley on September 5, 1901 by Leon Czolgosz. Editorial credit: Everett Historical / Shutterstock.com

It was almost twenty years to the day from the moment President Garfield died when William McKinley also passed away from an assassin’s bullet. On September 6th, 1901, McKinley was shot through the abdomen with a revolver while in Buffalo, New York. The man behind the trigger was Leon Czolgosz, an avowed anarchist.

The revolver round pierced McKinley giving him a dreaded gut wound. At first, it was discovered that the bullet had not damaged any major organs and that president might survive the attack. Unfortunately, on September 14th, McKinley took a turn for the worse and died due to gangrene.

Up until this point, despite two previous assassinations of US presidents, the Secret Service did not have a protective mandate only an investigative one.

The Secret Service was commissioned in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination but was chiefly concerned with uncovering counterfeit currency operations. After the death of President McKinley in 1901, the Secret Service was also tasked with protecting the president full time.

16. William Howard Taft

In 1909, William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz planned a summit in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a historic first meeting between a U.S. president and a Mexican president and also the first time an American president would cross the border into Mexico. Díaz requested the meeting to show U.S. support for his planned eighth run as president, and Taft agreed to support Díaz in order to protect the several billion dollars of American capital then invested in Mexico. Both sides agreed that the disputed Chamizal strip connecting El Paso to Ciudad Juárez would be considered neutral territory with no flags present during the summit, but the meeting focused attention on this territory and resulted in assassination threats and other serious security concerns. The Texas Rangers, 4,000 U.S. and Mexican troops, U.S. Secret Service agents, FBI agents, and U.S. Marshals were all called in to provide security. An additional 250-member private security detail led by Frederick Russell Burnham, the celebrated scout, was hired by John Hays Hammond. Hammond was a close friend of Taft from Yale University and a former candidate for U.S. vice president in the 1908 presidential election who, along with his business partner Burnham, held considerable mining interests in Mexico. On October 16, the day of the summit, Burnham and Private C.R. Moore, a Texas Ranger, discovered 52-year-old Julius Bergerson holding a concealed palm pistol standing at the El Paso Chamber of Commerce building along the procession route. Burnham and Moore captured and disarmed Bergerson within only a few feet (around one meter) of Taft and Díaz.
In 1910, President Taft visited his aunt, Delia Torrey, in Millbury, Massachusetts. Torrey later reported receiving a stranger who allegedly overheard an assassination plot in Boston, Massachusetts. Before leaving nearby Worcester, Massachusetts by train, he threatened Torrey, who claimed the stranger “did not want anything to get into the papers, and if it did he would come back and kill me.” Torrey reported the plot to the local police, who shared the allegation with the Worcester Police and the Secret Service. The man was never identified.

15. Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet while campaigning in Wisconsin during 1912. Roosevelt had served as President from 1901 until 1909 following the assassination of William McKinley. Roosevelt was McKinley’s Vice President when he died from his wounds.

In 1912, Roosevelt was once again running for president, this time as a member of the newly created Progressive Party, and was hoping to secure a third term as president. He was preparing to make a speech when the would-be assassin, John Flammang Schrank, fired a .38 caliber revolver and struck him in the chest.

As a former soldier and avid big game hunter Roosevelt calmly assessed his injury and deduced that the bullet had not struck anything life-threatening. He was, of course, correct in his assumption. Instead of proceeding immediately to the hospital, Teddy Roosevelt continued with his day, delivered an hour and a half long speech before deciding to get his wound checked.

The bullet had lodged itself into a pectoral muscle and it was decided that the best course of action was to leave the bullet where it was. Since the previous two presidents had died, not initially from the bullet wound but from lingering infections afterward, it was deemed safer to leave the bullet in his body. Roosevelt carried the bullet for the rest of his life lodged in his chest.

John Flammang Schrank was declared insane after he claimed Roosevelt’s presidential predecessor, William McKinley, had visited him and told him to avenge his own assassination by killing Roosevelt. Schrank was institutionalized until his death.

14. Herbert Hoover

On November 19, 1928, President-elect Hoover embarked on a ten-nation “goodwill tour” of Central and South America. While crossing the Andes Mountains from Chile, an assassination plot by Argentine anarchists was thwarted. The group was led by Severino Di Giovanni, who planned to blow up his train as it crossed the Argentinian central plain. The plotters had an itinerary but the bomber was arrested before he could place the explosives on the rails. Hoover professed unconcern, tearing off the front page of a newspaper that revealed the plot and explaining, “It’s just as well that Lou shouldn’t see it,” referring to his wife. His complimentary remarks on Argentina were well received in both the host country and in the press.

13. Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was shot at before he was officially sworn into office. At the time, he was merely the president-elect waiting for his first inauguration. While he was speaking in Miami, Florida, on February 15th, 1933, just days before his inauguration was to take place, Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at the president but missed him.

The shots ended up killing the mayor of Chicago, who was on stage with the president-elect, and wounding five other bystanders. Investigators had a difficult time determining a motive for the shooting. Zangara was given the electric chair later that year.

Some have speculated that the shooting was actually targeting the Chicago mayor, who was the only fatality, due to the crackdown on organized crime taking place in the city but no motive was ever established.

Another theory is that the attempt may have been ordered by the imprisoned Al Capone, and that Cermak, who had led a crackdown on the Chicago Outfit and Chicago organized crime more generally, was the true target.
The Soviet NKVD claimed to have discovered a Nazi German Waffen-SS plan to assassinate Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943.

12. Harry S. Truman

Mid-1947: During the Jewish insurgency in Palestine before the formation of the State of Israel, the Zionist Stern Gang was believed to have sent a number of letter bombs addressed to the president and high-ranking staff at the White House. The Secret Service had been alerted by British intelligence after similar letters had been sent to high-ranking British officials and the Gang claimed credit. The mail room of the White House intercepted the letters and the Secret Service defused them. At the time, the incident was not publicized. Truman’s daughter Margaret Truman confirmed the incident in her biography of Truman published in 1972. It had earlier been told in a memoir by Ira R. T. Smith, who worked in the mail room.

In 1950, President Truman was staying at a different house in Washington DC while the White House underwent extensive renovations. Two Puerto Rican nationals, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, approached the house and opened fire on the police who were standing guard around it. Blair House was also situated on Pennsylvania Avenue and there were capitol police as well as Secret Service agents on the premise.

In an attempt to gain entry to the house they engaged in a shootout with the officers on duty.

Torresola mortally wounded a Capitol police officer before being shot in the head by that same officer and died instantly.

Collazo missed every shot but one and was later captured. Torresola was the much better shot and inflicted all of the serious injuries. The pair were members of groups sympathetic to Puerto Rican independence. They were hoping to galvanize the government into releasing Puerto Rico as an independent nation.

Truman remained safely in the house while the attack took place on the street outside. He later claimed that he had served during World War I where professionals had been paid to shoot at him for years and thus was nonplussed about the attack.

Collazo’s death sentence was commuted down to life in prison and was later released by Jimmy Carter in 1979.

11. John F. Kennedy

On November 22nd, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was riding in an open-topped car through Dallas in the presidential motorcade. He was riding in the car with his wife, Jackie Kennedy, and the governor of Texas and his wife. Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire from an upper floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a bolt action rifle.

President Kennedy was hit twice and was mortally wounded, being pronounced dead upon his arrival at the hospital. Lee Harvey Oswald was a former US Marine who was determined to have been acting alone.

Two days later on November 24th, Oswald was shot and killed by a man named Jack Ruby in Dallas Police Headquarters while he was being transferred.

The death of John F. Kennedy marked the first modern assassination of a US president. The shooting galvanized the passing of the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution which laid out guidelines for succession in the event of a president being incapacitated due to injury. It also changed protocols surrounding how presidents travel and appear in public.

Kennedy was the first president to be killed after the Secret Service was given its security mandate in 1901.

10. Richard Nixon

On April 13th, Arthur Bremer carried a firearm to a motorcade in Ottawa, Canada, intending to shoot Nixon, but the president’s car went by too fast for Bremer to get a good shot. The next day, Bremer thought he saw Nixon’s car outside of the Centre Block, but it had disappeared by the time he could retrieve his gun from his hotel room. A month later, Bremer instead shot and seriously injured the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who was paralyzed from the waist down until his death in 1998. Three other people were unintentionally wounded. Bremer served 35 years in prison for the shooting of Governor Wallace.

On February 22nd, 1974, Samuel Byck put his assassination attempt into motion. He was planning on hijacking a commercial aircraft and crashing it into the White House while Nixon was on the premises.

Byck made his way to Baltimore-Washington International Airport and gained entry to a DC-9 jet after killing an airport police officer. Once onboard he threatened the two pilots with a gun and ordered them to take off to which they replied that they could not due to the plane being on wheel blocks. Angered, Byck shot both pilots, killing one of them.

After the pilots were shot, police arrived in force and shot Byck through the window of the DC-9. Byck died in the cockpit after shooting himself in the head.

Byck had been known to the Secret Service before his attempted hijacking after he made various threats against public officials, including Nixon. Byck was known to suffer from severe bouts of depression but no motive was established outside of the fact that he made a lot of threats against a lot of people.

9. Gerald Ford

President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts which both took place during September of 1975. The first attempt saw Lynette Fromm pull a gun on Ford as he reached out to shake her hand during an event. Luckily, while the pistol had been loaded, Fromm had failed to chamber a round and the gun did not fire when she pulled the trigger.

Lynette Fromm was a follower of Charles Manson and had been exceedingly close to getting nearby shot off on President Ford.

Just two and a half weeks later another woman took a shot at the president, this time getting a single round off. Sara Jane Moore was quickly subdued and the gun knocked away before she could fire any more. At her trial, she said that she attempted to kill the president out of deep anger.

The day before Moore attempted to shoot Ford she had been arrested on a handgun charge and had her gun confiscated by the authorities. The gun she used to shoot at the president was unfamiliar to her and is probably why she missed so badly.

Oddly enough, Fromm and Moore are the only two women who have attempted to assassinate a US president and they both tried to do the act in September of 1975.

17 days later, in San Francisco, Sara Jane Moore fired at Ford but a bystander deflected her arm and the bullet missed.

8. Jimmy Carter

May 5, 1979: Raymond Lee Harvey was an Ohio-born unemployed American drifter. He was arrested by the Secret Service after being found carrying a starter pistol with blank rounds, ten minutes before Carter was to give a speech at the Civic Center Mall in Los Angeles on May 5, 1979. Harvey had a history of mental illness, but police had to investigate his claim that he was part of a four-man operation to assassinate the president. According to Harvey, he fired seven blank rounds from the starter pistol on the hotel roof on the night of May 4 to test how much noise it would make. He claimed to have been with one of the plotters that night, whom he knew as “Julio”. (This man was later identified as a 21-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, who gave the name Osvaldo Espinoza Ortiz.) At the time of his arrest, Harvey had eight spent rounds in his pocket, as well as 70 unspent blank rounds for the gun. Harvey was jailed on a $50,000 bond, given his transient status, and Ortiz was alternately reported as being held on a $100,000 bond as a material witness or held on a $50,000 bond being charged with burglary from a car. Charges against the pair were ultimately dismissed for a lack of evidence.
John Hinckley Jr. came close to shooting Carter during his re-election campaign, but he lost his nerve. He would later attempt to kill President Ronald Reagan in March 1981.

7. Ronald Reagan

Police, FBI, and Secret Service agents outside the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981. Editorial credit: mark reinstein / Shutterstock.com

In 1981, Ronald Reagan was exiting a Hilton hotel in Washington DC after a luncheon speaking engagement. As he exited the hotel, John Hinckley Jr. opened fire on the president and his aides.

Hinckley fired six shots in rapid succession as Reagan passed close by him. The bullets flew wildly and struck four people, including the president. Reagan was wounded and taken to the hospital where he recovered rather quickly.

Hinckley’s motivation stemmed from an obsession with the actress Jodi Foster. He obsessively watched the movie Taxi Driver and strove to emulate the main character, who in the end attempts to assassinate a presidential candidate. In his delusion, Hinckley believed that by assassinating Ronald Reagan, Jodi Foster would take notice of him.

Hinckley was declared insane and institutionalized.

6. George H.W. Bush

April 13, 1993: According to Kuwaiti authorities, and an FBI investigation fourteen Kuwaiti and Iraqi men believed to be working for Saddam Hussein smuggled bombs into Kuwait, planning to assassinate former President Bush by a car bomb during his visit to Kuwait University three months after he had left office in January 1993. The former president was on a visit to Kuwait in 1993 to commemorate the coalition’s victory over Iraq in the Persian Gulf War when Kuwaiti officials claimed to have foiled an alleged assassination plot and arrested the suspects. At the time the former president was accompanied by his wife, two of his sons, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, former Chief of Staff John Sununu, and former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady. Of the 17 people Kuwaiti authorities arrested, two suspects, Wali Abdelhadi Ghazali and Raad Abdel-Amir al-Assadi, retracted their confessions at the trial, claiming that they were coerced. A Kuwaiti court convicted all but one of the defendants. Then-president Bill Clinton responded by launching a cruise missile attack on an Iraqi intelligence building in the Mansour district of Baghdad. The plot was used as one of the justifications for the Iraq Resolution authorizing the 2003 U.S. invasion of the country. An analysis by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center concludes the assassination plot was likely fabricated by Kuwaiti authorities; however, at the time the FBI established that the plot had been directed by the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), and the CIA had received information suggesting that Saddam Hussein had authorized the assassination attempt to get revenge against the U.S., to punish Kuwait for working with the U.S., and to keep other Arab states for intervening in Iraq any further. The day before the attack, on April 12, 1993, the then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and future 64th U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went before the U.N. Security Council to present evidence of the Iraqi plot with the hope of gaining international support.

5. Bill Clinton

January 21, 1994: Ronald Gene Barbour, a retired military officer and freelance writer, plotted to kill Clinton while the president was jogging. Barbour returned to Florida a week later without having fired the shots at the president, who was on a state visit to Russia. Barbour was sentenced to five years in prison and was released in 1998.
September 12, 1994: Frank Eugene Corder flew a stolen single-engine Cessna 150 onto the White House lawn and crashed into a tree. Corder, a truck driver from Maryland who reportedly had alcohol problems, allegedly tried to hit the White House. He was killed in the crash and was the only fatality. The president and first family were not in residence at the time.
October 29, 1994: Francisco Martin Duran fired at least 29 shots with a 7.62×39mm Type 56 semi-automatic rifle at the White House from a fence overlooking the North Lawn, thinking that Clinton was among the men in dark suits standing there (Clinton was inside). Three tourists, Harry Rakosky, Ken Davis and Robert Haines, tackled Duran before he could injure anyone. Found to have a suicide note in his pocket, Duran was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
November 1994: Osama bin Laden recruited Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to attempt to assassinate Clinton. However, Yousef decided that security would be too effective and decided to target Pope John Paul II instead.
November 24, 1996: During his visit to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Manila, Clinton’s motorcade was rerouted before it was to drive over a bridge. Secret Service officers had intercepted a message suggesting that an attack was imminent, and Lewis Merletti, the director of the Secret Service, ordered the motorcade to be re-routed. An intelligence team later discovered a bomb under the bridge. Subsequent U.S. investigation “revealed that [the plot] was masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden“.
October 2018: A package containing a pipe bomb addressed to wife Hillary Clinton and sent to their home in Chappaqua, New York, was intercepted by the Secret Service. It was one of several mailed to other Democratic leaders in the same week, including former president Barack Obama. Bill Clinton was at the Chappaqua home when the package was intercepted, while Hillary was in Florida campaigning for Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections. Fingerprint DNA revealed that the package was sent by Florida resident Cesar Sayoc, who was captured two days after the package was intercepted. Prosecutors sought a life sentence for Sayoc, but the judge instead sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

4. George W. Bush

May 10, 2005: While President Bush was giving a speech in the Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia, Vladimir Arutyunian threw a live Soviet-made RGD-5 hand grenade toward the podium. The grenade had its pin pulled, but did not explode because a red tartan handkerchief was wrapped tightly around it, preventing the safety lever from detaching. After escaping that day, Arutyunian was arrested in July 2005. During his arrest, he killed an Interior Ministry agent. He was convicted in January 2006 and given a life sentence.
May 24, 2022: Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, an Iraqi citizen and resident of Columbus, Ohio, was arrested for involvement in a plot to assassinate President Bush based on information obtained from conversations he held with several undercover FBI informants. He was also accused of committing an immigration crime and planning to illegally smuggle Iraqi nationals into the U.S. from Mexico in order to assist with the plot. He additionally claimed to informants that he had direct connections to members of the former ISIS, including ones to former ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (before his death) and a former ISIS financial chief, the latter of whom he intended to launder money from into the U.S. via a Columbus car dealership. In February, Shihab and an informant traveled to the Bush home in Dallas, Texas and to the George W. Bush Institute to conduct surveillance. Shihab entered the country illegally in September 2020 with false identification. Shihab claimed to have worked with Iraqi terrorists to kill many American servicemen in Iraq from 2003 to 2006 following the invasion. He stated that the motivation behind the assassination plot was anger over the Iraq War.

3. Barack Obama

December 2008: A United States Marine, 20-year-old Kody Brittingham, wrote that he had taken an oath to “protect against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.” In a signed “letter of intent,” he identified President-elect Obama as a “domestic enemy” and the target of Brittingham’s planned assassination plot. A search of his barracks uncovered a journal containing white supremacist material. In June 2010, Brittingham was sentenced to 100 months in federal prison.
April 2009: A plot to assassinate Obama at the Alliance of Civilizations summit in Istanbul, Turkey, was discovered after a man of Syrian origins carrying forged Al Jazeera TV press credentials was found. The man confessed to the Turkish security services details of his plan to kill Obama with a knife. He alleged that he had three accomplices.
November 2011: 21-year-old Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez was influenced by conspiracy theories and fringe religious viewpoints to attempt to murder Obama. Having traveled from his native Idaho, he hit the White House with several rounds fired from a semi-automatic rifle. No one was injured, but a window was broken. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
2011–2012: The far-right terrorist group FEAR plotted to carry out a series of terror attacks which included assassinating Obama. The plot was foiled when four members of the group were arrested on murder charges and one, Michael Burnett, agreed to co-operate with authorities in return for a lighter sentence.
October 2012: A mentally ill man named Mitchell Kusick was arrested after confessing to his therapist that he intended to kill Obama with a shotgun at a campaign stop in Boulder, Colorado.
April 2013: Another attempt was made when a letter laced with ricin, a toxin, was sent to Obama.
June 2013: Two white supremacists, Glendon Scott Crawford and Eric Feight, were arrested for a plot to kill Muslim Americans and other perceived enemies of Israel with a homemade “radiation gun”, described by Crawford as “Hiroshima on a light switch”. It later emerged that Crawford had suggested using the device against President Obama as well as several other targets.
October 2018: A package that contained a pipe bomb was sent to former President Obama at his home in Washington, D.C. The package was intercepted by the Secret Service.

2. Donald Trump

June 16, 2016: Michael Steven Sandford, a British national, attempted to grab the gun of a police officer at a Trump rally in Las Vegas, Nevada. After his arrest, he stated that he had aimed to assassinate Donald Trump with the gun. He was sentenced to twelve months and one day in prison, but was released and deported to the United Kingdom after eleven months.
September 6, 2017: Gregory Lee Leingang, a 42-year-old man from North Dakota, attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump in Mandan, North Dakota, while Trump was visiting the state to rally public support. Leingang stole a forklift from an oil refinery and drove toward the presidential motorcade. After the forklift became jammed within the refinery, he fled on foot and was arrested by the pursuing police. While interviewed in detention, he admitted his intent to murder the president by flipping the presidential limousine with the stolen forklift, to the surprise of authorities, who suspected he was merely stealing the vehicle for personal use. The man pleaded guilty to the attempted attack, stealing the forklift, related charges and several other unrelated crimes on the same day. Consequently, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. His defense attorney noted a “serious psychiatric crisis”. Leingang’s choice of a forklift as a weapon was unique among presidential assassination attempts.
November 2017: A man affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), whose name was not revealed, was arrested by the Philippine National Police in Rizal Park, Manila, for reportedly planning to assassinate Trump during the diplomatic ASEAN Summit. In the week prior to the failed killing, the Secret Service already suspected a planned assault on the president because of the general presence of ISIL in the Philippines and because of threats by many people against the president on social media. Before the landing of Trump’s airplane, the Secret Service discovered a credible terrorist threat from a man who threatened to kill the president on social media, quickly tracking down and arresting the terrorist. The government disclosed the incident to the public after a year of silence in a television documentary

Joe Biden

May 23, 2023: Sai Varshith Kandula, a 19-year-old man from St. Louis, drove a rented box truck into a barrier that separated the White House grounds from the public. Shortly thereafter he was taken into custody by the United States Park Police and was found to have a Nazi flag in his truck. Kandula expressed admiration for the Third Reich and stated his intentions were to “kill the president” and “seize power”

A whopping 11 of the assassination attempts happened in D.C., including at the White House itself. The most recent, in 2011, involved a man shooting at the presidential home. Someone had the same idea in 1994, with President Clinton safely inside. While there have been several international plots, there has only been one serious attempt outside of the US.

PROFILES OF THEIR KILLERS

Nearly all assassins and would-be assassins were, to put it plainly, failures. “We got this psychological profile that was supposed to help us spot a would-be assassin,” former Secret Service agent Marty Venker once wrote. “It was distilled from the profiles of everybody from John Wilkes Booth to Sirhan Sirhan. History’s most famous failures—you got to know their miserable lives by heart.” This was true in the case of all people who assassinated presidents.

Most were also motivated by real or imagined grievances and saw killing “the leader of the free world” as a way to catapult into the history books. Leon Czolgosz, a man who despaired of his lowly position in life and who assassinated President McKinley in 1901, had an alias, “Fred C. Nieman” (literally Fred “Nobody”). James Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, “had failed at everything he ever tried,” author Candice Millard wrote, “and he had tried nearly everything.” Both Kennedy assassins, Oswald and Sirhan, had been fired from jobs because of their disagreeable personalities. Would-be Nixon assassin Samuel Byck blamed political corruption, and Nixon in particular, for his marital and financial problems. Arthur Bremer, who first stalked Nixon before targeting Governor George Wallace, was a disgruntled busboy and janitor and a failure in his personal relationships. “Life has been only an enemy to me,” he wrote in his diary. John Hinckley, another failure, lived in the shadow of his successful father. He failed to hold down a job and was an unsuccessful student. Australian opposition leader Arthur Caldwell’s would-be assassin expressed it best when he said, “I realized that unless I did something out of the ordinary, I would remain a nobody.”

As far as potential assassinated presidents, Gerald Ford’s would-be assassins, Sara Jane Moore and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, were also failures in life. By 1975, Moore had suffered five broken marriages and borne four children, three of whom had been adopted by her parents. Lynette Fromme was a high school dropout who never worked a day in her life except to try to persuade the authorities to release her hero, Charles Manson, from prison.

Many presidential threateners also believed that they had exceptional qualities that society failed to recognize. This also led to assassinated presidents. Guiteau believed he was “a man of great distinction and promise.” Bremer believed he was “as important as the start of World War II” and that his diary “will be among the best read pages since the scrolls in those caves.” Oswald imagined his future involved becoming a famous revolutionary and future prime minister of Cuba.

Resources

statista.com, “Number of assassinations and assassination attempts on U.S. presidents from 1835 to 2005, by outcome.”; worldatlas.com, “Assassination Attempts On US Presidents.”; blog.batchgeo.com, “Presidential Assassination Attempts Mapped.”; historyonthenet.com, “Assassinated Presidents: Profiles of Them and Their Killers.”; medium.com, “An Overview Of Every Assassination Attempt On US Presidents.” By Grant Piper; list25.com, “25 Unknown Assassination Attempts on US Presidents.”; en.wikipedia.org, “List of United States presidential assassination attempts and plots.” By Wikipedia Editors;