This is not the column I intended to post today.
However, the column I did intend to post contained one paragraph relevant to today:
“Don’t be surprised by anything that happens in this marathon, jumbled presidential campaign.”
So, surprised we are not in this angry, turbulent period of U.S. history that someone or some group tried to assassinate a former president seeking to regain the job from its current occupant.
As the Babylon Bee reported:
Party that called Trump ‘Hitler’ for 8 years shocked as someone tries to assassinate him
If I was still in the daily newspaper business today, I’d likely be writing some kind of news analysis or reconstruction now.
I’ve been involved in numerous such pieces over the decades, reconstructing, for instance, the deaths of the 23 service members who died in the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. And how the people and ship came to be involved in the Valdez Alaskan oil spill that same year.
In the 1980’s, I covered the deadly violence that swept the Heartland during the farm financial crisis. That included the dual ambush murders of bankers in rural Minnesota and the manhunt that spread to Texas. That became the book “Final Harvest.”
On Saturday’s shootings in Pennsylvania, I’d be attempting to pull together the little that is now known about the unsuccessful assassination of former President Donald Trump. And reading it forward for the 15 remaining weeks of this interminable political campaign. RedState’s superior, detailed coverage is all over our front page here.
As is usually the case in the immediate aftermaths of such incidents, much of it would be piecemeal, speculation, and guessing on top of six decades of experience and refined tuition.
Fortunately, however, I am not in the daily newspaper business any longer. So, I won’t do that. With pleasure.
Virtually everything is yet to be learned about the sad event that turned out well, fortunately. We now know the dead shooter’s identity.
We’ll likely soon see photos from his high school yearbook, postings possibly from social media, perhaps anecdotal memories of friends that he was quiet and seemed inexplicably angry at times.
During my time on a presidential campaign, a Secret Service agent described President Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign visit to Springfield, Ill. During a parade, a spotter detected a rifle sticking out of an eighth-floor apartment building window.
The motorcade was getting close but slowed. A sniper, like the one who took out the Pennsylvania shooter Saturday, zeroed in on the open window, awaiting the order to shoot.
Agents ran into the apartment building, up eight flights of stairs. They kicked in the apartment door, guns at the ready. And found an excited little boy watching the parade through the scope of his father’s rifle. None of that made the news.
Sadly, I’ve been involved in aftermath stories of some actual shootings. There was Mark Essex, the Kansas kid who became a black nationalist. He shot and killed nine people in New Orleans, including five police officers. He died there himself in 1973.
I was in Emporia, Kansas the next day knocking on his family’s screen door to learn about him. It was a painful assignment, though not as pained as the expression on his mother’s face when she answered the door and politely declined to talk.
Then there was Sara Jane Moore, the serial divorcee and radical who tried to assassinate Gerald Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1975. It was the second attempt to kill Ford in California in two weeks. Remember Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme?
Ford was exiting the hotel. Moore was thwarted when a Marine veteran in the crowd across the street saw Moore raise the gun, knocked her arm up, sending the bullet to ricochet off the granite above Ford’s head. Last time I looked, you could still see the chip mark.
I was told that was to be the last presidential exit through a street level door. When I traveled with the Secret Service 1999-2001, we always took the dignitary into the hotel on the basement level near the stinking garbage dumpsters.
But then, oops, on March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan was escorted from a D.C. Hilton through a ground-level side door. John Hinckley was waiting.
As it happened, Wallace Turner, the legendary San Francisco Bureau Chief of my employer, had a police source who immediately supplied the suspect’s name. Within the hour, I was asking her landlord to see Ms. Moore’s apartment.
He asked why. And I said, truthfully, I understood it might be vacant soon. He let me in.
Moore was only 45 at the time, but the ground-floor place looked like an old lady’s apartment, drab, with blinds drawn. I would not have been surprised if my Great Aunt Flossie resided there.
No photos of Ford marked with an X. No Che Guevara or Hitler posters to note.
A few minutes later, several stern men in business suits stormed through the apartment door. I suspected, accurately, Secret Service.
The team immediately began searching the place with urgent energy. Their apparent leader quickly approached me rather closely. He sought identification.
Did you touch anything? he said.
I wasn’t a rookie. I replied, again truthfully, “No, of course not.”
The lead agent wanted no trouble with me because then he’d have to explain to bosses how I got inside the would-be assassin’s apartment before his team of professionals.
He then requested that I vacate the premises forthwith. Those weren’t his exact words. But I got the gist and obeyed.
This week Trump and his political party will assemble as scheduled in Milwaukee, which has historical connections to political shootings.
In 1972, a troubled 22-year-old man from a dysfunctional household wandered among jobs there. He had no friends in school.
His name was Arthur Bremer. He was a busboy in an upscale restaurant. But he was demoted to dishwasher after diners complained he’d march like a strutting soldier through the dining room.
Bremer was later arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. And a psychiatrist said he was mentally disturbed. Still, he was released. (Is any of this sounding familiar?)
Bremer bought another weapon and began writing his “Assassin’s Diary” to kill either President Richard Nixon or George Wallace, a segregationist and three-time Alabama governor, who was running for president in Democrat primaries.
Bremer stalked Nixon unsuccessfully in Canada, but caught up with Wallace during a campaign stop in Maryland. Bremer’s shots wounded three bystanders and permanently paralyzed Wallace, who died in 1998. Bremer went to prison and was released in 2007.
One of my favorite stories revealing Teddy Roosevelt’s bull-moose personality involved a speech he gave in Milwaukee on Oct. 14, 1912.
Roosevelt was trying to do the same as Trump, get reelected president four years after leaving the White House. Just before giving a 50-page campaign speech, a former New York saloon-keeper named John Schrank approached, pulled out a pistol, and shot Roosevelt.
The bullet lodged in the former president’s chest, but was slowed by Teddy’s thick, folded speech and metal eyeglass case. The former Army colonel decided, against advice, to give his speech anyway. Remember now these are the days before microphones were common.
After the speech, doctors wanted to remove the bullet. Roosevelt declined adamantly. He had become president when an assassin shot President William McKinley in 1901.
McKinley survived the shot like Roosevelt, but not the infection that set in during an operation to remove the bullet before antibiotics.
Roosevelt lost his third-party presidential bid that year. He split the Republican vote to help defeat incumbent Republican William Howard Taft. Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected.
But wait! There’s more. Wilson was later stricken by incapacitating strokes that left his wife Edith secretly in charge, in effect, as an unelected acting president.
Taft went on to become the only president also to serve as Chief Justice. In 1919, Roosevelt died unexpectedly in his sleep, Schrank’s bullet still in his chest.
That would-be assassin, who had been saved from the angry Milwaukee mob by Roosevelt, survived 24 years longer than his target, but in a mental institution.
Other than all that, history clearly has no relevance to modern life.
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