Things Worth Remembering: How to Respond to an Almost-Assassination
Yesterday evening’s attack on Donald Trump is reminiscent of the shootings of Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt—and their pitch-perfect response.
I was in Baltimore about to go onstage when I heard the news out of western Pennsylvania.
I felt sick to my stomach and uncharacteristically speechless.
This is a column that is meant to elevate words—the tools we use in a civilized society to air divergent views, to spar, and, ultimately, to resolve our political disputes. It is born of the hope that the things we say can deepen our democratic commitments and preempt bloodshed.
There have been times, of course, when that has not happened. American history is marred by the premature and violent deaths of presidents and presidential candidates. (I recently wrote about Robert F. Kennedy’s famous 1968 speech in Indianapolis.)
I am thinking about Kennedy in light of what happened yesterday. And I am also reminded of two famous, wonderful responses to almost-assassinations—those of President Ronald Reagan and former president Teddy Roosevelt.
Reagan, you may recall, was delivering a speech in West Berlin in 1987, when a nearby balloon unexpectedly popped. Without appearing in any way ruffled, the president—who had nearly been killed by gunman John Hinckley Jr., in 1981, outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.—quipped, “Missed me,” before proceeding with the rest of his speech. (The crowd loved that.)
T.R.’s story is even more unbelievable. In 1912, Roosevelt was in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention is slated to start tomorrow, and he was about to deliver a campaign speech. (Roosevelt was running, at the time, for a third term on the independent Progressive, or Bull Moose, ticket.)
After being shot by a former saloon owner and poet, John Schrank, Roosevelt correctly deduced that he had not been mortally wounded and delivered his ninety-minute speech.
The opening of his speech is simply remarkable:
“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” Roosevelt began. “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.”
He added: “But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”
Only after wrapping up did Roosevelt check himself into a hospital—blood having spread across his shirt—where doctors determined that it would be safer to leave the bullet in his chest muscle than to try to remove it. (As it turned out, Schrank, who was committed to an insane asylum, outlived Roosevelt by 24 years.)
We still do not know why Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, tried to shoot the former president yesterday. In time we will surely find out. But words, once again, are going to matter.
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