Андрей Тихомиров
Assassinations, assassinations and "sudden" deaths of American presidents

There have been many attempts on presidents and former presidents, here are just some of the most famous. The first attempt on the life of a head of state in the history of the United States occurred in 1835. The White House at that time was occupied by US President Andrew Jackson. An unemployed painter shot at the president, but the gun misfired. According to the shooter caught in the act, he lost his job because of the president. Jackson himself, however, was sure that the crime had political customers.

Theodore Roosevelt left the White House in 1909, but in the next election, in 1912, he decided to try his luck again and even created a new Progressive Party for his re-election. On October 14, 1912, he arrived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Where a certain John Shrank was lying in wait for him. Despite the injury, the president found the strength to speak to the voters and only then turned to doctors. He recovered from his wounds, but lost the election to his Republican rival Taft. John Schrank, who shot at the president, was declared insane and, according to a court verdict, was placed in a psychiatric clinic, where he died 30 years later.

The next president to experience an assassination attempt was Harry Truman. He took up his post after Roosevelt's death, and in 1948 he was re-elected for the next term. In 1951, when Truman was resting in his office after lunch, when two Puerto Ricans – Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola – tried to break into the house, as it turned out later, with the aim of assassinating the president. A three-minute shootout took place between the guards and the attackers. As a result, Torresola and one of the guards were killed, and Collazo was arrested. Collazo was found guilty of conspiracy to assassinate the US president and sentenced to death. Truman personally replaced his electric chair with a life sentence.

And Gerald Ford, who took over the post of President of the United States after Richard Nixon left his post in 1974, became the only US president whose life was attempted twice. And both times unsuccessfully. And both times women. On the morning of September 5, 1975, the president left the Senator Hotel in Sacramento, California and headed to the building where a business meeting was scheduled: smiling, shaking hands. Suddenly, a young woman rushed to the president, aiming a pistol at him. But the shot didn't happen. When the security agents seized the terrorist, she frantically repeated: "The gun didn't fire, it didn't fire!". Later, when examining the weapon, the police stated that the gun had indeed misfired. The detainee was 24-year-old Lynette Fromm, a member of the Charles Manson terrorist gang. But Ford, two hours after the incident, gave a speech about fighting crime and gun control in the California state legislature. However, on September 21, 1975, in Los Angeles, President Ford was shot again. The president left the hotel. The crowd of greeters began to move, and suddenly a shot rang out. Ford hesitantly stopped, but the Secret Service agents quickly and vigorously pushed him into the car, which immediately sped off. 45-year-old Sarah Jane Moore, a well-known activist of the left movement, was arrested.

On March 30, 1981, an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan took place at the entrance to the Washington Hilton Hotel. The assailant is 25-year-old disc jockey John Hinckley. The President, having finished his speech to the delegates of the congress of the builders' union, went to his limousine: there were no more than 20 steps from the entrance to the hotel to the car. Reagan was seriously wounded, the bullet passed a few centimeters from the heart. John Hinckley was declared mentally ill.

There was also such an attempt – on President George W. Bush, at the final press conference in 2008 in Baghdad (American-occupied Iraq), a correspondent of the Cairo-based al-Baghdadia TV channel, 29-year-old Iraqi journalist Muntadar al–Zaidi performed the feat of throwing two shoes at American President Bush, shouting at the same time: "This is a gift from the widows and orphans of those who died in Iraq!", employees of the Iraqi special services in the service of the Americans immediately arrested the attacker.

In the USA, a system has been established when behind-the-scenes millionaires (oligarchs) they put their henchman on the post of president, using democratic principles as a screen, but if the president breaks out of obedience, he is removed – or killed openly, or eliminated secretly. This "system" of US control is transferred to the whole world, as if the second and next levels, but the center remains the same – the "world government" centered in Washington. In fact, we are talking about a "battle" of money bags that put the right people in power. Official American propaganda presents four presidents who died "suddenly" as head of state as a "coincidence" of circumstances, and all the assassins of presidents and those who attempted to kill them as loners, psychopaths, lunatics, revolutionaries. But is it so?

1. William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) was the 9th President of the United States (from March 4 to April 4, 1841). Harrison was in office for the shortest time of all US presidents: according to the official version, having caught a cold during the inaugural speech, he died exactly a month after taking the oath. In mid-March, he developed pneumonia, and on April 4, Harrison died after serving as president for exactly a month. Garrison served in the army from 1791, fought on the border with the Indians and was adjutant to General Wayne. He participated in the Ohio War in 1795. In 1798 he retired and entered politics. He was the first governor of Indiana (then not a state, but a territory, 1800-1813). In this post, he was engaged in the expansion of settlements of Anglo-Americans and the purchase of land from Indians, which caused the protest of the latter and an anti-American military action led by Chief Tecumseh. Harrison became famous as a national hero in 1811, defeating the Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe, for which he was himself nicknamed "Tippecanoe" or "Old Tippecanoe". In 1812 he commanded all the forces of the state against the Tecumseh confederacy and defeated it (supported by the British during the Anglo-American War of 1812-1814) on the river, proudly called the Thames, in Canada; Tecumseh himself fell in this battle. Such a victory, won not just over the Indians, but also over the British, raised the prestige of the Indiana governor even higher. Then he was a member of the House of Representatives (1816-1819) and senator (1824-1828) from Ohio. In 1836, he was a candidate for president from the Whig Party, but lost to Martin Van Buren. But the next time, in 1840, he again became an opposition candidate and won a complete victory due to the fact that the United States was then in a severe economic crisis. In the campaign of 1840, the main task of the Whigs was to find a candidate capable of uniting at least temporarily, at the time of the election, their diverse forces. He became a veteran of the war of 1812, the elderly General G. Garrison, a man without definite political views, without significant weight in the party. His candidacy was approved by the first Whig National Convention, held in November 1839 in Harrisburg (Pennsylvania). In order to strengthen the party's chances of success in the southern states, the defender of the rights of the states, Senator J. J., was nominated for the post of vice president. Tyler (Virginia). The Whigs did not accept any platform, deciding to focus all the attention of voters on the unusual personality of G. Harrison. G. Harrison became the first "dark horse", which was an innovation in the political life of the country and very important for the further stable functioning of the two-party system of the United States. The elections of 1840 are also interesting in another respect – from the point of view of the birth of new techniques and methods of fighting for votes. The initiative came from the Whigs, who used mass events to promote the merits of their candidate. Behind the external spontaneity and noisy parade of the 1840 campaign was the great organizational work of their local leaders. The Whigs were able to mobilize considerable financial resources for the needs of the campaign. They were greatly assisted by businesses more closely connected with them; the party press also brought in significant revenues. He was the last British citizen president. Harrison took office in 1841 at the age of 68 and was the oldest person elected to the presidency until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. On the day of the oath of office on March 4, the weather was very cold and windy, but the president had to show that he was as indomitable a hero as he was thirty years ago at Tippecanoe; he delivered a two-hour inaugural speech, the longest in American history, standing in the wind without a hat and coat. He caught a cold, went down and the cold turned into pneumonia and pleurisy. To treat him, doctors used opium, castor oil, snake venom and even applied real snakes, but this treatment only worsened the condition of the president, who fell into a delusional state and died at 12.30 p.m. on April 4, 1841 from right-sided pneumonia complicated by jaundice and blood poisoning. His last words, in his delirium, were: "Sir, I want you to understand the true principles of government. I want them to be implemented, and I'm not asking for anything else." He became the first president to die in office.

2. Zachary Taylor (1784 – 1850) – the 12th President of the United States in 1849 – 1850 from the Whig Party. A hero of the Mexican War, died 16 months after being elected president. From 1808 on military service, participated in the extermination expedition against the Indians, the war with Mexico (1846-1848), etc. All these victories created such popularity for him that the Whig Party offered him a candidacy for the presidency of the United States, although he had not previously held any political positions. As president, Taylor tried to stand above minor party interests, but his health was undermined during Indian campaigns (he often had malaria), and he died (possibly from dysentery or typhus) in the second year of his presidency. The opinion that he was poisoned with arsenic was not confirmed during the exhumation and chemical examination of Taylor's remains in 1991. As president, he opposed radical supporters of the spread of slavery. The second president of the United States, who did not hold any other state post before entering the White House (the first was the founder of the state, George Washington). Taylor was also the last Southern president elected before Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

3. Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) – the 16th President of the United States. In 1860 and 1864, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. On April 9, 1865, the army of the Southerners, who fought the army of Lincoln, under the command of General Lee, capitulated, and on April 14, 1865, Lincoln went with his family to the play "Our American cousin", Extremist Wilkie Booth, picking up the moment when all attention was focused on the stage, approached the president and lined up behind the utor in the head Then he jumped on stage, shouting: "Sic semper tyrannis", a slogan from the state of Virginia, which means: "And so to all tyrants," The next morning Lincoln died. Those sitting in the box clearly did not expect an "invasion", and Booth, without wasting a second, shot the president twice with a .44-caliber pistol. The audience, according to many eyewitnesses, did not immediately understand what had happened. And Booth jumped on stage, ran past the stunned actors and ducked through the door leading backstage. The police gave chase. Here is what The Illustrated London News reported on May 13, 1865: "Booth, whose leg was broken by a fall from a horse that was set by a Maryland surgeon named Mudd, who was then arrested, and his accomplice, named Harold, were found to have taken refuge in a swamp in St. Mary's County, Maryland, They were pursued, but found the means to cross the Potomac, and reached a farm near the Royal Port, on the Rappahannock. There they were escorted by Federal Cavalry, but they barricaded themselves in a barn and refused to surrender. Federal soldiers then set fire to the barn, a fight broke out, during which Harold remained alive and unharmed; but Booth was shot in the head by a sergeant. He lived, however, for about three more hours, and during that time dictated a letter to his mother. Booth's corpse and Harold were received in Washington on the morning of April 27. It was stated that Booth's body, by order of the Military Department, was buried confidentially. Junius Brutus Booth was also arrested on suspicion that he was one of his brother's accomplices." However, when describing the first murder of a head of state in the history of the United States, historians do not always pay due attention to another event that happened on the same day, April 14, 1865, U.S. Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch discussed with President Abraham Lincoln the need to create a special police unit at his department, which would be charged with fighting counterfeiters. For the American economy in the first years after the end of the Civil War, the problem of counterfeit money was one of the most acute. Fifteen hundred banks had the right to issue, that is, issue banknotes, on the eve of the civil war, and there were banknotes of seven thousand samples in circulation in the country. In the USA until the 60s of the 19th century. in each state, many banks combined the functions of commercial and issuing. According to the law of 1863, the right to issue banknotes was granted to all national banks (subject to federal legislation), and since 1865, the banknote issue of state banks has been subject to a 10% issue tax. As a result, state banks ceased to perform issuing functions and only national banks began to act as the latter, but "miscellaneous" banknotes continued to go around, and counterfeiters took full advantage of this. Boots was actually an agent of planters and bankers who did not benefit from Lincoln's policy. As history shows, Lincoln put his signature to McCulloch's proposal. Who of them came up with the idea to call the new police structure the "Secret Service", and remained unknown. And even more so, no one could have imagined that this department, the creation of which the US president discussed with the Minister of Finance a few hours before the fatal shots, would soon be responsible for the security of "top officials". And when Hugh McCulloch sworn in the first director of the Secret Service, William Wood, a veteran of the war with Mexico, on July 5, 1865, the staff of the new structure consisted of a director and only ten agents, and they were charged with the duty to fight counterfeiters. Already in the first four years, its employees arrested more than two hundred counterfeiters and confiscated fakes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since 1867, Secret Service agents have been engaged in mail robberies and frauds with federal land property, hunted smugglers and even followed the Ku Klux Klan, however, soon the Department of Justice convinced Congress to limit the functions of the Secret Service exclusively to combating counterfeiting of money and other government papers.