History Buff's Guide to the Presidents (35 page)

The end of the Second World War unleashed a wave of independence movements as former colonies and protectorates labored to rid themselves of deteriorating bonds. Among them was Puerto Rico, seeking liberation from its meek status as a U.S. territory.

On July 4, 1950, Harry Truman offered a compromise. He signed Public Law 600, which granted the island the rank of commonwealth. Residents could elect their own governor, engage in free trade with the United States, and have a nonvoting representative in Congress. For an ultrapatriotic minority of Puerto Ricans, this was not enough. Only full autonomy would suffice.
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Meanwhile, the Trumans sought independence of a different sort. Past its 150th birthday, the White House was falling apart, literally. While the building underwent extensive renovations, Harry and his family relocated to the Blair House across Pennsylvania Avenue. Accommodations were pleasant, but security was a concern. All that stood between the president and the public was a latched screen door and a few armed guards.
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For Truman, personal security was an afterthought. His base concerns were global in nature—tensions between East and West in Europe, possible entry of Communist China into the Korean conflict, a growing Red Scare at home, and a recent and bloody nationalist uprising in Puerto Rico.

On an unseasonably warm November afternoon, as Truman prepared for a memorial service at Arlington, two well-dressed men approached the Blair House. They were Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, members of the Puerto Rico Independence Movement who had decided to murder Truman. In their way were three guards posted outside the residence: policemen Donald Birdzell and Joseph Downs and Pvt. Leslie Coffelt.

The two assailants brandished semiautomatic pistols and began firing. First to fall was Coffelt, taking several shots to the chest and abdomen. Birdzell took a bullet to the leg and another to the upper body. Three slugs slammed into Downs, who was guarding the main door. Truman rushed to his second-story window in time to see his men disable Collazo with a shot to the chest, while Coffelt, though mortally wounded, killed Torresola with a shot to the head.
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It was over in seconds. Unfazed, Truman commented, “A president has to expect those things.” He kept his appointment at Arlington and seemed indifferent to the shootings, until he heard that Coffelt had died, leaving behind a wife and stepdaughter. The president ordered that a plaque be placed on the Blair House to commemorate Coffelt’s sacrifice. Days later, speaking to a crowd in his hometown of Independence, Missouri, a visibly emotional Truman confided, “You can’t understand just how a man feels when somebody else dies for him.”
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The struggle for Europe and Korea continued, as well as for the troubled Caribbean island. Four years after the Blair House incident, four gunmen forced their way into the U.S. House of Representatives, shouting “Long live free Puerto Rico!” and opened fire, wounding five Congressmen.

The Blair House housed the Truman family during the White House renovation. To the right stands the guard booth where Leslie Coffelt was mortally wounded during the attempt on Truman’s life.
Truman Library

Oscar Collazo was scheduled to be executed in July 1952, but with a week to spare, Truman commuted his sentence to life. Twenty-seven years later, Collazo walked out of prison, pardoned by President James Carter and later decorated by Cuban president Fidel Castro.

7
. JOHN F. KENNEDY (NOVEMBER 22, 1963)

First lady of Texas Nellie Connally turned to the backseat of the blue 1961 Lincoln Continental and assured her guest, “Mr. Kennedy, you can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you.” Less than twenty seconds later, Nellie was desperately pulling her severely wounded husband toward her, when she looked up and saw brain tissue splatter the interior of the vehicle.
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What followed in Dealey Plaza was utter chaos. Racing engines, screaming sirens, stunned witnesses, crying, shouting, running. Sensing the confusion as he read the incoming bulletins of the unfolding tragedy, an editor at the
New York Times
predicted, “The year 2000 will see men still arguing and writing about the President’s death.”
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Was it a conspiracy? Most certainly not, but the myriad of theories do contain a grain of truth. JFK had enemies, and not just jealous husbands.

The pro-Castro element, including Fidel himself, was less than pleased by the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs episode, the removal of Soviet missiles, and multiple CIA attempts to kill
el Presidente
. Conversely, anti-Castro factions had reason to be angry over Kennedy’s last-minute stoppage of U.S. air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion, leaving more than a thousand expatriates to be killed or captured on the shores of their lost homeland.

Angry too were organized labor, organized crime, and the mafia, all targets of a painfully diligent U.S. Attorney General’s office, led by Bobby Kennedy. The FBI and its bombastic director, J. Edgar Hoover, also loathed the intrusive and controlling Kennedy brothers. Plus, the CIA, military contractors, the Pentagon, and the Saigon government were growing impatient with Kennedy’s slow approach to Vietnam. Add the vice president, a heartbeat away from his dream. Also among the accused are the Soviet Union, the Ku Klux Klan, the homosexual and bisexual communities, plus thirty alleged “second gunmen.”

Within moments of this photograph, John F. Kennedy was shot in the neck and parietal lobe. Texas Governor John Connally, seated to the front and slightly to the left of Kennedy, was also seriously wounded. Blood and brain tissue splattered mostly forward, indicating the shots came from above and behind the victims.

But motive does not equal murder. If it did, Kennedy’s limousine would have had more holes in it than the conspiracy theories that claim Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t a lone assassin. Sadly, the maladjusted, disturbed former marine, who had failed in everything else he tried in life, happened to be a competent sharpshooter.

Armed with a functioning Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and nested on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald landed two of his three steadied shots, and they were not difficult. Elm Street slanted down and away from the building, making the target appear almost motionless from his angle. On the fatal hit, his four-powered scope made his victim look as if he were only twenty-five yards away. And at 12:30 p.m., Oswald found his mark.
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If viewed dispassionately, the evidence is overwhelming. A full-scale, bipartisan investigation lasted nearly a year. It questioned more than five hundred witnesses, gathered more than two dozen volumes of evidence and testimony, heard from specialists who performed the autopsy, relatives and friends of the chief suspect, ballistics experts, and eyewitnesses who saw the rifle barrel protrude from the sixth-floor window. The gun matched the bullets. The suspect owned the gun. Traces of the suspect and the gun itself were at the crime scene, from which the suspect escaped and killed a police officer. Rarely is a murder investigation ever so irrefutable.

Most damning are the exit wounds of the victims, indicating that the shots came from above and behind. Had the assassin been standing behind the fence on the grassy knoll, in full daylight, near hundreds of witnesses and two dozen cameras, and managed to hit a moving target shielded by street signs and several bystanders, the splatter would not have caked the inside of the windshield and the backs of the car seats—it would have drenched the first lady’s face.

It is no crime for the conspiracy theorists to pursue the case further. The hundreds of investigations, books, articles, and documentaries speak volumes about the noble human desire to find absolute truth. But there are times when it is not possible to find logic and reason in a senseless act.
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Until recently, the Conspiracy Museum operated a block away from Dealey Plaza, adjacent to the Kennedy Memorial. It folded in late 2006, and a sign on the window suggested the museum’s closure was part of a conspiracy.

8
. GERALD R. FORD (SEPTEMBER 5, 1975)

Public acts of terror are recurrent in human history, but they spiked considerably in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spurred in part by the novelty of worldwide television and the global exposure it provided minor players. Eighty-two hijackings occurred globally in 1969, more than all previous years combined. In 1970, attempts were made on the lives of five international leaders. The following year, Palestinian militants murdered the prime minister of Jordan, Bengali rebels sparked a war between India and Pakistan, and separatist violence escalated in Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain.

In 1972, shocked by the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympiad, President Richard Nixon established the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism, amassing the heads of ten federal departments, including the FBI, Defense Department, and CIA. By 1975, Robert Fearey, the U.S. national coordinator for combating terrorism, surmised that conditions were steadily worsening, noting, “There’s even concern that, at some point, terrorists might try using weapons of mass destruction.”
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The same month of Fearey’s dark predictions, President Gerald Ford traveled to Sacramento, California, to give an address in the state capitol on the dangers of rising crime and waning gun control. Waiting for his arrival, with a Colt .45 automatic pistol, was twenty-six-year-old, bright-eyed, auburn-haired Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, an early and devout follower of cult leader and convicted mass murderer Charles Manson.

As Ford moved through a crowd of well-wishers, Fromme pushed her way toward the president, her disheveled crimson bathrobe and red floral dress almost as conspicuous as her aggressive behavior. Not two feet away from her goal, she raised her pistol and was immediately wrestled down by a Secret Service agent. Operatives rushed Ford into the capitol building and took Fromme into custody, where they discovered her gun was loaded but the chamber was empty.

Whether she truly wished to shoot Ford was never firmly established. Fromme did admit the act was an attempt to help the man she called “our Christ.” Through her court trial, Fromme planned to name Charles Manson as a character witness, hoping it would allow him to deliver, via television, his cryptic messages of justice through violence. Her request was rejected, and she was sentenced to life in prison.
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Moments after Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme pointed a gun at President Ford, he was rushed into the California capitol building, where he had just given a speech on social violence and gun control.
Gerald R. Ford Library