Last Saturday a gunman attempted to shoot and kill an ex-president of the United States….but I have given that all the ink it will get for now.
Trump is something special….an ex-president running for the lost office once again, right?
Come on guys! You knew I could not let this incident go by without a little history lesson involved, right?
Not hardly!
Trump is not the only or the first ex-president to be targeted by an assassin’s bullet…..as much as he would love to be unique.
The year is 1912 in Milwaukee (sound familiar?) and the ex-president is Teddy Roosevelt….
Theodore Roosevelt’s opening line was hardly remarkable for a presidential campaign speech: “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible.” His second line, however, was a bombshell.
“I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.”
Clearly, Roosevelt had buried the lede. The horrified audience in the Milwaukee Auditorium on October 14, 1912, gasped as the former president unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” the wounded candidate assured them. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bullet-riddled, 50-page speech.
Holding up his prepared remarks, which had two big holes blown through each page, Roosevelt continued. “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 I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”
Only two days before, the editor-in-chief of The Outlook characterized Roosevelt as “an electric battery of inexhaustible energy,” and for the next 90 minutes, the 53-year-old former president proved it. “I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap,” he claimed.
Few could doubt him. Although his voice weakened and his breath shortened, Roosevelt glared at his nervous aides whenever they begged him to stop speaking or positioned themselves around the podium to catch him if he collapsed. Only with the speech completed did he agree to visit the hospital.
The shooting had occurred just after 8 p.m. as Roosevelt entered his car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel. As he stood up in the open-air automobile and waved his hat with his right hand to the crowd, a flash from a Colt revolver 5 feet away lit up the night. The candidate’s stenographer quickly put the would-be assassin in a half-nelson and grabbed the assailant’s right wrist to prevent him from firing a second shot.
https://www.history.com/news/shot-in-the-chest-100-years-ago-teddy-roosevelt-kept-on-talking
You see Trump is not the first ex-president running for office again to have been shot while campaigning to regain the White House.
Personally I liked the message that Teddy had with his Bull Moose Party we could use some of those progressive ideas today.
Know your history.
Be Smart!
Learn Stuff!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”