A look at Americas long history of presidential assassination attempts

On March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan was walking out of the Washington Hilton Hotel where he had just addressed labor leaders when the mentally ill son of a wealthy Texas energy executive stepped from the crowd and emptied a six shot revolver at him.

The gunman, John W. Hinckley Jr., 25, hoped to impress then-child actress Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed. His bullets struck three people, and a ricochet hit Reagan, as police and Secret Service agents piled on Hinckley in a melee on the pavement.

Reagan was rushed to the hospital and survived.

Before Saturday’s wounding of former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Reagan was the latest among top politicians and cultural figures who have been victims of a strain of violence rooted in American discourse going back more than 150 years.

There have been at least 15 direct assaults on U.S. presidents, presidents-elect and presidential candidates alone; five of them resulted in deaths, according to the Congressional Research Service.

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The first attempted presidential assassination, according to the U.S. Senate history office, came on Jan. 30, 1835.

A troubled, unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence armed himself that day with two pistols and hid behind a pillar in the U.S. Capitol to ambush President Andrew Jackson.

Jackson, 67, was attending a funeral in the Capitol, and as he approached, Lawrence pointed a single-shot derringer at the president’s heart and pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a bang and a cloud of smoke but had misfired.

Jackson lunged at Lawrence with his cane. Lawrence pulled his second pistol and squeezed the trigger. But that misfired, too. Bystanders pounced on Lawrence, who was later judged insane, and rushed Jackson away.

There would be more attempts on the lives of U.S. presidents, and four presidential assassinations — Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 and John F. Kennedy in 1963.

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In 1975, President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in a month.

In each case, the violence shook the country as Americans struggled to make sense of what had occurred.

On Sept. 5, 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson cult, tried to shoot Ford outside the California Capitol in Sacramento. She was about an arms length away. But her gun had no bullet in its chamber when she pulled the trigger.

On Sept. 22, 1975, Sara Jane Moore, a self-described radical, fired a gun at Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, but missed.

On Nov. 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman at Blair House, where the president was staying in D.C. One of the gunmen was killed, along with a White House policeman. Truman, who remained inside, was unhurt.

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On Feb. 15, 1933, an assassin nearly killed President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt at a rally in Miami. An unemployed bricklayer, Guiseppe Zangara, who said he hated officials and rich people, fired five times. Roosevelt was unharmed, but the bullets wounded four people and killed Chicago’s mayor, Anton Cermak.

Oct. 14, 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee for a nonconsecutive third term in office when he was shot by a mentally ill bar owner from New York City named John Schrank as Roosevelt emerged from a hotel.

But the bullet was slowed by a thick copy of a speech he was planning to give and an eyeglass case Roosevelt had in a pocket. Roosevelt was staggered but went on to deliver the speech that night. The bullet stayed in his body for the rest of his life. Schrank died in a mental institution in 1943.

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On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in Memphis by an escaped convict James Earl Ray.

Two months later, on June 5, presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was slain in Los Angeles.

Four years after his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, was killed in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, Robert Kennedy was shot in a hotel in Los Angeles while campaigning for office.

Robert Kennedy was shot in the head by a Christian Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, as Kennedy walked near a kitchen in the hotel where he had spoken. Sirhan was angry over Kennedy’s support for Israel.

Sirhan was sentenced to death, but the sentence was later changed to life in prison. Last year, his latest appeal for parole was denied.

Kennedy’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is running for president as an independent against Trump and President Biden and has said he previously requested and was denied Secret Service protection.

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The chaos that unfolded after Trump was attacked Saturday was reminiscent of the shooting of George C. Wallace, a presidential candidate and the segregationist governor of Alabama in May 1972.

Wallace was making campaign promises to a crowd of roughly 1,000 people at the Laurel Shopping Center, northeast of D.C., when he was shot. The assailant, Arthur Herman Bremer, a 21-year-old from Milwaukee, was said to be working alone.

Wallace was partially paralyzed for the rest of his life. Bremer served 35 years in prison and was released in 2007.

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