There have been many assassination attempts and plots on Presidents of the United States; there have been over 20 known attempts to kill sitting and former Presidents as well as Presidents-elect. Four attempts have resulted in sitting Presidents being killed: Abraham Lincoln (the 16th President), James A. Garfield (the 20th President), William McKinley (the 25th President) and John F. Kennedy (the 35th President). Two other Presidents were injured in attempted assassinations: former President Theodore Roosevelt (the 26th President), and then sitting President Ronald Reagan (the 40th President).
Although attempts have been made to prove that most American assassinations were politically motivated actions, carried out by rational men, not all such assassinations and attempts have been undertaken for truly political reasons. Some have been perpetrated by people of questionable mental stability, and a few were judged legally insane. Since the successor to the presidency, the Vice President of the United States, has usually been, and now always is of the same political party as the President, the assassination of the President is unlikely to result in major policy changes. This may explain why political groups typically do not make such attacks.
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“I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list.”
—Linda Pastan (b. 1932)
“A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.”
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“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The Republican Vice Presidential Candidate ... asks you to place him a heartbeat from the Presidency.”
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“[Allegory] is a flight by which the human wit attempts at one and the same time to investigate two objects, and consequently is fitted only to the most exalted geniuses.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“Nothing aids which may not also injure us.
Fire serves us well, but he who plots to burn
His neighbor’s roof arms his hands with fire.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)