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Assassination of the President and of Major Candidates (last updated April 12, 2003) (back to top)
There have been four successful presidential assassinations and two successful assassinations of major presidential candidates in the United States.
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| Date
| President/Candidate
| Attempt's Result
| Assailant, Motive
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| Jan. 30, 1835
| Andrew Jackson
| failed
| Richard Lawrence,
declared insane
|
|
| Apr. 14, 1865
| Abraham Lincoln
| killed
| John Wilkes Booth,
Confederate loyalist
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| July 2, 1881
| James Garfield
| killed
| Charles Guiteau,
disgruntled office-seeker
|
|
| Sept. 6, 1901
| William McKinley
| killed
| Leon Czolgosz,
anarchist
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| Oct. 14, 1912
| Theodore Roosevelt
(former president, then-current candidate)
| wounded
| John Schrank,
declared insane
|
|
| Feb. 15, 1933
| Franklin D. Roosevelt
(president-elect at the time)
| missed
| Guiseppe Zangara,
anarchist
|
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| Nov. 1, 1950
| Harry S Truman
| failed
| Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola,
Puerto Rican independence
|
|
| Nov. 22, 1963
| John F. Kennedy
| killed
| Lee Harvey Oswald,
motive unknown
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| June 4, 1968
| Robert F. Kennedy
(candidate)
| killed
| Sirhan Sirhan,
opposed Kennedy's views toward Israel-Arab conflict
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| May 15, 1972
| George C. Wallace
(candidate)
| wounded
| Arthur Bremer,
motive unknown
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| Sept. 5, 1975
| Gerald Ford
| failed
| Lynette Alice Fromme,
member of "Manson family"
|
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| Sept. 22, 1975
| Gerald Ford
| failed
| Sara Jane Moore,
revolutionary
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| Mar. 30, 1981
| Ronald Reagan
| wounded
| John W. Hinckley, Jr.,
declared insane
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The two most famous assassinations of a sitting president are, of course, the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln (fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth in Washington in 1865) and John F. Kennedy (fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in 1963). The other two were James Garfield, fatally shot in 1881 by a disgruntled would-be political appointee, and William McKinley, who was fatally shot by an anarchist in 1901.
Of these presidents, only JFK was receiving formal protection at the time. The Secret Service, originally an anti-counterfeiting agency that Lincoln had agreed to begin just before being killed, did not assume full-time protection of presidents until 1902, the year after McKinley's death.
Unsuccessful Assassination Attempts
Besides these four assassinations, there have been several publicly-known assassination attempts in the last few decades.
The most violent was the November 1, 1950 attack by two Puerto Rican nationalists on the Blair House, the President's official guest house where Harry S. Truman was staying while the White House was undergoing repairs. Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola stormed the Blair House and shot several members of the White House Police before being stopped (Truman was taking a nap at the time and was not injured). Torresola shot Private Leslie Coffelt of the White House Police, but Coffelt managed to kill Torresola with a single shot before succumbing himself; Coffelt died later that night. Collazo was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death by electrocution; Truman commuted the sentence on July 24, 1952 to life imprisonment just as Puerto Rico's new constitution went into effect.
The next series of known assaults occurred in September 1975, when two women separately tried to kill Gerald Ford a few weeks apart from each other. First was Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme, 26, a follower of Charles Manson who was stopped by Secret Service agents as she tried shooting Ford. Then there was Sara Jane Moore, 45, who apparently had her shot deflected by a disabled Vietnam veteran bystander and then was apprehended by local police.
On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley, 26, shot Ronald Reagan in an attempt to attract the attention of young actress Jodie Foster. Reagan did not instantly know that he had been hit but was rushed to the hospital and was taken into surgery. Despite the injury, neither Reagan nor his staff invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which was designed to coordinate the temporary transition of executive authority in the wake of a president's incapacitation. Reagan survived the surgery and returned to the White House on April 11, but took months to fully recover.
Interestingly enough, Reagan was not the first president to be shot and survive, only the first to do so while in office. Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning in an ultimately unsuccessful to reclaim the White House when he was shot in the chest in 1912 by a man later determined to be insane. As Philip Melanson wrote in his book Politics of Protection, "The bullet probably would have killed the former president if it was not for the fact that it struck his metal glasses case, then was slowed by the 50-page speech that Roosevelt had double-folded in his breast pocket. This may be the only instance in history in which the political system unquestionably benefited from a very long speech." Roosevelt went on with the speech.
Assassination of Presidential Candidates
Moving beyond attacks on presidents while in office, there are several incidents worth noting here. Besides the attack on Teddy Roosevelt, FDR was shot at in 1933 shortly before inaugurated (the shooter missed FDR but did kill Chicago's mayor), presidential candidate Robert K. Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, and presidential candidate George Wallace was shot and paralyzed in May 1972.
Reports have surfaced of assassination plans that did not ultimately put the president's life at immediate risk. In 1981, the Secret Service instituted new protections in lieu of a reported Libyan hit squad sent to kill Reagan (this was also the year that security analysts argued in the Washingtonian magazine that sophisticated assassination techniques meant that the president would not "survive a real-life James Bond movie"). In June 1993, Bill Clinton authorized air strikes against Iraq after reports of an assassination attempt on former President George Bush. Other incidents undoubtedly exist but are not publicly known.
Secret Service's Expanding Mandate
The Secret Service's mandate has expanded in the wake of presidential assassination attempts. The Secret Service assumed full-time protection duties in 1902 in the wake of McKinley's death, and began protecting the president-elect in 1908. After the 1950 attack on Truman, Congress permanently authorized the protection of the president, his immediate family and the president-elect. After JFK's assassination, Congress authorized the lifetime protection of former presidents and their spouses (this was changed in 1997 so that presidents elected from then on would only receive protection for 10 years after office). After the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Congress authorized the protection of major presidential and vice-presidential candidates and nominees in 1968.
Under federal law, the Secret Service protects major presidential and vice-presidential candidates (as decided by the Secretary of the Treasury after consultation with an advisory committee) within 120 days of the general election. Senator Palmer would thus not receive Secret Service protection until late August of the election year, several months after the events of the first season of 24.
Sources: Frederick M. Kaiser, Presidential Assassinations and Assaults: Characteristics and Impact on Protective Procedures, Presidential Studies Quarterly, volume 11, page 545 (fall 1981). Philip Melanson, Politics of Protection (Praeger, 1984). A history of the United States Secret Service is available on-line here. The Secret Service's protection mandate is codified at 18 USC 3056.
Assassinations (last updated May 15, 2002) (back to top)
Officially, the United States does not conduct or permit assassinations. However, this policy is not codified in law, but in an executive order (EO 123333) that the President can change at will and without public notice of the change. In addition, this policy does not define what an assassination is, and the United States has long distinguished assassinations as separate from military operations directed against enemy leaders in the course of self-defense.
Generally, assassinations are considered by international law experts as the murder of a targeted individual for political purposes, usually involving circumstances of a covert or "treacherous" nature. Whether the intended killing of an individual counts as an assassination or as a generally acceptable military operation depends on whether the relevant countries are at peace or war, the forces carrying out the killing, and the means by which the killing is carried out.
During peacetime, the targeted killing of any individual, whether a combatant or not, is generally considerd an assassination and is not permitted. However, countries at peace are still allowed to use military force under the inherent right of self-defense of nations, which is recognized in Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations.
Taking an arguably broad view of its rights under Article 51, the United States has used military force in peacetime situations where a country's actions were considered a direct threat to U.S. citizens or national security. The United States has invoked this right in launching airstrikes against Libya in 1983, invading Panama in 1989, and launching airstrikes against Iraq in 1993, though the United States did not officially target specific individuals in these operations in order to avoid having these actions labeled assassinations that might not be permitted by EO 12333. Some critics say that the United States' view of Article 51 is overbroad, and that it was meant only to allow countries to repel either direct invasions or immediate, overwhelming threats under the Caroline standard established in the 1830s.
During wartime, countries have more freedom to target and attack individuals who are involved in military operations. A combatant is considered a legitimate target at all times, and is denoted as such by his or her uniform, and so a military operation to kill such an individual is considered permissible, unless done through treacherous means. Thus, the successful attack by U.S. military planes on Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto during World War II is generally considered an intended attack on an individual, but not an assassination.
U.S. policy towards assassinations has been shaped since the 1970s by an executive order first promulgated in 1977 by President Gerald Ford and re-implemented by presidents since then. Ford's Executive Order 11905 provided, in part, that "no employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." That order was expanded by President Jimmy Carter beyond "political" assassination to all assassinations, and is now embodied in EO 12333, which was issued by President Ronald Reagan and maintained by subsequent presidents.
Ford's original order came in the wake of a Senate committee investigation into allegations about United States-authorized assassinations. That committee, which was chaired by Senator Frank Church, concluded that the United States was directly linked to the assassination of Rafael Trugillo of the Dominican Republic and to assassination attempts of Fidel Castro of Cuba., and recommended laws that would prohibit assassinations in peacetime. No such laws were ever enacted, probably pre-empted by Ford's executive action.
EO 12333 is open to much interpretation, perhaps intentionally so. It does not define assassination, which gives the United States some flexibility in its actions and allows it to pursue overt military operations even against specific individuals. It also does not define "engaging" or "conspiring," which arguably leaves room for the United States to encourage coup attempts as long as there are no specific plans for the killing of individuals.
The order also has limited constraint on the President, since he can modify or overrule the executive order at any time and, because it involves security matters, he does not need to notify the public of the change. The president would not have such flexibility to lift the constraint on his power if the ban on assassinations was embodied in a law rather than an executive order.
Effectively, the President has several options if he does wish to order the killing of a foreign leader. He can ask Congress to declare war, he can construe Article 51 to authorize the use of military forces in self-defense, he can narrowly interpret EO 12333 to allow actions as long as specific plans to kill individuals are not involved, and he can modify or overrule EO 12333 unilaterally. His ability to order the killing of a foreign leader visiting the United States, however, might be limited by other factors such as the general policy of not using military forces in the United States, which is given some effect by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
Sources: W. Hays Parks, Executive Order 12333 and Assassination, Army Lawyer (1989). Stephen T. Hosmer, Operations against Enemy Leaders (Rand, 2001). Lt. Commander Patricia Zengel, Assassination and the Law of Armed Conflict, Military Law Review, Volume 134, Page 123 (Fall 1991). Bert Brandenburg, The Legality of Assassination as an Aspect of Foreign Policy, Virginia Journal of International Law, Volume 27, Page 655 (1987). Boyd M. Johnson, III, Executive Order 12,333: The Permissibility of an American Assassination of a Foreign Leader, Cornell International Law Journal, Volume 25, Page 401 (1992).
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