After President Abraham Lincoln was shot during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre, several doctors who were in the audience and also enjoying the play rushed into the Presidential Box and began attending to the President. It was clear that Lincoln's wounds were almost certainly mortal, but the doctors still attempted to save his life. Originally thinking that the President had been stabbed, they soon found that he had been shot behind the left ear and the bullet -- a 43.75 mm ball which had been fired by John Wilkes Booth's .44 caliber Derringer -- had sliced through Lincoln's brain and lodged behind his eye sockets without exiting the skull. When Lincoln's breathing became more shallow, Dr. Charles Leale used his finger to remove blood clots from the wound, which immediately improved Lincoln's respiration.
The doctors decided to move Lincoln from the theater, but felt that the President's condition was far too weak to risk taking him back to the White House, which was several blocks away. A nearby saloon was considered just as unseemly of a place for the President to spend his last hours and likely die in as a theatre, so Lincoln was carried across the 10th Street to William Petersen's boarding house. When they brought Lincoln into the boarding house, they realized that the 6'4" President was too tall for the bed they found for him, so they laid him diagonally upon it.
It was obvious that Lincoln could not survive his wound, so the attending doctors simply tried to keep him comfortable in his final hours by clearing the blood clots in his skull that caused his breathing to become more labored. Throughout the night, the President never regained consciousness, but witnesses said that he looked peaceful as his life was drawing to a close. The only visible evidence of his mortal wound were the bloody pillows that his head rested on and the raccoon-like bruising around Lincoln's eye sockets due to the orbital bones fractured by Booth's bullet after it passed through his brain. Nine hours after he was shot, Lincoln died in Petersen's Boarding House at the age of 56.
Shortly after the President was pronounced dead, his body was placed in a coffin and transferred back to the White House in a carriage. Just a few hours later, one of the residents of Petersen's Boarding House, Julius Ulke, took a photograph (seen at the beginning of this post) of the room and the bed -- including a pillow soaked with the President's blood -- where Lincoln had died earlier that morning.
The room in Petersen's Boarding House where Abraham Lincoln died, pictured in 2007.
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This is one of my favorite things about Leon Czolgosz and the news surrounding him. This newspaper called him "cunning" for the way he concealed his gun. How did he do it? He put a fucking handkerchief over it.
This newspaper called him cunning because he had the brilliant idea to put a fucking handkerchief over his gun
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Residents look on from windows and stand in the street across from 173 Brook Ave. in the Bronx, November 1, 1950, after word of an attempted assassination of President Truman in Washington the same day had reached the neighborhood. Oscar Collazo, 37, who lived in the 173 Brook Ave. tenement, was one of two gunmen shot outside Truman's Blair House residence.* Collazo's wife identified her husband, who was wounded, as a member of the revolutionary Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.
*The White House was being renovated at the time.
Photo: John Lent for the AP
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czolgosz working man born in the middle of michigan woke with a thought and away he ran to the panamerican exposition in buffalo!!!!!
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Everyone knows about Lincoln and Garfield and McKinley and Kennedy, the quartet of America Presidents who fell victim to assassination. Even the most casual observers of Presidential history can probably name the four Presidents who were murdered while in office, and many even know the names of the four assassins responsible for their deaths: Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz, and Oswald.
There have also been quite a few (in)famous unsuccessful assassination attempts, where Presidents barely escaped with their lives, that many Americans are familiar with, including (but not limited to):
•Richard Lawrence's miraculously unlucky double misfire on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in 1835 which left Andrew Jackson unharmed but resulted in Lawrence -- who would be found not guilty by reason of insanity -- getting viciously pummeled by the cane-wielding President Jackson until Davy Crockett intervened to save the would-be assassin from the 67-year-old President.
•The shooting of former President Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee as he sought another term in the White House during the 1912 Presidential election. Despite being shot in the chest, Roosevelt decided to go ahead and deliver his campaign speech before being taken to the hospital where doctors discovered that the bullet lodged inside of TR had first passed through a case for his eyeglasses and the thick pages of his speech in his jacket's pocket, lessening the damage from the gunshot.
•The attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami in February 1933, just seventeen days in before FDR's Inauguration, which wounded four people and killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.
•The ill-fated 1950 attempt by Puerto Rican nationalists to storm Blair House (the temporary Presidential residence during the renovation of the White House) and kill President Harry S. Truman as he was napping. Truman was not hurt, but a White House Police Officer and one of the two assassins were killed during the wild shootout.
•President Gerald Ford's trouble with two California women who separately tried to kill him in Sacramento and then San Francisco just two weeks apart in September 1975.
•The shocking shooting of President Ronald Reagan in broad daylight from just a few yards away as he exited the Washington Hilton following a speech in March 1981, which left four people wounded and very nearly killed the 70-year-old Reagan just two months into his Presidency.
But what is amazing is that, in this age of instant information and the constant regurgitation of media coverage via the 24-hour news cycle, very few Americans know that there is a man sitting in prison in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia for attempting to assassinate President George W. Bush. What even less Americans realize is how close Vladimir Arutyunian actually came to accomplishing his task.
On May 10, 2005, President Bush spoke to a large crowd at an outdoor rally in Tbilisi, Georgia. In one of the photos at the top of this post, Bush is seen speaking from the stage in Tbilisi. The other photo is of Arutyunian holding a plaid handkerchief close to his chest. Wrapped in that handkerchief was a live hand grenade.
As President Bush spoke, nearby sat his wife, Laura, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and the Dutch-born First Lady of Georgia, Sandra Roelofs. They had no idea that, during the speech, Arutyunian tossed his handkerchief-wrapped grenade towards the stage. The grenade landed just 61 feet away from President Bush, well within range of causing serious injury, if not death.
Of course, the grenade did not explode. At first, it was thought to be a dud, but upon closer inspection it was discovered that the only reason the grenade didn't explode was because Arutyunian's handkerchief -- used to conceal the explosive as he stood in the crowd -- was wrapped too tightly around the grenade, preventing the firing pin from deploying. A Georgian security official noticed the grenade, grabbed it quickly and disposed of it as Arutyunian disappeared into the massive crowd and President Bush continued speaking.
After Bush's speech was over and once it was recognized that the President had only narrowly escaped a legitimate attempted assassination, Georgian police worked closely with the United States Secret Service, the FBI, and the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the assassination attempt and find the would-be assassin who seemingly melted into Tbilisi after his brazen, albeit unsuccessful attempt on Bush's life. Using DNA evidence and tips from informants, the Georgian police ultimately tracked down Arutyunian two months later. When they went to arrest Arutyunian, a gunfight broke out and Arutyunian killed Zurab Kvlividze, a top counterterrorism official with Georgia's Interior Ministry. Arutyunian was wounded before finally being captured with the assistance of Georgian Special Forces.
The Georgians tried Arutyunian on the murder of the police officer, as well as the attempted assassinations of President Bush and President Saakshvili. Arutyunian was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. A federal grand jury in the United States also indicted Arutyunian on the federal charge of the attempted assassination of the President of the United States, which is a felony. The U.S., however, has not attempted nor has any potential plans to extradite the failed assassin from Georgia, and Arutyunian will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in a Georgian prison.
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^^^ That cartoon indirectly reminds me that we're nearing the 4th anniversary of Trump's terribly botched response to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
All those MAGA zombies who wax nostalgic about what a golden age the Trump administration was conveniently forget about everything that happened after January of 2020; that includes the Trump recession and the need for stimulus payments which led to a spike in inflation.
As for legal immunity, Trump is making the case that a president could order the assassination of a political rival. Seriously.
US president could have a rival assassinated and not be criminally prosecuted, Trump’s lawyer argues
If the courts bizarrely rule in Trump's favor on that, there's nothing legally to stop President Biden from ordering a drone strike on Mar-a-Lago. 😆
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Quién era Fernando Villavicencio, el candidato a la presidencia de Ecuador asesinado días antes de las elecciones
Anti-corruption figure killed days before election amid sharp rise in violent and organised crime
The Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio has been shot dead as he left a campaign event in Quito, days before an election where the central issue is the rise violence and crime.
Local media first reported his death, which Ecuador’s president Guillermo Lasso later confirmed on…
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