Are there certain types of Presidents who get assassinated?

To the NSA reviewer reading this post, no actual Presidents were harmed in the writing of this post.

I’ve seen several people saying that Barack Obama is more likely to be a target for assassination because he’s half black. Is there any truth to this? Not just in the sense of the President’s race but overall.

I’ve always assumed that potential assassinations were living in another world from the rest of us. Their motivation is completely internal. If somebody is going to shoot the President in 2010, it won’t matter if it’s John McCain or Barack Obama. He’ll be shooting the President because he’s trying to get a date with Hillary Duff or get people to spay their pets or because he deciphered a secret message in a Seinfeld rerun. He’ll barely notice who the person is he’s shooting at.

Am I right or wrong? Are assassination attempts pretty much random occurences? You get shot if somebody happens to go crazy and then get lucky when you’re President? Or are there factors that make a President more likely to be the target of an assassination attempt?

IMO, the greatest danger to Obama isn’t that he has black blood, it’s that he’s charismatic. For some reason charismatic people seem to draw the nutcases. JFK, RFK, MLK and Reagan all had charisma in spades.

I know there have been attempts on most of our presidents at least since JFK, but it seems that when bullet strikes flesh it’s the charismatic people who get hit.

Gerald Ford?

Lincoln didn’t exactly have a big fan club in the South. But that was unusual in that there was an actual conspiracy that involved many people, and multiple targets.

There was an assassination attempt against Truman by Puerto Rican nationalists.

He was included in the second paragraph of my post when I said that most presidents since JFK have had attempts made on their lives.

McKinley was shot by an anarchist. It probably wouldn’t have mattered who he was personally or politically, it was the fact he was President that mattered. And Garfield was shot by a nutcase who wanted to be an Ambassador despite having no qualifications for such an important job. Same deal, really.

It is true, however, that a substantial portion of presidential assassinations — and attempts — are against white men.

According to the film In the Line of Fire (I know, I know, but this seems like the kind of detail a technical adviser would tell them) the President gets 1400 death threats a year no matter who he is. I have read that there is a certain amount of danger involved in any occupation that deals with the public, from President to store clerk, since that person tends to become a focal point for anger.

FWIW,
Rob

There are certain types of assassins who actually succeed.

Whatever factors one considers for Reagan must also be accounted for in Carter - John Hinckley stalked Carter before shifting his attention to Reagan.

I recommend U.E. Baughman’s memoir Secret Service Chief. He was head of the Service from 1945-1962. Though it’s clearly self-censored (no mention of JFK’s hookers, for example), it has interesting chapters of the variety of kooks the Service routinely intercepts. Baughman’s take was that it’s wasn’t the man they were after but the office, since “President” represents the pinnacle of whatever malicious authority the schizophrenics believe is ruining their lives.

Christian white men and, with the exception of Kennedy, Protesant Christian white men.

100% of all the Catholics who have ever been President have been assassinated! It’s clearly more dangerous to be a Catholic in that job.

Seems I’ve read somewhere recently (alas, not in the book I thought it was in) that Leon Czolgosz’ motivation was more “mental” than usually stated. Perhaps he was an “Anarchist” for what seems to be the reason Lee Oswald was a “Marxist”: it offered an explanation for his crappy life, and offered some hope that things would get better.

I’m not comfortable with such assassins being labeled “nuts”. While it’s clear that, in some respects, they were marching to their own drummer, their deviance from the norm was hardly enough to warrant locking them up.
So far as Obama goes, I’ve no doubt there are still enough White Supremacists around that he is at a bit more risk than a(n all-)white president would be.

There is perhaps some difference. Garfield was shot by a guy who had deluded himself into thinking that he was responsible for Garfield winning the election, and therefore, owed a job. He did have some animus against Garfield personally, on however illogical a basis.

Blair House (used by Truman for much of his presidency, as the White House was being renovated). A brief gun battle outside the residence ensued when two PR nationalists attempted to storm it. PR nationalists also made two attempts on Eisenhower, according to his former press secretary. In one instance, they apparently plotted to lob hand grenades into an Eisenhower motorcade. The grenades were intercepted before they were delivered to the assassins.

Attempts by organized groups are more likely to be caught wind of beforehand, of course.

All presidents since Kennedy have had assassination attempts against them with the exception of LBJ :dubious:. I am friends with a Secret Service family with the father retired from presidential detail and one of the sons doing it now. It is incredibly stressful work and people on presidential detail tend to develop various problems. Assassination attempts on any modern president come in daily. They tend to be just piss poor plans and threats from random lunatics but the SS takes all of them very, very seriously but a lot of them aren’t attempted by incompetent people. Those are the ones that are hard to deal with. The SS really does not like assassination attempts to be publicized It can create a frenzy and make them look bad.

Here is a list of presidential assassination attempts. The general public does not even remember most of them:

Man, I’ve just been reading about Guiteau. What a tuna-brain.

He wrote a speech in support of Ulysses S. Grant called “Grant vs. Hancock”, which he revised to “Garfield vs. Hancock” after Garfield won the Republican nomination in the 1880 presidential campaign. Ultimately, he changed little more than the title (hence mixing up Garfield’s achievements with those of Grant).

Ah yes, I remember it well — that emotional day when Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to James Garfield, at Appomattox.

Not many people know that.

The speech was delivered at most two times […], but Guiteau believed himself to be largely responsible for Garfield’s victory. He insisted he should be awarded an ambassadorship for his vital assistance, first asking for Vienna, then deciding that he would rather be posted in Paris.

Now that’s versatility for you. Fluent in both German and French, I gather. Such a shame our government couldn’t find a place for him.

His personal requests to the President and to cabinet members […] were continually rejected; on May 14, 1881, he was finally told personally never to return by Secretary of State James G. Blaine.

“Now that the telephone has been invented, Mr. Guiteau, let me just say: Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Guiteau then decided that God had commanded him to kill the ungrateful President. […] On one occasion, he trailed Garfield to the railway station as the President was seeing his wife off to a beach resort in New Jersey, but he decided to shoot him later, as Mrs. Garfield was in poor health and he didn’t want to upset her.

Well, there’s a gentleman for you. When you’re blowing away a lady’s husband with a revolver, you don’t want to risk splattering his blood and guts on her person. This was the Victorian Era after all. For the civilized assassin, it just wasn’t done.

Lincoln wasn’t a Christian.

Well, there you go.

The wiki article only seems to have a one sentence treatment of another interesting aspect of the case - a defense attempted by Guiteau:

The doctors probably helped make that tack somewhat plausible by making public announcements after the shooting that the president’s wounds were not serious, and that he should recover fully. Then, they got to work on their patient …