The title saya it – attempts against a sitting president don’t count.
Yes. Someone took a shot at Roosevelt during the campaign for the 1932 election and killed Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago who was on the platform.
Actually I was slightly wrong. Roosevelt had been elected by not yet sworn in and was President-elect when the incident happened.
RFK? Or was that during primaries and he wasn’t quite the chosen candidate yet?
Bobby Kennedy and George Wallace were both shot while running for president. Neither was his party’s nominee yet, although Kennedy was almost certain to get the Democratic Party nomination when he was murdered in 1968.
There was also the plot to kill Bush I in 1993. This is what c-span (not noted for their tin-foil hattery) says
Going through the biographies at whitehouse.gov, I can’t find any presidents that died through violence except the ones assassinated in office. There aren’t any mentions of post-administration attacks, though an Iraqi plot against Bush41 sounds plausible. I’m sure the Secret Service intercepts all kinds of nastiness aimed at former presidents that we never hear about.
I’m pretty sure Kennedy was killed the day he won the California primary, which basically clinched the nomination for him.
Theodore Roosevelt was shot while campaigning in 1912 as the Progressive (or “Bull Moose”) Party’s candidate for President. He finished the speech that he was going to deliver before he sought medical attention.
Huey Long was a non-candidate in name only. Someone of note said the only way he was not going to run was if someone killed him. And someone did.
He hadn’t. The majority of the votes at the 1968 Democratic convention were controlled by party bosses, and were not decided in primaries.
Odds are, even if Kennedy hadn’t been assasinated, these bosses still wouldn’t have given Kennedy their votes, and Humphrey still would have won the nomination.
Bobby Kennedy entered the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination very late in the game, only AFTER Lyndon Johnson withdrew. Kennedy had very, very little chance of winning the nomination, as even his closest friends and advisors (like Dick Goodwin) admit.
Indeed, Eugene McCarthy resented the hell out of Kennedy for lacking the cojones to make a stand against LBJ until after McCarthy had shown Johnson’s vulnerability.
Was Larry Flynt running for office when he got shot? I can’t remember what he was up to at that time.
There have been three assassination attempts against major, serious, declared, non-incumbent presidential candidates:
Theodore Roosevelt, 1912 (slightly wounded)
Bobby Kennedy, 1968 (killed)
George Wallace, 1972 (seriously wounded)
Franklin Roosevelt was shot at and missed as President-elect in 1933. Huey Long was shot and killed in 1935, and was a possible presidential candidate in 1936, but he would have faced an uphill battle against an incumbent of his own party.
Darn, I must’ve skipped the Teddy bio. Shoddy research on my part.