If you saw a commercial for this week’s episode of Hawaii Five-O, you heard McGarrett claim “no foreign dignatary has ever been assassinated on American soil.”
Is that factually correct? Has a foreign government official ever been assassinated in the United States?
I don’t know the answer but I do know there is an awful lot of wiggle room in several of the terms used like “dignatary” and “assassinated” and “on American soil”. The whole sentence is constructed that way probably as a preconceived defense against questions of its accuracy.
A member of the parliament of Israel was killed in the US. He was born in the US and grew up here but emigrated to Israel.
But he wasn’t in the Knesset when he was assassinated. In fact, his party (which was quite nutty indeed) had been banned entirely years earlier.
This was Hawaii Five-O. I don’t think anyone’s holding them to a high standard of historical accuracy. But it did raise my curiousity.
But then, how many foreign dignitaries are assassinated in *any *other country? Off the top of my head: a German ambassador was killed in China, but that was during the Boxer Rebellion when the place was a nuthouse; the king of Yugoslavia was shot in Paris, so that one counts; one of the planners of the Armenian Genocide was killed in Berlin, Trotksy in Mexico, Samoza in Paraguay; but they each had no official capacity as “dignitaries” at the time, IIRC.
And Trotsky, at least, was assassinated BY his country, or at least at the request thereof.
Franz Ferdinand.
I figured that the government officials you were most likely to find in a foreign country were ambassadors, so I googled for stories about assassinated ambassadors and found there were numerous incidents of this. But I couldn’t find a case of it happening in the United States.
Orlando Letelier was a former Chilean ambassador to the US and government minister who was assassinated by Chilean government agents in Washington DC. He was not currently a “government dignitary,” but he had been one in the past.
I was about to say. I think that caused a bit of a ruckus.
They were asking for it, with a song called “Take Me Out”.
Kennedy was shot in Dallas. That sort of counts, at least to some Texans.
Sarajevo was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, though. Granted, that was kind of what Gavrilo Princip was so ticked off about, but I don’t think it counts as an assassination in a “foreign country” in the way, say, the President of Ruritania being gunned down at the United Nations in New York City would.
I think I found a definite case. Mehmet Baydar, the Turkish Consul General in Los Angeles and Bahadir Demir, his Deputy, were killed by an Armenian named Gourgen Yanikian on January 27, 1973.
There was the guy who’s assassination triggered (or was used as the excuse for) Kristallnacht, Ernst vom Rath, German Secretary of Legation in France, by a Polish refugee.
Are you saying Texans considered Kennedy a foreign dignitary?
Another near miss was the assassination of Ali Akbar Tabatabai near Washington DC in 1980. He was a former Press Attache for the Iranian embassy under the shah and was killed for being critical of the revolution.
I think you’re right. However, Austria got it into its “head” that the Serbian government was behind the assassination, so to them it was an act of war. You can almost see the dominoes falling. WWI, here we come.
The Serbian government was behind the assassination.