The Assassination Attempt on President Truman

Puerto Rico is NOT a place you normally think about when you want to discuss violent uprisings, massacres, and plots to assassinate the president of the United States, but the Puerto Rico of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a much different place than it is today.


In 1898, under the authorization of the Treaty of Paris ending the Spanish American War, the United States took possession of the territory of Puerto Rico. Many American officials were pleased with the new territory that could serve as a defense point, naval port and coaling station. It also didn’t hurt that the island was covered with sugar plantations.

Unfortunately, several natural disasters hit the island in the years that followed making life very hard for many of the people. The Jones Act of 1917 gave Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship which meant they could be drafted for service during World War I, yet they could not vote in presidential elections and did not have representation in Congress. Discrimination during World War I was rampant, and for many of the poorest Puerto Ricans the gulf between rich and poor was constantly growing wider. In the years that followed the Great Depression hit the island very hard. It is easy to see why many Puerto Ricans blamed the United States for their troubles.

Events like the Ponce Massacre occurred in 1937 where many Puerto Ricans were protesting wanting change…change of any kind. Soldiers answering to the governor appointed by the United States opened fire on armed and unarmed folks….killing 19 and wounding over 200. Tensions mounted when it was discovered some of the wounded were shot in the back as they were moving away from the soldiers.

President Truman appointed the first Puerto Rican born governor in 1946, but in 1948 Ley de la Mordaza or the Gag Law was passed making it illegal to display the Puerto Rican flag or sing patriotic songs.

Pedro Albizu Campos, a Harvard graduate and one of the Puerto Rican soldiers who had experienced racism during World War I was the leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. He called for independence using violence, if necessary. Many Puerto Ricans thought his views were a bit extreme, but they shared his feelings toward the United States.

At the end of October, 1950, several uprisings occurred for three days across Puerto Rico including the town of Jayuya. Marshall law was eventually declared after the United States used infantry, artillery and bombers against the protesters in Jayuya.

Two supporters of Campos wanting independence, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, felt if they could get the attention of the American people they might gain sympathy and support for the independence movement in Puerto Rico. Amazingly, they felt if they killed President Truman they could get the much needed attention.

Torresola, a skilled gunman, and Collazo had met up in New York City. Later, after they had hatched their assassination plot Torresola taught Collazo how to use a gun. Blair House, located across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House was the location for their plot to kill President Truman.

The Truman family had taken up residence at Blair House while the White House was undergoing extensive renovations from 1948-1952. The main part of the mansion was found to be structurally unsound…..so unsound the floors literally swayed to and fro. One resource states a leg of Margaret Truman’s piano broke through the floor in what is today the Private dining room, and the plaster in a corner of the East Room was sagging as much as 18 inches.

Torresola and Collazo’s plot involved approaching Blair House from opposite directions, overpowering any police or guards they came in contact with and then shooting their way into the house.

Thankfully, the whole attempt was fumbled from the very start. Collazo failed to cock his gun and nothing happened when he tried to shoot a guard. After frantically attempting to get the gun to fire Collazo shot the officer in the knee. Other officers opened fire on Collazo and struck him in the head and arm.

Torresola, on the other hand, approached a guard at the information booth outside the front door of Blair House and fired four shots at close range killing White House policeman, Leslie Coffelt. Another White House policeman, Joseph Downs was also shot by Torresola, but managed to get inside the house and close the door blocking the assassin’s way inside. Luckily before he died, Leslie Coffelt managed to fire the shot that eventually caused Torresola’s death.

President Truman had been taking a nap on the second floor of Blair House and awoke to gunfire. It is reported in many sources he actually looked out the upstairs window in time to see Torresola reloading his gun before Coffelt shot him.

President Truman didn’t miss a beat in his schedule because of the assassination attempt. One hour after Torresola and Collazo attempted to kill him, President Truman was on his way to Arlington National Cemetery for a wreath laying ceremony as the video below advises.




In the days following the assassination attempt Collazo was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life by President Truman. Truman also asked Coffelt’s widow to visit Puerto Rico and receive the condolences of the people there.

Puerto Rico experienced rapid industrialization during the 1950s mainly due to Operation Bootstrap which funneled millions of American dollars into the Puerto Rican economy moving it rapidly from mainly an agricultural economy to a very industrialized island.

In 1979, during the Carter administration Collazo was pardoned, and he returned to Puerto Rico.

Smallpox and the Adams

I posted earlier on both Washington and Jefferson in relation to smallpox. In my current reading (First Family by Joseph Ellis as noted earlier), I was reminded that John Adams, as well as most of his family, underwent innoculation as well, which was a major decision at the time, so I decided to post on that.

John Adams was inoculated during a Boston outbreak of smallpox right before his marriage to Abigail:

At the time of the epidemic, John Adams was a young attorney living in Braintree, about 14 miles south of Boston. He traveled up from Braintree and crossed over to Castle William to take advantage of the variolation treatment. During his two-week stay on the island, he wrote letters to Miss Abigail Smith (soon to be Mrs. Abigail Adams). As an old man, he recollected the episode in his autobiography.

Adams shared a room with nine other men. In preparation for the inoculation, the men were given medicines to make them vomit. In his letters to Abigail, John made the experience seem jolly for a while. According to his April 7 letter (http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/): “We took turns to be sick and to laugh. When my Companion was sick I laughed at him, and when I was sick he laughed at me. Once however and once only we were both sick together, and then all Laughter and good Humour deserted the Room.”

When we think of this, we think of a shot, but this was much more complex and more risky:
The usual process of variolation involved making a cut in the arm of a healthy person and then applying to it scabs collected from the sores of a person with smallpox, according to The Invisible Fire: The Story of Mankind’s Triumph over the Ancient Scourge of Smallpox, by Joel N. Shurkin. Adams’ description suggests a variation of this. He wrote on April 13: “They [the doctors] took their Launcetts and with their Points divided the skin for about a Quarter of an Inch and just suffering the Blood to appear, buried a Thread about (half) a Quarter of an Inch long in the Channell. A little Lint was then laid over the scratch and a Piece of a Ragg pressed on, and then a Bandage bound over all—my Coat and waistcoat put on, and I was bid to go where I get and do what I pleased.”

After variolation, Adams and his companions were quarantined to await their sickness, normally a mild case of smallpox, which would provide lifetime immunity from the disease. Adams wrote to Abigail that the room was equipped with a card table, “Chequer Bord,” flute and violin to distract the men while they waited for the disease to take its course.

Variolation was risky. According to Public Health, Its Promise for the Future by Wilson George Smillie, 47 people out of 4,977 innoculated—about 1 out of every 100—died during that epidemic. Still, variolation was safer than getting the disease the natural way. Of 669 people who “naturally” contracted the disease during that epidemic, 124 did not survive—about 18 of every 100. Those who survived could be horribly scarred. In his April 17 letter, Adams described one man: “His face is torn to pieces, and is as rugged as Braintree Commons.”

Now during the Revolution, Adams was usually away, but Abigail and the kids were close to Boston, all that fighting, and the smallpox that ran through both camps and so this was her major concern in July of 1776:
Independence was just one of many things on her mind that month. Her main concern was smallpox. She wanted to undergo variolation, a risky procedure of that time, to give her immunity from the deadly disease. She also wanted to see to it that her four children—ages 11, 9, 6 and 4—received the treatment, which involved making an incision and placing on the wound scabs from someone who had the disease. Occasionally the person undergoing such treatment would get a full-blown case of the disease and die. But usually, the person suffered a weakened form of the disease and survived, emerging with a lifetime immunity.

Abigail's mother wouldn't let her get inoculated with John when he did (she wanted to join him) and now she had four children to worry about. So Abigail underwent treatment with the kids, while John was away:

The physician overseeing the treatment for Abigail and her children did not subscribe to the practices of earlier physicians, who demanded that patients endure ten days of self-induced vomiting and other torments as preparation. Still he did prescribe some unpleasant medicines. It was not easy for the children: "We have enough upon our hands in the morning," Abigail wrote. "The Little folks are very sick then and puke every morning but after that are very comfortable."

The treatment was not easy and there was major worry for Charles, who got it the "natural" way, which was more dangerous:

...the smallpox treatment was not going as well as hoped. Abigail was still waiting to come down with the mild sickness and only one of the four children had certain signs of infection. But she noted to John that she was starting to feel miserable, hoping that was an indication: "A most Excruciating pain in my head and every Limb and joint I hope portends a speedy Eruption . . ."

Eventually one of the children had to be inoculated three times before it took. Out of frustration, she fed one son a little wine hoping that would somehow stimulate inoculation. When six-year-old Charles finally got the disease, it was not through inoculation, but the "natural" way, which meant it could be especially bad, even deadly. The boy was delirious for two days.

Charles did recover and Abigail left Boston on September 2.

Sorenson Died

First, did you all vote? I don't care who you all voted for, but I do care that you got out and exercised that right to vote!


Theodore Sorenson, one of JFK's speechwriter, died at 82. He was responsible for some of the Kennedy adminstration's best statements:
Some of Kennedy's most memorable speeches, from his inaugural address to his vow to place a man on the moon, resulted from such close collaborations with Sorensen that scholars debated who wrote what. He had long been suspected as the real writer of the future president's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Profiles in Courage," an allegation Sorensen and the Kennedys emphatically — and litigiously — denied.

They were an odd but utterly compatible duo, the glamorous, wealthy politician from Massachusetts and the shy wordsmith from Nebraska, described by Time magazine in 1960 as "a sober, deadly earnest, self-effacing man with a blue steel brain." But as Sorensen would write in "Counselor," the difference in their lifestyles was offset by the closeness of their minds: Each had a wry sense of humor, a dislike of hypocrisy, a love of books and a high-minded regard for public life.

Kennedy called him "my intellectual blood bank" and the press frequently referred to Sorensen as Kennedy's "ghostwriter," especially after the release of "Profiles in Courage." Presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln saw it another way: "Ted was really more shadow than ghost, in the sense that he was never really very far from Kennedy."

Sorensen's brain of steel was never needed more than in October 1962, with the U.S. and the Soviet Union on the brink of nuclear annihilation over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Kennedy directed Sorensen and Bobby Kennedy, the administration's attorney general, to draft a letter to Nikita Khrushchev, who had sent conflicting messages, first conciliatory, then confrontational.

The carefully worded response — which ignored the Soviet leader's harsher statements and included a U.S. concession involving U.S. weaponry in Turkey — was credited with persuading the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba and with averting war between the superpowers.

Sorensen considered his role his greatest achievement.

"That's what I'm proudest of," he once told the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald. "Never had this country, this world, faced such great danger. You and I wouldn't be sitting here today if that had gone badly."