American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out That Stopped It

American Gunfight\ The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out that Stopped It \ \ By Stephen Hunter \ Simon & Schuster\ Copyright © 2005 Stephen Hunter\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 0743260686 \ \ \ INTRODUCTION\ On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican Nationalists named Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola pulled German automatic pistols and attempted to storm Blair House, at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., where the president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, was at that moment -- 2:20 P.M. on an abnormally hot Wednesday -- taking a nap in his underwear. They were opposed by a Secret Service security detail led by Special Agent Floyd M. Boring, consisting of Special Agents Vincent P. Mroz and Stewart G. Stout, Jr., and White House police officers Leslie W. Coffelt, Joseph O. Davidson, Joseph H. Downs, and Donald T. Birdzell. In the brief exchange -- under forty seconds -- between twenty-nine and thirty-one shots were fired in an area about ninety feet by twenty feet, though the exchange broke into two actions at either end of the property, where the ranges were much shorter. When it was over one man was dead, another was dying, and two more were seriously injured.\ The story was of course gigantic news -- for about a week. What's remarkable about it is not how big a story it was but how quickly it went away. Today, few Americans even remember it, or if they do, they have it mixed up with a later event. In 1954, four Puerto Rican Nationalists pulled guns and shot up Congress. Soon enough the two stories melded in the U.S. folk imagination under the rubric of stereotype: hot-tempered Latin revolutionaries, undisciplined, crazy even, pursuing a dream that made no sense at all, Puerto Rican independence.\ Even those few North Americans who could distinguish between the two events couldn't prevent the actual thing itself from eroding, losing its detail and meaning and settling sooner rather than later into a kind of comforting folk narrative. For Americans, it always encompassed the following points:\ The grievances Oscar and Griselio were expressing were fundamentally absurd: Puerto Rico had been given the gift of United States culture and political traditions and was rapidly becoming Americanized, as it should be. What was wrong with these two that they didn't understand how benevolently they had been treated?\ Americans believed they were a little crazy. The evidence is clear: the assault was thrown together on the run by these two men of no consequence and no meaningful cause. One of them didn't even have a gun, so the other had to go out the day before and buy him one. They were upset by newspaper reports of what was going on in Puerto Rico, where an equally silly group of men were attempting a coup, like they do down there all the time, something equally stupid and futile.\ In Washington, the two gunmen further expressed their deep state of mental disorganization by acting in strange ways.\ On the morning of the attempt, for example, they went sightseeing. It turned out they thought Truman lived in the White House, and a cabdriver told them the president had moved across the street while the White House was being remodeled. Then, back in the hotel room, one had to teach the other how to work the gun.\ One of them even went up to the hotel clerk on the day of the attempt as he was leaving and inquired about an extended checkout time.\ And that was the smart one!\ The dumb one was an unemployed salesman, a ladies' man, an abject failure in life. Nothing at all is known about this fellow, but why should it be, since he is so predictable: like so many disgruntled would-be assassins, this was his chance to count in a world that had denied his existence. They had no plan and no understanding of tactics.\ In the actual fight itself, the Secret Service and the White House policemen essentially brushed them aside.\ The two never came close to getting into Blair House. And even if they had, it would have made no difference, as an agent with a tommy gun was waiting just inside the door.\ Harry Truman was never in any mortal danger.\ In the end, many Americans concluded, it was more a joke, a farce, an opera buffa, than anything else.\ There is only one trouble with assigning these meanings to the 38.5 desperate, violent seconds of November 1, 1950.\ Every single one of them is wrong.\ Copyright © 2005 by Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge, Jr.\ \ \ Continues...\ \ \ \ Excerpted from American Gunfight by Stephen Hunter Copyright © 2005 by Stephen Hunter.\ Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

Authors' Note     1Introduction     3A Drive Around Washington     5Griselio Agonistes     12Revolution     18The Odd Couple     36Mr. Gonzales and Mr. De Silva Go to Washington     40Early Morning     50Baby Starches the Shirts     54Toad     62The New Guy     74The Buick Guy     83The Guns     86The Ceremony     100Indian Summer     104The Big Walk     109Oscar     113"It Did Not Go Off"     128Pappy     133The Next Ten Seconds     138Resurrection Man     141So Loud, So Fast     152Upstairs at Blair     156Downstairs at Blair     161Borinquen     167Oscar Alone     181The End's Run     184Good Hands     186The Colossus Rhoads     194Oscar Goes Down     200The Second Assault     203Pimienta     206Point-Blank     223The Man Who Loved Guns     228The Dark Visitors     236Mortal Danger     240The Neighbor     243American Gunfight     244The Good Samaritan     252The Policemen's Wives     258The Scene     260Inside the Soccer Shoe     267Who Shot Oscar?     273The Roundup     278Taps     286Oscar on Trial     289Deep Conspiracy     298Cressie Does Her Duty     308Oscar Speaks     310- R - I -     317Epilogue: Destinies     323Source Notes     327Bibliography     339Acknowledgments     349Index     355

\ Ted WidmerThe definitive history of this attempted murder has now been written by Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge Jr. True to their topic, theirs is an unlikely conspiracy: Hunter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for this newspaper and Bainbridge a journalist and former legal writer in Baltimore. It's a bit unclear what drew them to each other or to this topic, but they attack it with verve.\ — The Washington Post\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyOn November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, engaged in a sustained gun battle with Secret Service agents at Blair House. Their goal was to assassinate President Harry Truman. It's curious that the two men haven't found a place in popular memory like other presidential assailants. But this attempt deserves attention because it was explicitly political and because it permanently altered Secret Service practices. Hunter, esteemed for his film criticism and macho adventure novels, teams up with former Baltimore Sun journalist Bainbridge for this richly detailed account of the motives and destinies of virtually everyone connected to the skirmish. This is an ambitious attempt to achieve time-lapse history. The actual confrontation took less than a minute; rather than save it up for the end, the authors spread it across much of the book, interspersed with background material on the participants. The book reads like the product of a film lover/action novelist and a journalist rather than a work of history, with the shootout described in stream-of-consciousness, and melodramatic, cliff-hanging chapter endings. To the authors' credit, though, interpretations are presented as such, and their handling of the recorded events is not only convincing but compelling. Agent, Esther Newberg. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ Library JournalNovelist/film critic Hunter, along with Baltimore Sun journalist Bainbridge, brings cinematic flair to this investigation of the 1950 attempt by Puerto Rican nationalists to assassinate Truman. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsJournalists Hunter and Bainbridge reconstruct an attempt on Harry Truman's life, an event that "was of course gigantic news-for about a week."The principal actors in the November 1950 attempt were two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, devotees of a lawyer-revolutionary named Pedro Albizu Campos. The extent of their connection to Campos was not known until long after the attack, yet the operative principle was simple: If any attempt were made on Campos's life in Puerto Rico, then cells would activate in the U.S. and kill Truman. The witness may not have been entirely reliable, and in all events of the assassination effort, there was a certain amount of dumb luck: Truman was staying across the street from the White House, which was being renovated, a fact that a helpful cab driver had to point out to Collazo and Torresola; Collazo had few qualifications apart from a commitment to the cause; much of the attack was concocted on the spot. Yet Torresola was able to shoot several guards and get within ten yards of Truman before being taken down. It all makes for an intrinsically interesting story, but the authors tend to tell everything they can about any particular point of play, layering on incidental details about the lives of D.C. cops and expounding on the history and geography of Puerto Rico while drifting much too often into breathless Dragnet-speak: "The president is in the window he is thirty feet from Griselio who stands unnoticed at the stairway to Lee House the men on the other side haven't noticed him yet he's shot at three men and downed them all the president is thirty feet away and he has a straight line-of-sight picture to that window and therestands the president of the United States so he is very much in the kill zone."Those with patience for run-on sentences may enjoy this long footnote to history.\ \