Dan Snow's History Hit - US Presidents Who Were Almost Assassinated

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, Clinton, Bush and now Trump. All have been targets of assassination attempts while in or running for office. Dan is joined by Professor of American History at Cambridge University Gary Gerstle to take a look at the assassination attempts that could have changed the course of American history and how.Produced by Dan Snow, Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On Saturday evening in Butler, Pennsylvania, shots were fired at former President Donald Trump. 150 yards to the north of where Trump was speaking during a campaign to be elected president once again this November, a gunman identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks was lying on the roof of a building. Six minutes into Trump's speech, he fired a number of rounds from an assault rifle at Donald Trump. One of

those shots skimmed Trump's ear. Trump ducked to the ground. Five Secret Service agents immediately rushed to the stage and covered the former president with their own bodies. Less than a minute after those shots were fired, the Secret Service said that the shooter himself had been killed by snipers. Trump, bleeding but seemingly unbowed, was brought to his feet. He raised a fist of defiance before agents hustled him off stage. We now know that a man called Corrie Comperator was killed, a volunteer firefighter. He died throwing his body over his family to protect them. David Dutch and James Copenhaver were both injured badly, but are believed to be in stable condition. however, were both injured badly, but are believed to be in stable condition.

That means that today, the world is once again talking about American political violence this week. I guess I should start by saying the Brits shouldn't feel too smug about political assassinations. George III survived several attempts, including one in a theatre when shots were fired at him and narrowly missed him. Not long after, Spencer Percival, a Prime Minister, was shot in the House of Parliament. Our Prime Ministers themselves, strangely, have come close to killing or being killed in duels. Pitt the Younger fought a duel. Canning and Castlereagh fought a famous duel. Wellington fought a duel as Prime Minister. Queen Victoria survived, by the skin of her teeth, multiple assassination attempts, some of which came very close to success. Margaret Thatcher was blown up. John Major was mortared.

Elizabeth II, the former Queen, was shot at with a rifle on a trip to New Zealand, just one of several plots to assassinate her. But people will be more familiar with the fact that in the USA and America, four sitting presidents have been killed. We have Abraham Lincoln, killed in 1865. James Garfield was killed in 1881. William McKinley in 1901. And John F. Kennedy on that day in Dallas in 1963. Others have been injured in assassination attempts, as you'll be hearing about in this podcast. We have Ronald Reagan in 1981, Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, and now Donald Trump's name can be added to that list.

The story of political violence in the US goes much deeper than presidents. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, he was murdered as he ran for president. The Ku Klux Klan assassinated political leaders, Republicans particularly, in the southern states in the years following the Civil War. John Hines and John Stevens, for example, both killed to intimidate people who sought to run on a ticket of construction of civil and political rights for all Americans, regardless of skin colour. Robert Kennedy, JFK's younger brother, was killed while running for president in 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King, civil rights leader, activist, was killed in that same year. Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, was murdered in 1978. The list goes on. Anton

Cormack, mayor of Chicago. Huey Long, another presidential candidate. George Lincoln Rockwell, American Nazi. Some were killed by people deemed subsequently to be not of sound mind. Others were killed because of personal grudges, some very personal grudges, losing a fistfight or some sort of financial betrayal. But many were killed for political, for strategic reasons, to remove a leader, to remove a voice, an activist working for a cause that the assassin passionately disagreed with. In this podcast, we'll be reflecting on political assassination, but we're going to particularly focus on the times when the victim survived, the failed assassination attempts.

Because we don't really know what would have happened if Lincoln had lived, if Kennedy had lived. But we do know what happened because Roosevelt lived. We do know what happened when Lenin survived his very, very close brush with death in August 1918. The jaws of terror that he opened as a result. We know what happened when Hitler survived when George Elsa placed a time bomb

meticulously in a beer hall in Munich where Hitler was due to give his annual speech in 1939. George Elsa placed a time bomb, meticulously, in a beer hall in Munich, where Hitler was due to give his annual speech in 1939. Hitler survived only because he left slightly earlier than scheduled. Elsa brought the beer hall down, killing eight people and injuring 62 others. But Hitler, his intended target, survived, and went on to lead Germany from that attempt in 1939 all the way to his catastrophic death and downfall in 1945, making a blizzard of decisions that remain some of the most consequential of the 20th century. So this is a podcast about survival.

What do failed assassination attempts mean in the history of the United States of America? And here to talk about it all, we've got Gary Gersel. He's been on the podcast before. He's the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at Cambridge University. He's the Director of Research in American History. He is as engaging as he is brilliant.

And he's going to tell me all about those American politicians who live to fight another day. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity until there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. It was right at the end of January, January the 30th, 1835, that Andrew Jackson got the dubious honour of becoming the first president to experience an assassination attempt.

Richard Lawrence charged towards him holding two pistols in the East Portico of the capital as Jackson was leaving a funeral that had been held in the House chamber. For some reason, the pistols failed to go off, even though later tests showed they were both in working order. And as they say, if you come for the king, you'd best not miss. Well, Jackson, whatever you think of his politics, he was certainly a force of nature, and he was arrested, but only after President Jackson himself had beaten him severely with the cane that he was holding in his hand. Let's hear from Professor Gary Gerstle about what this

failed attempt on Jackson's life meant for the subsequent career of this pivotal president. So, Gary, Andrew Jackson, massive impact on the presidency. If he'd been killed in 1835 when he was almost shot in the Portugal over the Capitol building, would that have changed the course of US history? No, I don't think so. We enter the world of counterfactuals, which I find very interesting myself. But I don't feel as though the course of American history would have been dramatically changed. The issue with which Jackson is most closely associated is westward expansion, conquest of the Indians, introduction of a more plebeian style, populist style to American politics. I think those were all set in motion and well underway. And much as Trump has now created a bunch of acolytes and descendants, those politicians of Jackson's time were already watching Jackson very carefully and beginning to mimic and imitate his style.

And that would increasingly become the style of the Democratic Party. And also, some of his greatest contributions were not as president. as a general in the War of 1812 and beyond, war on the indigenous populations, expanding the United States, consolidating the territory, setting in series a set of events. One of the ways of testing this is the Mexican-American War, which was in the 1840s, a war in which the U.S. was an aggressor against Mexico and took half of Mexican territory. That's a very Jacksonian policy, but Jackson was long gone from the presidency by that time. Would the Bank of the United States have been disestablished in favor of state banks? I think it would have been anyway. So I don't see that as decisive. It was 11 o'clock p.m. on a warm August night in 1864. Private John Nichols was on sentry duty. Washington was at the heart of a nation at war with itself. The Civil War was still raging,

the streets would have been full of uniformed men. And it was 11 o'clock that night that Private Nichols heard a shot. Moments later, he saw an instantly recognisable man riding towards him. Rather shocking for the time that he was riding, bareheaded. That man was Abraham Lincoln, the wartime president of the Republic. And his hat had been knocked off by a sniper whose identity remains mysterious to this day. Lincoln had been riding, as he often did, from the White House to the soldier's home, which was the place he would work and sleep before returning to the office, the White House, in the morning.

He was unguarded. He used to make that journey himself, alone. And on this occasion, someone took the opportunity to have a shot at him. In 1864, like nearly a year before Lincoln is successfully murdered in Ford Theatre, he was, had his hat shot off his head by a sniper apparently. By that stage, the Civil War was, it was creeping towards successful conclusion for the North. It wouldn't have made a huge difference if Lincoln had been removed. I shudder at the thought of Lincoln being taken out of American politics at any point before his death. There was still a lot to be negotiated about the war. There was strong sentiment in

quarters of the Democratic Party and in quarters of the Republican Party for striking a deal with the Confederates that would end the bloodshed sooner than it was ended. Ulysses S. Grant was Lincoln's great general, and Sherman was one of his great generals. And in that last year of the war, he struck through the South, hitting not just military installations, but building the infrastructure of southern cities like Atlanta. There was a lot of opposition to that mode of warfare, a lot of calls on the part of humanitarians for compromises. So it's possible to imagine a war having come to some kind of negotiated end before the

time when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in 1865. So I'm never one to bet against Lincoln. And also, I mourn his passing and his killing and his murder when he was desperately needed for the job of Reconstruction, the job of Reconstruction being twofold, reincorporating a defeated South into the nation and putting African-Americans on a plane of full equality with white Americans. And that remains one of the most vexatious and failed projects

in American history. And I'm mindful of his being taken too soon. Now, there are certain situations and scenarios that can't be solved by any politician, no matter how committed and how talented. So who knows whether he would have come out of Reconstruction with a better settlement for the United States. But the failure of Reconstruction hangs seriously over the United States still to this day in the 21st century. There are echoes of that failure and the resurgence of the Confederate South and the support for Trump, which makes Lincoln's murder in 1865 still a devastating moment, and possibly a turning point for the United States.

One of the most remarkable and in some ways celebrated assassination attempts has to be that against Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Roosevelt was both a former president and a presidential candidate, interestingly. Three and a half years after he left office, and whilst campaigning to be president again in the election of 1912, Roosevelt was in Milwaukee. It was October the 14th, 1912. A man called John Schrank, he ran a bar in New York. He'd been stalking Roosevelt for weeks.

He got up close to him and fired a single round from a Colt pistol straight into Roosevelt's chest. Now, Roosevelt was saved because he had his stump speech. He had his 50-page speech folded over twice in his breast pocket. He also had a metal glasses case there. So collectively, the metal, all that paper slowed the bullet down, even though it did penetrate the skin. It did lodge itself in Roosevelt's chest. Remarkably, Roosevelt, his first action was to save the life of Schrenk, because he was immediately captured. He was immediately set upon by the mob, and it seems like he would have been lynched. So Roosevelt shouted for Schrenk to remain unharmed. Then he told everyone he was all right, made sure Schrenk

went into police custody, and then gave himself the once-over, but realised he wasn't coughing up blood. So despite the bullet having entered his chest cavity, it hadn't gone into a lung, and he decided to, rather than go to hospital immediately, to carry on with the campaigning event. He carried on and made the speech. And the pages of that speech not only had a bullet hole in them, but they were covered in the blood from his chest wound. Only after something like an hour and a half of speaking, the mind boggles, did he go and accept medical attention. His opening line was, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I've just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.

The x-ray showed that the bullet lodged itself in the muscle. The doctors said it was too difficult to get rid of it, so that bullet stayed in there for the rest of his life. Interestingly though, he didn't get much of a bounce. He lost the presidency, defeated by Woodrow Wilson. I think one of the more consequential near misses could be an attempt on another Roosevelt, a distant cousin, FDR, made on the 15th of February 1933. He'd won the election of 1932. It was just days before his first inauguration. FDR was heading for the White House, and a man called Giuseppe Sangara fired five shots at him in Miami, Florida. Sangara missed the president-elect,

but he did kill or he did mortally wound the Chicago mayor, and he injured four other people as well. What about Roosevelt's lucky escape in February 1933? He was president-elect. He wasn't even in the job yet. It was the height of the Depression. America without Roosevelt. Can't imagine it.

Can't imagine the world either, actually. This was a moment that most people don't know about, not just most people in Britain or Europe or wherever your show goes in the world. It's not known to most people in the United States. But at the time, a president was elected in November, but he's not known to most people in the United States. But at the time, a president was elected in November, but he did not take office until March. And so the interregnum was months long. And this was during the worst depression in American

history. Banks were failing. The economy was failing. In February 1933, Roosevelt is riding in an open-air car with Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago, without any protection. And he's riding through Miami. And out of the crowd jumps a small-stature anarchist who fires five shots at Roosevelt from nearly point-blank range. from nearly point-blank range. And all the shots miss Roosevelt. Most of them hit Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, who dies pretty soon thereafter. You take nine out of 10 other occasions of this attempted assassination, Roosevelt is dead. And this is before he even assumes office, before the fabled 100 days, before he has a chance to unveil his new deal. His vice president was a man by the name of Garner from Texas, pretty undistinguished man sitting in Congress. Without Roosevelt's vision,

without Roosevelt's support in the North, without the ability to hold the country together. I shudder to think what would have happened had Roosevelt died in that day, no Roosevelt presiding over the New Deal, and then no Roosevelt bringing America into the Second World War at a time when most educated opinion in America did not want America to go to another world war that the goddamn Europeans had started yet again. Excuse my language. That's not my sentiment. I'm just reporting what Americans were feeling at the time. There was some mystery surrounding this one, but it does seem like there could have been a German plan to kill, SS plan to kill Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt in Tehran when they all met

there in Iran in 1943 for a conference. Soviet sources say that German agents were dropped into Persia, they made their way to Tehran where they established radio contact with Berlin, and they were doing the preparation work for an attack on the Big Three to decapitate the Allied Supreme Command. The Soviets, though, take the credit for breaking up this particular plot by arresting some and forcing the others to flee, but it's all a little bit murky. But we're going to count that one as well. A very much closer attempt took place on the life of the president on November the 1st, 1950. Two Puerto Rican independence activists tried to kill President Truman. The White House was undergoing some renovations, so Truman was living at Blair House. These two men broke into Blair House. There was a gunfight. One White House

policeman was injured. Another was mortally injured, so he would be killed. One of the terrorists was shot. Another one was badly injured. So Truman wasn't harmed, but his life was certainly in grave danger. Harry Truman survives an extraordinary assassination attempt in 1950. What impact do you think Truman had between 50 and 53 when he leaves the office? I hate to say that a man's death would not have been that consequential. You're putting me in difficult situations here. But if I think in crudely pragmatic terms, or if I think in realpolitik, and I think what are the interests and what direction is the economy and politics going? Truman, by that time, had committed himself

to the Cold War. He had committed himself to preserving and extending the New Deal where he could. By 1950, he was pretty much stalled in terms of what he could do in Congress. The Korean War had been engaged with. And the most important fact to bring into this is that his successor in the White House, Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected in 1952, comes into office in 1953. He's the first Republican president in 20 years. And the big question is, will he preserve the New Deal or will he dismantle it? The New Deal being America's version of social democracy. It's a big deal in America, big reform movement. Eisenhower acquiesces to the New Deal and Truman had embraced it as well. So I

think the contours of American politics by 1950, both internationally and domestically, had been set. And so I don't think that Truman's death at that time would have led to a huge change in American or global history. And I apologize to Harry for that judgment. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. More after this. More after this. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. it could be that john f kennedy's family protects him from an earlier assassination attempt on december the 11th 1960 actually he was then president-elect he just won the election against nixon he was about to enter the white house he was taking a vacation after the election in Palm Beach, Florida. And a 73-year-old with a passionate hatred of Catholics called Paul Pavlik made a plan to crash a dynamite-laden car into Kennedy's vehicle. He followed him, he staked out the attack,

but he changed his mind after he saw Kennedy's wife and daughter say goodbye. He was then stopped in a routine bit of policing a few days later and taken into custody when they discovered what was in the vehicle. So December 11th, 1960, JFK, president-elect, not even president yet, is targeted by an older gentleman with a hatred of Catholics who was going to drive a dynamite-laden Buick into Kennedy's vehicle. He didn't do so. No JFK.

No JFK there during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I mean, is this another big one? Well, it depends who we imagine the president to have been. His greatest rival at the time was Lyndon Johnson. And Lyndon Johnson domestically was a much more capable president than JFK himself was. I think the million dollar question has to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm not terribly impressed with Kennedy's presidency. I think his charm and his charisma won him a lot of points that are not particularly deserved. But his one moment of great strength, I think, and judgment

was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the moment when the Soviet Union and the United States probably came closer to a nuclear war than they had ever been before or that they would be again since that time. Even during the Reagan years, they were not as close to nuclear Armageddon at that time. that time, even during the Reagan years, they were not as close to nuclear Armageddon at that time. And I don't know whether Johnson would have been able to resist the pressure that the generals, some of the generals were exerting for a nuclear strike on Cuba. I don't know if he would have been able to withstand that. So in that sense, had Kennedy been killed in December, it might have had enormous consequences. On the other hand, different president, maybe no ill-considered Bay of Pigs invasion, which was an ill-considered attempt by the U.S. to support Cuban exiles to mount an invasion of Cuba. refusal to send in any support for that failed invasion because it was mostly developed under Eisenhower, gives Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, a sense that America is weak and vulnerable and may have tempted them to bring missiles to Cuba in 1962. So a president with a

stronger profile in international affairs may have tempted Khrushchev less. So you see the contingencies that we get into once we get into these counterfactuals. Like something out of a spy thriller on February the 22nd, 1984, Samuel Byke planned to kill President Nixon by crashing a commercial airliner into the White House. He went as far as actually hijacking this airliner in Baltimore Washington International Airport. He killed a law enforcement officer on the ground. He tried to take off, but the wheel blocks were in place. He shot both pilots, one of whom later died. But at that point, law enforcement was trying to retake the cockpit and bike shot himself before the plane or the assassination

attempt really could get off the ground. Gerald Ford had a couple of shots fired at him, but I want to skip forward now to March the 30th, 1981, when Ronald Reagan was in Washington. He'd been speaking at the Hilton Hotel and he was about to climb back into his limousine when a man called John Hinckley Jr. fired six shots at him. He hit Reagan and three other people. Reagan was wounded by a bullet that actually had hit the side of the limousine and then ricocheted off and smashed into his underarm, which broke a rib and punctured a lung and gave him significant internal bleeding.

He apparently arrived at the hospital at death's door, was stabilised in the emergency room. The famous story about Reagan is that he was compus mentis enough to say just before he went under, I hope you guys are Republicans, the doctors that would be operating on him. The White House press secretary, James Brady, was brain damaged and disabled. A secret service agent and a police officer were both wounded. Shockingly, John Hinckley later said that he wanted to kill Reagan to impress the actress, Interestingly, John Hinckley later said he wanted to kill Reagan to impress the actress Jodie Foster. Gary, Reagan in 81, he was so badly wounded, had he actually died, that would have been an important one, wouldn't it?

I think so. Yeah, I think so. His vice president was not nearly as committed to neoliberal political economy as free markets and globalization of capitalism as Reagan was. I consider Reagan to be the second most consequential president of the 20th century after Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s in terms of putting America on a different course, especially in terms of political economy. So I think that would have been very, very significant. At the same time, one has to say that the economic crises of the 1970s affecting the global north, not just America, but Britain, Europe, and the efforts to climb out of that in the sense that the social democratic regimes that had prevailed since World War II were no longer working as they once did. This dissatisfaction ran pretty deep, which meant

that someone trying to have a different kind of politics might have run into very strong headwinds. The abandonment of detente and foreign affairs and the military buildup and the struggle with the evil empire, I do give Reagan credit for hastening the end of the Soviet empire. And that is a world historical event of enormous importance. And that's Soviet empire collapsed much more quickly and much sooner than anyone had expected. And if anyone tells you they knew that that was coming in 1989 and they were alive at the time, they're not telling you the truth because no one thought that. That's not how empires go out. If we think of how empires go out of business slowly, reluctantly, they elect a reformer, that doesn't go so well, so then they become reactionary. If you think of empires in recession, they hang on for as long as

they can. It's true of the Ottoman Empire. It's true of the Spanish Empire. Might we say the same about the British Empire? I'll let you be the judge of that. But empires don't declare themselves out of existence the way Gorbachev did. And the fact that this happened so quickly and decisively between 1989 and 1991 is one of the more stunning events in world history of the 20th century. 20th century. There's an attempted assassination of a former president that would have consequences because, well, his son would one day sit in the White House and, according to some sources, was motivated to take some revenge against those who tried to kill his father. On April 13th, 1993, according to an FBI investigation, 14 men, some Kuwaiti and some Iraqi, believed to be working for Saddam Hussein, smuggled bombs into Kuwait with a plan to assassinate former President Bush with a huge

car bomb during a visit to Kuwait University. He'd left office in January 1993 and he was heading to Kuwait, the country that he had led the coalition to liberate in 1991. The plot never got much further than that, but in retaliation for it, Clinton launched a cruise missile strike against Baghdad. And it's said that the family, particularly his son George W. Bush, always harbored the desire for revenge. Can I ask about the one strange, perhaps not really a near miss? George H. W. Bush, after the presidency, goes to Kuwait. According to the FBI, there's an attempt, it seems that by Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, to blow him up while he's in Kuwait. Clinton launches a cruise missile strike on Baghdad in retaliation. Do you think this event was important or played any role at all in George Bush's son, George W. Bush, in planning for the removal of Saddam Hussein?

I don't have access to the interior of George W. Bush's mind, so I can't say how dominant it was. say how dominant it was. I do consider the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to be the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, one that the world will be paying for for 50 years after that event, and we're about halfway through that 50-year process now. And certainly, anger about his father was one factor, but he had Cheney, the oil man at his side, calling many of the shots, who was arguing about the international geopolitics of oil and how the U.S. had a position itself to assure itself and its allies of a steady oil supply for the foreseeable future. Then Bush had a dream of, I call it a Woodrow Wilson dream. He's the last of the Wilsonians to spread democracy through the entire world and to be the person who brought democracy to the Arab Middle East. This was a genuinely held belief of his. I think it may have been noble in aspiration, but it was extremely poorly executed and not well thought

out at all. But he was animated by a dream of America as the wellspring of democracy for the world. And in the final analysis, I think oil and his dream of universal democracy for all the countries that didn't have it factored in his thinking far more seriously than avenging his father. Here's an interesting one. In November 1996 in Manila, President Clinton's motorcade was rerouted before it drove over one particular bridge. And that's because the Secret Service had intercepted a message saying an attack was imminent. Later, that bridge was checked and a bomb was found under it. The US investigation revealed that there'd been a plot masterminded by one Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan. His name was Osama bin Laden.

So Bill Clinton narrowly avoids being blown up in Manila when his motorcade had to be rerouted because a terrorist ultimately answering to or inspired by Osama bin Laden had placed a bomb under the bridge. This was in 1996. Gary, there's Clinton in your Harry Truman category of not super important. What do we do with President Al Gore from 96 onwards? Well, what I will say about Al Gore is that if he had been president starting in 2001, and I should say he probably was the properly elected president in 2001, there would have been no invasion of Iraq. So in that sense... Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium

in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. George Bush's ascent to the White House, which may not have been legal, was an extremely important event in American history. And it may have been the wrong president sitting in the White House if the votes had been fully and fairly counted and if the Supreme Court had played a neutral rather than partisan role. So I can't say the non-election of Gore because I think he was elected, but the non-transfer of the presidency to Gore is a moment of extraordinary significance in American history.

As for Clinton, you may have read my most recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. I've gotten a lot of flack for this, but I stand by it. I see Clinton, he was a very able politician. I see his most significant contribution as acquiescing to the neoliberal political economy, a political economy that prized free markets and globalization above all else that Reagan in the 1980s had been the architect for. And I think that path was clearly set by 1996. It had not been set by 1993 or 1994 when he undertook his massive health care, National Health Insurance Reform Act. But when he gets crushed and when the Democrats get crushed in the 1994 election, he abandons that ambitious reform agenda and acquiesces to the political economy that the Republicans in the

80s had put in place. And so in that sense, I don't think that his death in 96 would have altered the course of American history. President George W. Bush was lucky to survive when he went on a visit to Tbilisi. One man in the crowd threw a live Soviet-made hand grenade towards the podium. The pin had been pulled out of the grain, but it didn't explode because a handkerchief had been wrapped around it and had held the safety lever in place. During the course of his presidency, there were many plots and threats made against Barack Obama. Some packages were sent and were intercepted by the Secret Service containing either chemicals or explosives. But I want to move forward now to June the 16th, 2016, when Michael Stephen Sanford, a Brit, attempted to grab the gun of a police officer at a Trump rally in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was arrested and he stated that he'd hoped to assassinate

Donald Trump, who would go on to win the presidency that fall. He was given around a year in prison before being deported back to the UK. Last one, Gary. A British national did a year in prison for trying to grab a pistol at a rally in 2016 in Nevada, a Trump rally. He said he was going to try and shoot Trump. No Trump. No Trump 2016. What do you think?

Well, I'm trying to think who the Republican nominee would have been. Boy, that's a tough one. That's a tough one. I have to say Trump is one of the most significant political players of the first quarter of the 21st century and has reshaped American political life profoundly, both in style and substance. I would have said Hillary Clinton would have won, but we don't know who her opponent would have been

if it had been a Marco Rubio may well have beat her in 2016. On the other hand, 2016 is the year of Brexit. The rise of populism and authoritarian tendencies has been a global phenomenon. It's not been simply a US phenomenon. And Trump is a pattern of rulers that find their counterparts throughout the world. Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Netanyahu in Israel, Xi in China, Modi in India. This is an international

upsurge. And we also see the surge in right-wing politics across Europe, and Farage threatens it in Britain. So if you ask me, would this have forestalled the populist surge in the world, the answer is no. But I also must acknowledge that as much as I dislike Trump, He is a politician of very dangerous charisma that has gripped the attention of the world like few other figures in American history. Gary, in history, we talk a lot about the substructural, it's all inevitable, it's all economics and resource and climate. And then here you are also saying the two most consequential figures of the 20th century, Reagan and Roosevelt, both survived by millimeters, by millimeters to an assassin's bullet reasonably early on, very early on in the case of Roosevelt in their presidential career. How as a historian do you think about this? Does it just make you feel a sense of the chaos of the public realm, of this little piece of dust that was spinning around the sun?

Well, it makes me aware of how difficult it is to be a historian speaking about the present and writing about the present, as I often do now. And I've been thinking about this issue since the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday, because an inch, you know, if he had not turned his head, we'll see more dissection of the photograph. inch, you know, if he had not turned his head, we'll see more dissection of the photograph. But if he had not turned his head at that moment to look sideways rather than just looking ahead, it feels like he'd be dead today. And so one is aware on the one hand of all this contingency, right? What are the chances of him turning his head at that way at that moment? What are the chances of an assassin nine feet from Roosevelt missing with all five shots if that happened again?

That's absolutely a story of contingency. And yet, as I contemplate the current moment, I think of not just what happened on Saturday, but over the last two years, I think of all the particular events that might have gone in one direction or another. What about if Biden had performed better in the debate? Maybe his cold did make a difference, all sorts of events like that. But on the other hand, we see this persistent pull to right-wing politics, to the authoritarian temptation, to the strongman.

And those refer to the underlying substructures that seem to be pushing people consistently in a particular direction. And so it's not that it eliminates contingency, but it weights the scale, if you see what I mean. It predisposes events to going in one direction rather than another. That doesn't mean they can't be upset by an extraordinarily contingent event. But it also suggests that there's a drift, that there's patterns, that there are underlying structures that are pushing politics in a certain direction. And so I struggle with these two dimensions because I'm a believer that politics is often guided by underlying political and economic substructures.

And yet we live in the here and now in which these political contests are very real and very consequential and can sometimes turn history in a different direction. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Thank you. you