THE PRESIDENCY: Fanatics’ Errand

No dictator in his right mind would live in Washington’s historic Blair-Lee House for a minute. Its severe, four-story facade rises almost flush with the sidewalk on broad, busy Pennsylvania Avenue. Its two entrances are only ten steps above street level. Unless the blinds are drawn, passers-by can peer up into its shutter-framed, white-curtained windows. But if Harry Truman had any misgivings for his safety when he moved into the old residence two years ago while the White House was being made over, he gave no sign of it. Only the Secret Servicemen worried: to them, Blair-Lee House was a perilous place. Agents with submachine guns were posted behind both front doors. Uniformed White House guards (who are under the direction of the Secret Service) were stationed at two sidewalk sentry booths and at posts along the curb. Day after day, month after month, fighting monotony, they doggedly worked their eight-hour shifts, watching the limousines which swept up to the house, the streetcars, trucks and cars which rumbled along out in the street, the pedestrians who sauntered day & night under the windows, the shoving throngs of the curious which clotted up when the President came out across the sidewalk. Nothing ever happened.

Faint Click. One quiet, unseasonably hot afternoon last week, a burly White House cop named Donald Birdzell was reacting like a bear in a zoo to the rigors of boredom and the demands of duty. He paced. Then he stood before the Blair House steps, got his weight back on his heels and stared solemnly toward the street. As he did so a sound—a faint, metallic click—disturbed him. He turned his head.

On the sidewalk, ten feet away from him, stood a neat, dark man in a pinstriped, blue-green suit. The man was silently and carefully aiming a German P-38 automatic pistol at him. It went off—just as Birdzell jumped, clawing for his own revolver. The guard bolted instinctively for the street—partly to draw the gunman’s fire away from the President’s quarters, partly to leave a clear field for the Tommy gunner behind the door. Then hell’s own corn popper began to grind in front of Blair-Lee House.

The gunman pivoted, shooting. Birdzell, out in the streetcar tracks of Pennsylvania Avenue, turned and began firing back. A bullet hit one of his legs and he sank to one knee. Another bullet hit his good leg. He tumbled forward, and went on banging steadily away with his pistol held braced at arm’s length on the pavement before him.

The Second Man. As other guards and Secret Service men went into action, a second neat, dark man darted up to the guards at the west sentry booth, yanked out a Luger and began shooting at point-blank range.

A uniformed private named Leslie Coffelt went down, dying, with bullets in his chest, stomach and legs; Plainclothesman Joseph H. Downs toppled over, shot in the stomach and chest. There was one last cacophony of shots, shouts and tinkling glass. The first gunman, bending over, frantically trying to reload, was hit and sprawled out, hat awry, heels kicking; the second lurched backward over a low boxwood hedge, stone dead with a bullet through his ears.

The Letter. For a few seconds it was so quiet that the ding-ding of distant streetcars was clearly heard. Then hundreds of people were running toward Blair-Lee House. A panting skirmish line of photographers charged in. A hefty Secret Service man named Floyd Boring looked up, saw the President, who had been aroused from a nap, peering out an upstairs window in his underwear. Boring bawled: “Get back! Get back!” until the President stepped out of sight.

Down below, guards rolled the living gunman over, jerked roughly at his coat, fumbled through his pockets, pulled out his shirt and carefully snapped the elastic band of his underwear to be certain it was not hooked to a hidden bomb mechanism. They demanded his name. He whispered: “Oscar Collazo.” His companion was Griselio Torresola. They were Puerto Ricans. Guards frisking the dead gunman’s pockets found a letter written in Spanish. Translated, it read:

“My Dear Griselio—If for any reason it should be necessary for you to assume the leadership of the movement in the United States, you will do so without hesitation of any kind. We are leaving to your high sense of patriotism and sane judgment everything regarding this matter. Cordially yours.”

It was signed by the leader of Puerto Rico’s fanatic Nationalists, Pedro Albizu Campos (see THE HEMISPHERE).

For the moment, there was no time to learn more. Ambulances nosed, moaning, through the crowd, loaded the wounded aboard. Presidential Secretary Charles Ross, who had been in the White House offices across Pennsylvania Avenue, rushed inside Blair House to find out: Would the President still make his trip to dedicate a statue in Arlington? Harry Truman—who had shrugged hurriedly into a dark blue suit and had run downstairs to look cautiously out the front door—did not hesitate. Said he: “Why, of course.”

Secret Service men hustled him out a rear entrance and into his gold-trimmed Lincoln limousine. Convoyed by automobile loads of hard-faced agents, the big car rolled out of the drive, and off across the Potomac.

In New York, in Washington, in San Juan, Government agents began a high-pressure investigation of the weird assassination plot. Government agents roused by teletype combed Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem; they picked up a covey of Puerto Rican Nationalists, arrested the wives of the two gunmen. Both women were dry-eyed and defiant. Cried Rosa Collazo to her three daughters: “Hold up your heads. Don’t be ashamed.”

In Washington’s Gallinger Hospital, the wounded Collazo willingly told the tale of his crazy pilgrimage. He and his fellow plotter had known each other only two weeks. But they had agreed that the President should die, and that it was their sacred duty to kill him. Why? With flowery Latin eloquence, Oscar Collazo cried that his countrymen had been “enslaved” and that Puerto Rico’s politicians were “tools” of the United States.

Their mistakes, rather than their deadly accomplishments, made Secret Service men shudder. Collazo, who was charged with murder, admitted that neither man had any idea whether the President was at home when they arrived. Neither had been moved to read a line in Washington newspapers—if they had done so, they would have known that they could have had a free shot at the President when he left for Arlington, or when he spoke there.

It was just such irrational, unpredictable behavior that made the Secret Service’s job so tough. A President need have little fear of cold, well-planned political murder, since the Government of the U.S. cannot be overthrown simply by killing the Chief Executive. But he is always a target for crackpots. Said Calvin Coolidge: “Any well-dressed man who is willing to die himself can kill the President of the United States.” Of the nation’s 32 Presidents, three—Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley—were murdered while in office, and assassins had tried to kill Andrew Jackson, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt.

Harry Truman, however, seemed unmoved by the assassination attempt; although extra guards accompanied him, he took his usual walk the next morning. Said he: “A President has to expect those things.” To Admiral William Leahy he added: “The only thing you have to worry about is bad luck. I never have bad luck.”