Assassination attempts have an impact – even when they fail
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Eighty years ago today – on July 20 1944 – Adolf Hitler survived a determined attempt to assassinate him with a bomb planted under his conference table. The Nazi dictator’s trousers were torn to shreds, his eardrums burst, and four of his aides were killed – but he staggered away with bruised buttocks, alive – shaken but not stirred in his determination to wreak yet more death and destruction on Europe.
Last Saturday’s failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump is likely to have almost as consequential results for the future of US politics as the failure of Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s bomb attack on Hitler had on the course of World War Two.
If sniper Thomas Matthew Crooks’ shots had found their mark in Trump’s head instead of nicking his ear America – according to seasoned observers – could have erupted into full scale civil unrest, as armies of the former president’s fans would have taken to the streets in violent rage at what they might see as their hero’s destruction at the hands of a malevolent deep state.
As it is, Trump’s near miraculous survival is likely to generate huge waves of sympathy, and an uptick in his poll ratings just like President Ronald Reagan enjoyed after he survived an assassin’s bullet in 1981.
Similarly, Hitler’s close brush with death only hardened his supporters’ conviction that he would win the war despite all the evidence to the contrary, and encouraged him to believe that Providence was on his side he as he took a bloody revenge on the enemies within who had sought to kill him. The failure of Stauffenberg’s bomb plot ensured that the war would continue for another ten savage months – costing millions more lives. The bomb’s failure to kill the Fuhrer had baleful results for the whole world.
Another failed assassination that cemented the image of an earlier former U.S. President as a tough near superhuman titan fated to triumph over his foes took place in Milwaukee in October 1912, by spooky coincidence the same mid-western city where the Republican Convention this week anointed Trump as its presidential candidate.
Former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt was in the city, like Trump also running for a return stint in the White House, this time for the Progressive “Bull Moose” party, when a mentally disturbed German migrant named John Schrank fired a bullet into his chest. The bullet’s force was lessened by ploughing through Roosevelt’s metal spectacle case, and the lengthy speech he was due to deliver which was folded in his breast pocket. Nonetheless, the shot lodged in his chest wall causing severe bleeding.
Astonishingly, Roosevelt refused immediate medical help and went on to deliver his speech – which continued for more than an hour – with the bullet still inside him. ( He carried it for the rest of his life and said it gave him no more trouble than if it had been in his waistcoat pocket) . Although his courage, surpassing even Trump’s blood spattered clenched fist salute, did not earn Roosevelt a further spell as president – with the Republicans split in two factions the contest was won by Democrat Woodrow Wilson – it did consolidate his reputation as the president who most embodied America’s spirit of rugged frontier fighting never say die individualism.
If Trump harnesses and summon up the same defiant spirit as Roosevelt, it should not only carry him back to the White House in triumph but also prove that a failed assassination bid can be not a curse as it was in Hitler’s case – but a blessing in disguise.
Historian Nigel Jones is author of Countdown to Valkyrie: the July plot to assassinate Hitler (Frontline Books)
