Attempted assassination of Truman

The Attempted assassination of Truman took place at Blair House on November 1, 1950, while Harry S. Truman was living there during renovations to the White House. The attack was stopped before the assailants reached him, but it cost the life of a White House policeman and exposed the danger surrounding the President even within the guarded residence.

Background and Approach

Two weeks after the Wake Island conference, Truman returned to Blair House after a disquieting morning. Walter Bedell Smith had reported that Chinese Communist soldiers were opposing United Nations forces in North Korea, with their numbers estimated at as many as fifteen to twenty thousand. In Washington, the weather was unusually hot for November: the temperature reached 85 degrees in the shade. Truman had lunch with Bess Wallace Truman and Madge Gates Wallace, then went upstairs to rest before a scheduled appearance at Arlington Cemetery.

At 2:19 p.m., two men approached Blair House from opposite directions through the ordinary flow of pedestrians. They were Griselio Torresola, twenty-five, and Oscar Collazo, thirty-six, Puerto Rican nationalists from New York who had decided to kill the President to draw attention to their cause. Torresola carried a German Luger and Collazo a German Walther P-38; together they had sixty-nine rounds. Their unobtrusive appearance had led a hotel clerk to mistake them for divinity students.

The Attack and Its Reversal

The guards were on a rotating shift at Blair House. At 2:15, Donald Birdzell took his post beneath the entrance canopy, while Joseph Davidson and Secret Service agent Floyd Boring were in a booth farther along the sidewalk. Leslie Coffelt stood in a second booth. Joseph Downs, whom Coffelt had just relieved, was heading toward the basement door when Torresola and Collazo approached from opposite directions at 2:19. Torresola paused at Coffelt’s booth, apparently to divert attention while Collazo passed Davidson and Boring and headed for the entrance.

Birdzell heard a faint metallic click, turned, and saw Collazo aiming his pistol from only a few feet away. When the weapon fired, Birdzell was struck in the leg. Rather than remain at the entrance, he ran into Pennsylvania Avenue, drawing Collazo’s fire away from the President’s quarters. He was hit again, fell near the streetcar tracks, and returned fire. Meanwhile, Torresola fired at Coffelt from close range, then turned his weapon on Downs, who managed to reach the basement and call for help. Davidson and Boring fired at Collazo; Boring struck him in the chest, and Collazo fell beside the front steps. The exchange lasted about two minutes, with twenty-seven shots fired.

Torresola then turned back toward Birdzell, who had been hit again but continued firing from the ground. Coffelt, despite his own wounds, managed to fire a single shot that brought Torresola down. The shooting stopped, and people began converging on Blair House as police, Secret Service agents, photographers, and reporters arrived. Inside, the First Lady encountered J. B. West in the hall and asked what had happened; after he told her there had been a shooting, she hurried back upstairs. In the midst of the gunfire, Harry S. Truman had jumped from his bed and rushed to a window, but someone outside shouted for him to get back, and he moved away. As ambulances arrived, a rumor spread through the crowd that the President had been killed.

Aftermath and Significance

Fifteen minutes after the shooting, Harry S. Truman left Blair House through its back door, followed by seven or eight Secret Service agents, and crossed the Potomac in his limousine. At Arlington Cemetery, he appeared grim but calm and delivered his prepared remarks beside the equestrian statue of Sir John Dill. The crowd had not yet heard what had happened; news reached it only after a motorcycle messenger arrived to collect a photographer’s film. Truman continued with the ceremony rather than publicly interrupting it to address the attack.

His composure gave way when he learned that Leslie Coffelt had died at the hospital. Truman later recalled Coffelt as one of the best-liked officers on the White House force. A plaque honoring the policeman was placed on a new iron fence in front of Blair House, marking the loss at the site where the attack had been stopped. Donald Birdzell and Joseph Downs recovered from their wounds and returned to their jobs.

The attempt carried a political irony: Torresola and Collazo had acted in the name of Puerto Rican nationalism, yet Truman had supported Puerto Ricans’ right to determine their political relationship with the United States. He had named the island’s first native Puerto Rican governor and extended Social Security to its people. The attack therefore exposed a sharp divide between the assailants’ choice of violence and the political measures Truman had already taken concerning Puerto Rico, even as the episode demonstrated that the President remained vulnerable inside a heavily guarded residence.

Security and Personal Exposure

Truman’s relationship with his protection detail was not simply one of distance from the men assigned to guard him. He took an active interest in their lives: when he learned that Floyd Boring’s wife had given birth, he arranged for another Secret Service agent to drive him to the hospital so he could visit her and see the baby. That personal attention stood in contrast to the constant presence of guards, which grated on him. He never grew accustomed to living under their watch and would have preferred less security, not more.

Blair House made that tension especially consequential. Although the residence presented security problems, Truman never voiced misgivings about them. His reluctance to complain did not mean that the protective arrangements felt natural to him; it left a gap between the security he endured and the lighter protection he would have chosen for himself.