Blair House assassination attempt, November 1, 1950

The Blair House assassination attempt, November 1, 1950, brought two armed Puerto Rican nationalists to the residence where Harry S. Truman was staying and turned an otherwise quiet afternoon into a deadly gunfight. The attack was stopped before the assailants could reach Truman, but White House policeman Leslie Coffelt died of his wounds. The episode exposed the danger surrounding the presidential household even as Truman remained committed to carrying out his public duties.

Background and Approach

The attempt came amid a mounting crisis in Korea. At midday, Truman returned to Blair House after receiving a troubling report from Walter Bedell Smith, the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency: Chinese Communist soldiers were opposing United Nations forces in North Korea, and their numbers might be as high as fifteen to twenty thousand. Truman had lunch with Bess Truman and Madge Wallace, then went upstairs to nap before a scheduled 2:50 appearance at Arlington Cemetery for the unveiling of a statue honoring British Field Marshal Sir John Dill.

The day was exceptionally hot: at 85 degrees in the shade along Pennsylvania Avenue, it was the hottest November day on record. Truman took off his clothes and stretched out in his underwear on a four-poster bed, with the window open. The house quieted around him. Bess and her mother had gone to another room; Secret Service Agent Stuart Stout was on duty in the front hall, while guards occupied positions outside. The front door stood open to the street, though its screen door was latched.

At 2:19, two men in dark suits and hats approached Blair House from opposite directions, blending into the pedestrians on the sidewalk. Griselio Torresola, twenty-five, came from the west toward Coffelt’s booth; Oscar Collazo, thirty-six, approached from the east. Both were 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 of ammunition.

The Gunfight and Its Aftermath

The attack began when Torresola and Collazo reached Blair House at 2:19. The guards’ rotation had placed Private Donald Birdzell beneath the entrance canopy, while Private Joseph Davidson and Agent Floyd Boring were talking in a nearby booth; Private Leslie Coffelt was stationed in another booth farther up the sidewalk. Gunfire erupted with startling speed: twenty-seven shots were fired in two minutes, sending people nearby running for cover. Boring and Davidson fired at Collazo. One bullet grazed his ear and another struck his hat before Boring hit him in the chest, dropping him face down beside the front steps.

Torresola turned toward Birdzell near the streetcar tracks and shot him in the leg. Though wounded, Birdzell braced his pistol against the pavement and continued firing. Coffelt, himself dying, managed to raise his weapon and bring Torresola down with a single shot to the head. The shooting stopped; after a few seconds of silence, police, Secret Service agents, photographers, reporters, and onlookers converged on the scene. In the front hall, Stuart Stout stood ready with a Thompson submachine gun, having rushed to the usher’s office gun cabinet.

About fifteen minutes later, Truman left by the back door and was driven across the Potomac with Secret Service men crowded onto the sides of his open car. At Arlington Cemetery, he appeared grim but calm and delivered his prepared remarks beside the equestrian statue of Sir John Dill without interrupting them to discuss the attack. The crowd did not learn what had happened until a motorcycle messenger arrived for a photographer’s film and news spread through the gathering. Truman became deeply upset only after he heard that Coffelt had died at the hospital; he later remembered him as one of the best-liked officers on the White House force. Birdzell and Joseph Downs, who had also been wounded, eventually recovered and returned to their jobs.

The attack carried a bitter irony: Truman had supported Puerto Ricans’ right to determine their political relationship with the United States, appointed the island’s first native-born Puerto Rican governor, and extended Social Security to Puerto Rico. The assailants’ violence therefore struck at a President whose policies had already taken steps toward the political self-determination they sought to publicize.

Security and the President’s Unease

Truman’s relationship with the men assigned to protect him was personal, not merely ceremonial. When he learned that Secret Service agent Floyd Boring’s wife had given birth, he arranged for another agent to drive him to the hospital so he could visit her and see the child. Yet the constant presence of protectors and the sense of always being under guard grated on him; he never grew accustomed to it and would have preferred less security. The danger at Blair House therefore met a President who accepted the protective detail without becoming reconciled to the confinement it imposed. If he had misgivings about the security problems of living there, he did not voice them.

Public Duty and Political Irony

The attack’s sharpest contrast lay in what followed: the attempt to force attention through violence did not displace the President’s public message. Beside the statue of Sir John Dill, Truman spoke instead of the need for nations to understand one another and trust one another’s sincerity. That appeal, delivered while the danger at Blair House was still unknown to the crowd, made the ceremony an unintended counterpoint to the gunmen’s method. The episode thus joined private peril to the public obligations of the presidency: Truman continued with his prepared duty, while the death of Leslie Coffelt gave the encounter its lasting human cost.