How Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan Responded To Their Assassination Attempts

Yesterday, I wrote about how George Washington and Donald Trump reacted to bullets missing them.

I thought to check on two other Presidents who survived assassination attempts.

On October 14, 1912, shortly before the presidential election, Theodore Roosevelt was shot at a campaign rally. The bullet was impeded by a copy of Roosevelt’s speech and his glasses case. Roosevelt famously chose to continue delivering the speech. He began:

Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet – there is where the bullet went through – and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.

Here is a photograph of the manuscript and eyeglass case

Here is a statement from Theodore Roosevelt after his assassination in October 1912:

It is of course perfectly true that in voting for or against me consideration must be paid to what I have done in the past and to what I propose to do. But it seems to me far more important that consideration should be paid to what the Progressive Party proposes to do. I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact upon which we Progressives insist that the welfare of any one man in fight is wholly immaterial compared to the great and fundamental issues involved in the triumph of the principles for which our cause stands. If I had been killed, the fight would have gone on exactly the same.

Judge Ben Lindsey and the hundreds of other men now on the stump are preaching the doctrines that I have been preaching and stand for and represent just the same cause. They would have continued the fight in exactly the same way if I had been killed, and they are continuing it in just the same way now that I am for the moment laid up.

On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt. The following day, Reagan closed his diary entry with this sentence:

Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.

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