It was a morning that will forever be burned into my memory. Thursday, June 6, 1968, in the early summer after completing the eighth grade, I awakened at my grandparents’ home thinking it would be just another day of doing chores at their farm in Central Texas. As I started putting on my work clothes, my grandfather solemnly walked into the bedroom where my brother James and I slept and said, “I’ve got some bad news, and I bet you can guess what it is.”
We must reduce the media vitriol against political leaders.
James and I looked at each other and had no idea what Grandaddy was talking about. We shrugged our shoulders and said, “We give up. What happened?
“Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed last night after he won the California presidential primary. He died just like his brother did four and a half years ago, and Martin Luther King did two months ago. Not sure where America is going and when this is gonna stop.”
In a state of shock, James and I looked at each other and wondered who would be next. With the three front-page assassinations that had taken place since November 1963, there was no reason to think this would be the last one.
Four years later, Alabama Gov. George Wallace was shot in Maryland and paralyzed from the waist down while running for president. Three years after that, two assassins acting two weeks apart tried but failed to gun down President Gerald Ford in September 1975. Next came President Ronald Reagan, who was shot but miraculously recovered in March 1981.
I have purposely not mentioned the names of the cowards who performed these violent acts because they are not worthy of having their names in print. They were mad men and women who sought and received their “15 minutes of fame” and deserved their decades of ignominy in prison.
We got a reprieve from high-profile assassination attempts in America from March 1981 to July 2024. But two summers ago in Butler, Pa., then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was shot by another goon. He soon recovered. Then, he was again targeted by another would-be assassin two months later on a golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla. Most recently, on April 25, a gunman allegedly targeted the president and other high-ranking officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington but was subdued before entering the room where Trump was seated.
There have been several other verified incidents in which someone threatened to do harm to the president: in Dayton, Ohio in March 2016; Las Vegas in June 2016; Reno, Nev., in November 2016; North Dakota in September 2017; Washington in October 2018 and August and September 2020. Those are just the threats while Trump was on American soil I’ve seen reported in the press. No doubt, there have been other security concerns that aren’t known beyond Secret Service circles.
With so many threats aimed at Trump since 2016, the amount of Secret Service protection necessary to protect his life must now be multiplied. I never want to get news like I got in the summer of 1968.
What to make of this egregious situation where efforts to murder a president have now become commonplace, and thereby stain the honor of our nation?
The following conclusions come to mind:
- Our country now has over 342 million people, many of whom are sufficiently unhinged to consider shooting a president.
- With the overabundance of guns available to the irrational people in our country, no gun control legislation is capable of minimizing the risk of assassination.
- The best strategy to protect the life of a president is by substantially increasing security measures.
- Given the frequency of unsuccessful assassination attempts in recent years, media outlets should be encouraged to portray aspiring killers as being unworthy of significant coverage, except when a president or presidential candidate actually gets shot. Let’s make it clear that we are not going to give lunatic assassins one second of fame.
- Let’s turn down the volume of vitriol aimed at the president by politicians and media commentators, since it surely increases the likelihood that an assassin will believe he’s justified in trying to kill the commander in chief. Strong, firm, maturely worded criticism of a president’s policies is absolutely appropriate in a democracy that guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, but unhinged rage directed at a political opponent serves no useful purpose and might just inspire a psychopath to try to kill someone.
Bottom line, unlike in the 1960s, murderous acts aimed at ending the lives of our presidents are no longer shocking because they happen so often. Their frequency will decline and such incidents will become less newsworthy when our government ramps up its security protection and our media stops its sensationalist over-reporting.
