Harry S. Truman’s Near Miss With Puerto Rican Independence Activists
Public DomainUnlike most presidents on this list, Harry S. Truman was attacked at home.
It’s rare that a would-be assassin makes it all the way to the president’s front door. But that’s what happened to Harry S. Truman.
On November 1, 1950, the president was napping upstairs at the Blair House — where he had relocated during White House renovations — when he suddenly heard gunfire from the street below. Truman sprang to his feet and rushed to the window, where he saw a man on his doorstep.
That man was Oscar Collazo. A pro-Puerto Rican independence activist, he and his fellow nationalist Griselio Torresola had come to the Blair House to kill the president — to help bring attention to their cause.
But the Secret Service members guarding Truman put up a fight. In less than a minute, they had exchanged gunfire with the two assassins and barricaded the Blair House door. A fatally injured Secret Service agent named Leslie Coffelt managed to kill Torresola, and Collazo was arrested at the scene.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images Oscar Collazo lies at the foot of the steps of the Blair House. Harry S. Truman was just upstairs.
“At this time all of us in Washington had a bad scare,” Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote in the aftermath of the event, noting that he and other Cabinet members didn’t even know whether Truman was hurt at first.
But Truman was more or less unfazed by the presidential assassination attempt. When asked about the incident by Time magazine, he said: “A president has to expect those things… the only thing you have to worry about is bad luck. I never have bad luck.”
Though Oscar Collazo was sentenced to death, Truman later commuted his sentence to life in prison. President Jimmy Carter went one step further — and allowed Collazo to leave jail and return to Puerto Rico in 1979.
