The Wildest Foiled U.S. Presidential Assassination Attempts 

The first known attempted assassination of a sitting U.S. President took place in 1835, as then-President Andrew Jackson was returning from a funeral. Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, approached the president with not one but two derringers. Both failed to fire, and Jackson beat his would-be assailant with his cane, before Lawrence was arrested.

Ultimately found to be not guilty by reason of insanity – among other things, Lawrence claimed to actually be King Richard III, dead since 1458 – Lawrence spent the rest of his life in an institution. The police later tested the two pistols, and found that they worked perfectly. 

The unlikely event of not one but two pistols misfiring in an attempt on the life of the president “made a deep impression upon the public feeling, and irresistibly carried many minds to the belief in a superintending Providence,” according to senator Thomas Hart Benton.

In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was no longer president. He had left office after serving two terms as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 until 1909. In 1912, however, he sought the office again—the constitutional amendment limiting presidents to two terms would not be ratified until 1951— forming his own Bull Moose Party when he was denied the Republican nomination. While on the campaign trail, Roosevelt was shot in the chest by New York saloon-keeper John Schrank.

Schrank was disarmed and captured by the crowd, but Roosevelt ordered the crowd not to harm his assailant. In fact, Roosevelt refused medical aid, instead going on to give his full speech, talking for some 84 minutes as blood soaked his shirt. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the crowd, “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.” 

The bullet was left where it had lodged in Roosevelt’s chest muscle, and it remained there for the rest of his life. At his trial, the failed assassin claimed that he had been encouraged in his attempt on Roosevelt’s life by the ghost of assassinated former president William McKinley, who had visited him in a dream and told him to slay Roosevelt.

The 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy is one of the defining moments of American history—but it wasn’t the first time that an attempt was made on Kennedy’s life. In 1960, while Kennedy was still president-elect, 73-year-old Richard Paul Pavlick planned to end the presumptive president’s life by crashing a Buick loaded with dynamite into Kennedy’s car.

Allegedly, Pavlick was all ready to go when he changed his mind after spotting Kennedy’s wife and daughter seeing him off. He was caught four days later, with his car still loaded with dynamite. While charges against him were dropped after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Pavlick was still held in a mental hospital until 1966, with a judge determining that he was unable to tell right from wrong.

Would-be assassin Arthur Bremer—who ultimately shot and seriously injured Alabama governor George Wallace instead, paralyzing him from the waist down—may be the most famous person to plot against the life of Richard Nixon, but his plan wasn’t the most unusual. That dubious distinction goes to Samuel Byck, who, in 1974, planned to kill the president by crashing a DC-9 passenger plane into the White House. 

He got as far as hijacking the plane on the runway of the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, where he shot both pilots before the plane could take off, killing one of them, before he was shot himself by an airport policeman.

Byck survived long enough to end his own life with the revolver he had used in the hijacking. He left behind a tape recording detailing his plan, which he called “Operation Pandora’s Box.”

Not one but two notorious criminals threatened the life of President Gerald Ford. The first was Muharem Kurbegovic, who had been conducting a reign of terror through bombings and arsons as the unidentified “Alphabet Bomber.” The Alphabet Bomber’s most notorious crime was detonating an explosive in a public locker at the Los Angeles International Airport, killing three people and injuring several others. 

In 1974, Kurbegovic, who frequently taunted police with letters and recorded messages, claimed that he was going to come to Washington and kill Ford with a nerve gas bomb. The threat allegedly helped to catch Kurbegovic in a net woven by several cooperating law enforcement agencies.

The following year, Ford’s life was targeted again, this time by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, one of the members of Charles Manson’s “Family” – this already several years after the string of murders that made Manson and his followers infamous around the world. While Ford was visiting the California State Capital and shaking hands with the public, Fromme produced a .45-caliber pistol and attempted to shoot the president, though her effort failed because, while there were four cartridges in the magazine, there were none in the chamber. 

Fromme was detained by the Secret Service and arrested.

“What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what ive got in store for you mr president,” read a letter intended for President Barack Obama that was laced with the deadly toxin ricin. “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns.”

The letter, along with similar ones sent to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Mark Glaze of the Raben Group, was mailed by actress Shannon Richardson. 

Richardson had appeared in minor roles in The Walking Dead, The Vampire Diaries, and The Blind Side, and she later admitted to purchasing castor beans and using them to produce ricin—but not before trying to frame her husband, Nathan Richardson, for the crime.