On Dec. 11, 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy was threatened by Richard Paul Pavlick, a 73-old former postal worker motivated by hatred of Catholics.
He meant to crash his dynamite-filled 1950 Buick into JFK’s vehicle, but he changed his mind after seeing JFK’s wife and daughter bid him goodbye. Pavlick was arrested three days later by the Secret Service after they found dynamite in his car. He was confined to two different mental hospitals. and he died at age 88 in 1975.
On April 13, 1972, President Richard Nixon literally dodged a bullet when Arthur Bremer intended to shoot him, but the president’s limo sped by too fast for Bremer to get a good shot at him. The next day, Bremer missed a second chance, when he failed to retrieve his gun from his hotel room. A month later, Bremer shot and seriously wounded Alabama Governor George Wallace, paralyzing him from the waist down until his death in 1998. Bremer served 35 years in prison for that dastardly deed.
On Feb. 22, 1974, Samuel Byck meant to kill Nixon by crashing a commercial airliner into the White House. He hijacked a DC-9 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport after killing a Maryland Aviation Administration police officer. He was shot in the process, but lived long enough to kill himself with his own gun.
On Sept. 5, 1975, President Gerald Ford was on the northern grounds of the California State Capitol, when Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme pulled a Colt M1911 .45-caliber pistol on him when he reached out to shake her hand in a crowd. She had four rounds in the gun, but none in the firing chamber. Hence, the gun did not fire. She was quickly subdued by the Secret Service and later sentenced to life in prison. However, she was released from prison on August 14, 2009, nearly three years after after Ford died in 2006.
On Sept. 22, 1975, in San Francisco, Calif., just seventeen days after Fromme’s failed try, Sara Jane Moore fired a revolver at Ford from 40 feet away. An alert bystander, Oliver Sipple, grabbed Moore’s arm, causing her shot to miss Ford, but slightly wounding taxi driver John Ludwig. Moore was tried and convicted in federal court, than sentenced to life in prison. After serving over 30 years, she was paroled on Dec. 31, 2007, one year and five days after Ford’s natural death.
On May 5, 1979, President Jimmy Carter was the target of Raymond Lee Harvey, an Ohio-born unemployed drifter, who was arrested by the Secret Service after he was found in possession of a starter pistol with blank rounds, just 10 minutes before Carter was to speak at the Civic Center Mall in Los Angeles, Calif. Charges against him were ultimately dismissed for lack of evidence.
I’ll have one more column on this topic next week. I hope it piques your interest as well.
Retired Army Colonel Thomas B. Vaughn may be reached at tbvbwmi@benlomand.net.
