Back before United States chief executives had security details, Andrew Jackson was on an afternoon stroll on Capitol Hill when a man jumped out of the bushes and pointed two flintlock pistols at the president's chest.
They both misfired. The former general and veteran of the War of 1812 took his hickory cane and beat the would-be assassin senseless. That man spent the rest of his life in an asylum.
That event occurred about 200 years ago. Since then, we've had four successful presidential murders and numerous other attempts, some of which we know about, others not.
Teddy Roosevelt survived a shot to the chest and, in fact, died years later with the bullet still in his body. President Gerald Ford had two well-known attempts made on his life within two weeks, both in California.
A former Secret Service agent told me about another lesser-known incident in the 1976 presidential campaign. During a parade in Springfield, Illinois, an agency lookout spotted a rifle sticking out of an apartment window ahead on the parade route.
As the president's cavalcade neared, agents rushed into the building, vaulting up the stairs while snipers sighted in on the window, awaiting the order to fire. When agents kicked in the apartment door, they found a youngster watching the parade through the scope on his father's rifle.
This summer, we've now had two unsuccessful attempts on the life of former president Donald Trump. Which, as you might expect, prompted much public hand-wringing over the sudden explosion of violence in America.
Such claims may get a speaker in the news. They're just not true.
There has been considerable talk this campaign about the overblown, hyperbolic rhetoric used. They were extreme. A prime example is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris likening Trump to Adolf Hitler and declaring often that he is an existential threat to American democracy.
This presumably superseded all the criticism last election of Trump's "mean tweets" that got him banned from Twitter.
As further evidence of Biden's mental imbalance, the man who declared Trump is "literally a threat" to U.S. freedom urged other people to tone down their overheated rhetoric. Seriously.
My colleague Susie Moore has detailed the firm response from GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance.
This week, the Babylon Bee captured the surreal sense in media these days with the headline:
"Democrats Accuse Trump of Inciting Further Violence by Not Dying"
That's the topic of this week's audio commentary.
In recent days, I also posted another personal Memory in the ongoing occasional series of memories from my journalism career posted in the last year or so. This one recounted the experience of visiting all three 9/11 crash sites six months after.
The moving scenes and people I talked with were encouraging reminders that if the hijackers' goal was to break Americans' spirit, they failed miserably.
