Since 1865 more U.S. heads of state have been assassinated than in any other country.  Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1882), William McKinley (1901) and John F. Kennedy (1963) were all cut down. There was also an attempted assassination of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami on February 15, 1933. Had it succeeded then war with Germany might well have been averted.

On November 1, 1950, Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to murder President Harry S. Truman in a failed shoot-out. Other unsuccessful attempts on the lives of American Presidents included Theodore Roosevelt who was shot and wounded on October 14 1912.

Following the Second World War there was a wave of convenient ‘suicides’ throughout the United States.  These included the inexplicable deaths of Harry Dexter White, Stephen Duggan and ex-U.S. Ambassador to Britain, John G. Winant.  

Most interesting (after General Patton’s ‘accident’) was that of James Forrestal, America’s First Secretary of Defence. On May 22 1949, he fell (or was pushed) from an upper floor window of a Washington hospital. The First Secretary, one of the most important legislators in the United States had been ‘diagnosed as being deeply depressed’. Why, one asks, was a man in such a state not given a ground floor room?

President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) when ill refused to be taken to hospital. He muttered, ‘if I go in there I will never come out alive.’  The President survived. 

Very little reason was ever given as to why the Danish UN diplomat Paul Bang-Jensen, profoundly interested in the fate of Hungarian refugees fleeing the Hungarian revolt should take his own life in a New York park on Thanksgiving Day 1959. ~ Michael Walsh