Of the 45 men who have served as U.S. presidents, four of them—Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy—died at the hands of an assassin. Others have escaped death or injury. In 1974, for example, an armed Samuel Byck boarded a Delta airliner in Baltimore and demanded that the pilots take him aloft with the intention of crashing the aircraft into the White House and killing Richard Nixon. When the pilots refused, he shot them, killing one, and then turned the gun on himself after being wounded by the police.
Three presidents were shot but survived their assassins’ bullets. Whatever we may think of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump, the cool-headed courage and even humor that all three men demonstrated in the face of death makes an impression.
