Two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to kill President Harry S. Truman in an effort to gain independence for their homeland, leading to the deaths of one security agent and one would-be assassin.
On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists
The assassins, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, were members of the New York City-based Puerto Rican Nationalist Party
The planned assassination was not the only violence leading up the Puerto Rican vote. As part of the Juyuya Uprising
The assassins were an odd pair. Torresola, only twenty-five years old, was an active member of the PRNP. He claimed at various times to work as a bodyguard for Pedro Albizú Campos in Puerto Rico, but more often he seemed to be unemployed and living on welfare in the Bronx. Collazo, thirty-six years old at the time of the attack, was also a member of the PRNP. Unlike the younger Torresola, Collazo was a respectable family man, supporting his wife and three children by working as a metal polisher. Neither man was part of the Juyuya Uprising, but the failure of the uprising convinced both of them that the murder of President Truman was necessary to gain international attention for their cause.
Torresola and Collazo’s plan was as amateurish as the men themselves. The assassins, armed with handguns, planned to shoot their way past the security guards outside the building, enter through the front door of Blair House, and quickly search through the house until they could locate and kill President Truman. It was an ill-prepared plan, and nothing went as expected. While Torresola knew how to use a gun, Collazo had not fired a gun in years and was unfamiliar with the Walther pistol provided for him. The assassins had information about neither the layout of Blair House nor how many security officers were stationed in the building. Unusually warm weather meant that more Secret Service and White House police personnel were on duty outside the house than usual, posted at the main steps into the house and at a security desk just inside the front door.
Leaving the Harris Hotel at mid-morning, the two assassins split up and approached Blair House from opposite sides. Approaching from the east, Collazo aimed his weapon at White House police private Donald Birdzell
Slightly wounded in the head in the exchange, Collazo slumped to the steps. In the meantime, Torresola approached the house from the west. Torresola fired upon police privates Joseph Downs
A final burst of gunfire hit Collazo in the chest. He fell on the Blair House steps without reaching the front door. As it turned out, he was lucky he did not make it inside the house. At the front desk, Secret Service agent Stuart Stout
Collazo survived his chest wound (the bullet ricocheted off his sternum) to face three criminal counts: the murder of Leslie Coffelt, intent to kill the president, and assault with intent to kill Donald Birdzell. Refusing to plead for mercy, Collazo used the trial to promote the Puerto Rican independence movement. Convicted on all counts, Collazo received a death sentence for his part in the assassination plot, and the judge scheduled his execution for August 1, 1952. Only a week before his execution, however, Truman commuted his sentence to life in prison. Truman justified his action on the grounds that Collazo had not fired the bullet that killed Coffelt. Imprisoned for twenty-seven years, Collazo became a free man when President Jimmy Carter pardoned him in 1979. He returned to Puerto Rico, welcomed as a hero of Puerto Rican nationalism. Oscar Collazo died in Puerto Rico of a stroke in 1994.
Oddly, the attempted assassination of Harry S. Truman turned out to be a political boon for the president. With his popularity waning in 1950, Truman’s brush with death gained him the sympathy of the American voters, causing a temporary upswing in his popularity. The assassination attempt did not help Puerto Rico. Americans viewed the Puerto Rican independence movement with suspicion, and efforts to gain independence for the island suffered from an inevitable public backlash. Fearful of similar assassination attempts, future presidents relied upon increasingly dense security measures to protect their lives. In doing so, presidents became increasingly separated from their constituency.
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Hamby, Alonzo L. Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. The best academic biography of Truman, this book concentrates upon Truman’s political life. The discussion of his near assassination focuses on its boost to his political standing among American voters. -
Hunter, Stephen, and John Bainbridge, Jr. American Gunfight: The Plot To Kill Harry Truman—and the Shoot-Out That Stopped It. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. The only book written exclusively on the assassination attempt. Provides a great amount of detail about the Puerto Rican independence movement, the assassination attempt itself, and the subsequent events after November, 1950. -
McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. A Pulitzer Prize-winning book that examines Truman from a personality viewpoint rather than a purely political one. McCullough provides an excellent account of the shoot-out at Blair House. -
Raskin, Jonah. Oscar Collazo: Portrait of a Puerto Rican Patriot. New York: Committee to Free the Puerto Rican Nationalist Prisoners, 1978. An unabashedly biased biography of Oscar Collazo, portraying him as a hero who sacrificed for his nation instead of a bumbling would-be assassin.
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