Product Description

November 1, 1950 -- an unseasonably hot afternoon in sleepy Washington, D.C. At 2:00 P.M. at his temporary residence in Blair House, President Harry Truman takes a nap. At 2:20 P.M., two Puerto Rican natives approach from different directions. Oscar Collazo, a respected metal polisher and family man, and Griselio Torresola, an unemployed salesman, don't look dangerous, not in their new suits and hats, not in their calm, purposeful demeanor, not in their slow, unexcited approach. What the three White House policemen and one Secret Service agent guarding the president cannot guess is that under each man's coat is a 9mm German automatic pistol and in each head, a dream of assassin's glory.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #406694 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Amazon.com Review
On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, nearly assassinated President Harry Truman. If this historical fact surprises you, you're not alone. American Gunfight, a new account by suspense novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Stephen Hunter and journalist John Bainbridge Jr., examines this largely forgotten episode in meticulous detail, including the conspiracy surrounding it and the misconceptions associated with the would-be assassins. As the book makes clear, it's remarkable that these two men even came close to succeeding, given the disorganized nature of the plot. Intending to attack the president at the White House, they only learned in passing from a cab driver that it was being renovated and that Truman was in fact living at the nearby Blair House. When they made their assault on Blair House, they quickly lost their element of surprise when Collazo's gun misfired, leading to a 38-second shootout in front of the residence that left Torresola and one policeman dead. Meanwhile, Truman witnessed the action from an upstairs window.

At his ensuing trial, Collazo was depicted as a crazed fanatic, but the authors argue that this simplified assessment unnecessarily dismisses a potential political conspiracy involving Puerto Rican nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos, who was believed by some to have masterminded the plot in an effort to bring attention to his cause. Hunter and Bainbridge provide in-depth portraits of Collazo and Torresola, as well as the Secret Service agent and three White House policemen who saved Truman's life. The descriptions of the remarkably light presidential security of the era reveal much about 1950s Washington, D.C., a time in which the president would take a daily walk around the neighborhood with just a bodyguard or two in tow. As a result of the attack, the Secret Service would forever change the way it guarded the president. This fast-paced book reads like a detective thriller, shifting quickly between various story lines and characters, including a second-by-second breakdown of the gunfight itself. The potboiler narrative may seem over the top at times, with its conjecture and imagined internal dialogue, but this comprehensive account succeeds in bringing this unlikely plot vividly to life. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, engaged in a sustained gun battle with Secret Service agents at Blair House. Their goal was to assassinate President Harry Truman. It's curious that the two men haven't found a place in popular memory like other presidential assailants. But this attempt deserves attention because it was explicitly political and because it permanently altered Secret Service practices. Hunter, esteemed for his film criticism and macho adventure novels, teams up with former Baltimore Sun journalist Bainbridge for this richly detailed account of the motives and destinies of virtually everyone connected to the skirmish. This is an ambitious attempt to achieve time-lapse history. The actual confrontation took less than a minute; rather than save it up for the end, the authors spread it across much of the book, interspersed with background material on the participants. The book reads like the product of a film lover/action novelist and a journalist rather than a work of history, with the shootout described in stream-of-consciousness, and melodramatic, cliff-hanging chapter endings. To the authors' credit, though, interpretations are presented as such, and their handling of the recorded events is not only convincing but compelling.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
One of the stranger news stories of a strange year was last spring's report that the authorities in Tbilisi had foiled an assassination bid against President Bush during his brief visit to Georgia. And yet our history is so littered with attacks on the commander in chief that we barely blink when we read the latest delusional plan to take out the world's most public person. It's a savage paradox at the heart of our democracy: We expect our presidents to embody both the power of the state and the accessibility of our democratic system. That contradiction has led to a spectacularly bad record at keeping our leaders alive over the past 216 years.

Since Andrew Jackson, there have been at least 12 attempts to murder the chief executive, four of which have been successful (Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy). One of the nearest misses was the attempt on Harry S. Truman's life as he lay napping in his underwear at Blair House, around 2:20 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1950. The two assailants were Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, who tried to shoot their way into the president's temporary residence (the White House was being renovated). That they failed was due to extraordinary heroism on the part of the Secret Service and some good luck to boot. But still, the attack was lethal enough. Roughly 30 shots were fired in a brutal exchange that lasted about 38 seconds. One member of Truman's protective detail was gunned down, as was one of the would-be assassins. It was a horrifying way to begin a decade that we naively remember as a time of coonskin caps and hula hoops.

The definitive history of this attempted murder has now been written by Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge Jr. True to their topic, theirs is an unlikely conspiracy: Hunter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for this newspaper and Bainbridge a journalist and former legal writer in Baltimore. It's a bit unclear what drew them to each other or to this topic, but they attack it with verve.

Truman's near-killing is a good subject for many reasons, including its disappearance into the black hole of our amnesia. The authors begin with a list of commonly held beliefs -- that the assassins were deranged, that the Secret Service fended them off with ease, that Truman was never in danger -- and then flatly state that "every single one of them is wrong." Hooked, the reader begins a journey that weaves a bit drunkenly across the lives of all of the protagonists, pulled by fate toward the bloody confrontation. The authors have clearly worked hard to get inside the minds of the shooters. There are extensive recreations of long-vanished domestic moments, idle conversations between spouses, thoughts about cars (Secret Service guys liked Buicks 84) and other quotidian insights that deepen our feeling for the obscure gunmen who fought out this battle at the high noon of the 20th century.

These scenes are endearing and bring back a distant Washington, just after the war, when young couples streamed into the capital for the chance to start a better life. Hunter and Bainbridge pay close attention to "blue-collar, hardworking Washington." In many ways, this is a local book, and it evokes nostalgia for the more open city that used to exist before episodes like this made it impossible for presidents to mingle with ordinary citizens. All of the men shooting at each other that day were from small towns, and the authors skillfully recreate each participant's trajectory toward Blair House, going back to innocent high school football games and whispered sweet nothings -- the kinds of encounters that change lives forever. Surprisingly, the would-be assassins grew up seemingly normal and happy on their island paradise, with very similar concerns. The book is especially strong on the culture of the Secret Service -- the internal codes and rituals, the combination of action and tedium and some of the false assumptions that allowed two ordinary gunmen to get much closer to the president than they ever should have. (In retrospect, the house was too close to a busy road -- on Pennsylvania Avenue, just across from the White House; moreover, the agents were not all armed with the right weapons and were too easily surprised by a disorganized attack.) It is more difficult to revivify the Puerto Rican assailants and their motives, but Hunter and Bainbridge make a strong effort. They forage deep into the anti-Americanism that festered in the decades following the Spanish-American War and the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico, ultimately finding focus in Pedro Albizu Campos, a charismatic nationalist. Both Collazo and Torresola fell helplessly under his sway. The book's biggest piece of news -- that Albizu Campos almost certainly commanded the attempt on Truman's life -- is important but gets lost near the end. The book interweaves chapters on the Puerto Ricans and the Americans, like a film cutting back and forth between competing story lines. But this montage becomes dizzying, and that points to another shortcoming. Throughout, a breathless potboiler tone prevails, adding a Raymond Chandleresque voice-over that is distracting and in many ways self-defeating. The assassination reenactment is a genre that begs exactitude -- and the imagined interior monologues of the book's actors often strain credulity. When the assassins meet on a bridge in New York, the authors imagine that one of them looked at the Empire State Building to "locate a symbol of his pain, in the form of the lights of a spire clawing to the sky." The account of the actual gun battle includes the stream of consciousness of agents getting into position: "Grrrrrr Donald the bear feels the heat as he's on the worst damn job on the shift standing there by the stairway in his hot uniform in this hot weather all by himself for an hour his legs hurt his feet hurt he's not young anymore and maybe CLICK the noise comes. . . ." Gertrude Stein might have liked this, but it's out of place in a story based, as this story must be, on the facts.

That said, American Gunfight is well worth reading for a journey into a Washington that no longer exists. The same stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue where the battle unfolded -- then barely defended -- must now be one of the most closely surveilled places on Earth, with cameras hanging like gargoyles off every roof. Hunter and Bainbridge are correct to bring back a day worth remembering. Still, their argument would have been stronger if the compelling facts had been allowed to speak for themselves.

Reviewed by Ted Widmer
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Good But Not What it Could Have Been
I had been anxiously looking forward to reading this book since I first saw it on amazon a few months ago. Stephen Hunter is a great author & the perfect person to elucidate the story of the violent attempt on the life of Harry Truman by a pair of desperate Puerto Rican nationalists. This isn't your "usual" assassination attempt with a lone person firing a single gun but a 40-second gun battle pitting a pair of gunmen against the frighteningly casual security arrangements at Blair House where the President was staying. It's an incident that many Americans may have forgotten but it is well worth remembering, if only for the courage of the White House policeman who stopped the more dangerous of the two assassins despite having been mortally wounded himself.

The book starts out very well with little biographies of some of the people involved & a description of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement & some of the events in Puerto Rico that led to the assassination attempt in Washington, DC. Hunter is at his best in this book in describing the people inovlved & in giving enough of a history of the Secret Service, Puerto Rico, etc. without slowing his story down.

Reading this background information, it is easy to get excited about the desription of the gun battle that is coming. Hunter's specialty in his novels is writing about guns & gunfights & the book promises to be both informative & exciting when it gets to the gunfight itself. Unfortunately, when he does get to the gun battle, he falls into a sort of flashback/flash forward style of writing with very brief accounts of the assassination interspersed with more Puerto Rican history & more biographical information. As a result, the story of the actual assassination attempt becomes hard to follow & confusing & Hunter's incessant digressions rob the incident of its inherent interest & tension. He should have gotten the background stuff out of the way & then stayed with the events of the day--I'd have been willing to wait.

Hunter also has a tendency to repeat himself, especially when it comes to his opinions on the effects of being caught in a gunfight & his theories on how police marksmanship training should be conducted. Besides that fact that he tends to harp on these topics, the evidence he brings forth from this particular gun battle is thin. Of course, he may be right about what he says, but this gunfight isn't a good example of what he's trying to say--not to mention the fact that this sort of thing isn't what the book is ostensibly about. At another point, he devotes an entire chapter to a "point of view" description of part of the gunfight through the eyes of the participants. I felt this really fell flat, especially since he was simply repeating things he had just told us about without the fancy pov stylings.

This being said, the book is readable & fairly short so you can get through it in an evening, although it isn't the page-turner I had hoped it would be. And the best thing about reading it is that it will remind you of the good people who stand between people like you (& me) & the monsters of the world. God bless Les Coffelt & his family.

Forgotten history
An admirable job of reacquainting us with this event. The hero of the piece displays amazing strength and focus. The parallels to the family men who terrorize us today are sobering. But too much background and some poor editing distract the reader (I've never seen so many exclamation points outside of a middle school).

Floyd Boring-hero in November 1950, villain in November 1963
"Americna Gunfight" is a terrific book about the Secret Service heroes who saved Truman's life on 11/1/50...but Floyd Boring was a villain on 11/22/63---see these articles by Vince Palamara:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010210063152/www.njmetronet.com/palamara/boring.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010210062952/www.njmetronet.com/palamara/boring_arrb.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010209041718/www.njmetronet.com/palamara/index1.html
http://jfkassassination.net/parnell/vpal5.txt
http://www.jfklink.com/articles/EmoryRoberts.html