Puerto Rican militants try to assassinate Truman, Nov. 1, 1950
On this day in 1950, two Puerto Rican pro-independence militants, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman. From 1948 to 1952, Truman and his family lived in Blair House, on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, while the executive mansion underwent extensive renovations.
At 2 p.m., the would-be assassins walked up to Blair House’s front steps and began shooting. Private Leslie Coffelt, a Secret Service uniformed officer, was mortally wounded but managed to return fire and kill Torresola.
Meanwhile, Collazo walked up behind Donald Birdzell, another Secret Service uniformed officer, and pulled the trigger on his Walther P-38 handgun. Because he had failed to cock it, nothing happened. After pounding on his pistol, Collazo managed to fire the weapon just as Birdzell turned to face him, striking the officer in his right knee.
Standing nearby, Floyd Boring, a Secret Service special agent, and uniformed officer Joseph Davidson, opened fire with their service revolvers. Collazo returned fire but found himself outgunned as the wounded Birdzell managed to draw his weapon and join the shootout. Soon after, Collazo was struck by two .38-caliber rounds in the head and right arm.
Torresola and Collazo belonged to the extremist Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, which sought to gain independence from the United States. The “Independistas” had targeted Truman, though the president backed Puerto Rican autonomy.
Truman was taking a midafternoon nap in his second-floor quarters when the shooting began. He went to a window and saw Collazo below on the front steps. A White House guard saw the president standing by the window and shouted to him to get down. The president obeyed. Unfazed by the foiled assassination attempt, Truman kept his scheduled appointments that day. “A president,” Truman later said, “has to expect these things.”
Collazo was sentenced to death, but on July 24, 1952, Truman commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. President Jimmy Carter commuted Collazo’s life sentence in September 1979, and he was freed from prison. He died in Puerto Rico on Feb. 20, 1994, at the age of 80.
In the wake of the assignation attempt, the FBI arrested Collazo’s wife, Rosa, on suspicion of having conspired with her husband in the plot. She spent eight months in federal prison but was never tried. Upon her release, Rosa continued to work with the pro-independence Nationalist Party. She helped gather 100,000 signatures in a bid to save her husband from execution.
Truman supported a Puerto Rican plebiscite in 1952 on a potential new constitution to determine the island’s future relationship to the United States. Nearly 82 percent of the voters supported the status quo, which had been established in 1950.
A plaque at Blair House commemorates Coffelt’s heroism. The day room of the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division at Blair House is named for him.
SOURCE: “TRUMAN,” BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH (1992)