It would not be a very difficult job to shoot the president of the United States. All you’d have to do is get up in a high building with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight, and there’s nothing anybody could do.—President John F. Kennedy
According to Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Kennedy said this on the morning he was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in a high building with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.[1] Within 12 hours of the President’s assassination, Oswald was in police custody and nearly everything important to the case was known. The one missing piece was Oswald’s motivation in his own words. Jack Ruby prevented the world from hearing those words.
Yesterday former president Trump was shot by a man on a rooftop with a high-powered rifle. America avoided a national tragedy by roughly an inch.[2] Details are coming out about the shooter, who was himself fatally shot by Secret Service snipers. Whether we will know is motivations remains to be seen. But in many ways, it doesn’t matter. Like Oswald, this was almost certainly a lone shooter who happened to have an opportunity.
It’s not hard to guess the coming theories:
- The Secret Service is secretly loyal to Biden (or the Democratic Party or another Republican candidate) and allowed the shooter to get in place to kill the former president. Their plan failed.
- Under the theory of cui bono, Trump or his allies staged the assasination attempt to gain voter sympathy. This seems very risky, of course, but maybe the teleprompter was intended to shield the former president.
- China, Q or some other mysterious organization masterminded the attempt for reasons that fit with their lore.
But the truth is disappointedly simple. It was a troubled young man, whose motivations were likely confused and incoherent, decided to shoot a presidential candidate. I’m confident that whatever was going on in his mind has virtually no meaning for the rest of us.
The quote is sourced from William Manchester’s The Death of a President: November 20–November 25, 1963, which was published in 1967. He interviewed people who were in the room at the time Kennedy said this. ↩︎
As in the Kennedy shooting, there were other victims who seem likely to be forgotten over time. For the record, Corey Comperatore was killed yesterday. ↩︎