by Phil Mason
It was not the first remarkable escape for Jackson. He had carried a musket ball near his heart since a duel fought 23 years before he became president. It was so close that doctors refused to operate. His opponent in the duel, Charles Dickinson, reckoned to be one of America’s foremost marksmen, had aimed directly for Jackson’s heart but had been misled by Jackson’s unusual skinniness and his wearing of an oversized coat. Dickinson had hit exactly where he had thought he wanted, but the coat concealed the true position of Jackson’s frame. It missed by a fraction of an inch. Jackson’s shot, incidentally, killed Dickinson.
Two small, but highly consequential decisions, put paid to William Henry Harrison, who has the distinction of being the shortest-serving president in US history – just 31 days.
A military hero of the Indian wars, born in a log cabin and elected in 1840 on a campaign ticket emphasising his personal strength of character, Harrison was the oldest person before Ronald Reagan to win the office, at 68. He delivered what still remains the longest inauguration speech ever, taking an hour and 40 minutes, did so on a freezing March day in 1841 and, to continue the theme of his stamina, decided against wearing a coat, hat or gloves.
He caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. Exactly a month after his inauguration, he was dead.
The second American president to be assassinated, James Garfield, died because an innovative metal detector invented by Alexander Graham Bell with which he tried to locate the bullet, failed to work – because no one knew that doctors had laid the President on a coiled spring mattress.
Garfield was shot on 2 July 1881, by a crazed gunman in Washington’s main railway station, barely four months after becoming president. A bullet was lodged somewhere in his body but, despite numerous probes inside the wound, doctors were unable to find it. They feared to operate in case there had been damage to vital organs.
Although in great pain, after a few days Garfield was stable (he did not in fact die until 19 September, 11 weeks and several botched intrusive procedures later). Bell was intrigued by the case of the ‘unlocatable’ bullet. He brought to the White House a prototype device that he had been developing as an offshoot of his telephone and which he claimed was capable of detecting metal through electric currents.
Bell had already tested the machine with Civil War veterans who carried bullets in their bodies and it had successfully found the embedded metal. The President’s doctors enthusiastically let Bell try it out on Garfield. It unexpectedly failed. Unknown to everyone, the President was lying on a newfangled coiled spring mattress, which disrupted the signal.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who set a record for American presidents by winning four straight elections and serving more than 12 years in office, nearly did not serve a single day. Two weeks before his first inauguration in March 1933, while on holiday in Miami, he narrowly avoided assassination in a gun attack that saw the would-be assassin fire off five shots, all of which hit someone near the President, with one killing the Mayor of Chicago who was standing right beside him.
Guiseppe Zangara, an Italian bricklayer, somehow missed the President completely.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 is replete with conspiracy theories over who might have been responsible. One of the biggest obstacles to probing deeper into the incident is the paucity of photographic evidence. Apart from one moving-film sequence of the killing taken by a bystander, there is hardly any other visual material.
One of the curious, and still unexplained, reasons for this is that the press corps vehicle, which had always been positioned directly in front of the President’s car to help photographers get the best angles, was on this occasion consigned right to the back of the 14-car cavalcade (even though officially it was designated to be in sixth place).
From their position, none of the pressmen covering the trip were able to provide any visual evidence which might have been crucial in the investigation. Bad luck, or bad intent?
Kennedy’s prodigious womanising only emerged publicly in the years after his assassination. His philandering, however, seems very likely to have contributed directly to his death in Dallas.
According to Washington investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s 1997 exposé, The Dark Side of Camelot, Kennedy severely tore a groin muscle while frolicking with one of his illicit partners during a vacation in late September 1963. Doctors ordered him to wear a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin body brace that locked him rigidly upright. This, and the back brace he already regularly wore because of an old football injury which had been exacerbated during war service, made it impossible for him to bend in reaction to the assassin’s first bullet. This hit him in the throat but was not a fatal shot. His head remained upright and did not move. The second, deadly strike, blew his brains out.
The very first assassination of an American president that might have been caught on film, of William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901, was missed through unlucky timing. The Edison Company had been filming the President on the day of his visit and was changing reels when word spread that McKinley had been shot. They had missed the actual shooting. All they could do was to film scenes showing the crowd’s reaction to the outrage.
Charles de Gaulle was a frequent target for assassination throughout his presidency of France because of his policy on Algeria, first resisting the independence movement and fighting a civil war there between 1954 and 1962, and then being regarded as a traitor by French Algerians after he agreed to independence. A shadowy organisation of former settlers, the OAS, plotted dozens of attempts to kill him in revenge.
One source suggests there were no fewer than 31 documented attempts on his life. Most were gun attacks and, as de Gaulle always travelled in a bulletproof car, were less dangerous than they looked. One famous attack in August 1962 in a Paris suburb deposited 14 bullets holes in the presidential limousine and shot out two of the four tyres.
He came closer to death when the plotters used explosives. The narrowest escape came by sheer luck. In July 1966, de Gaulle was being driven to Orly Airport. His car passed a parked vehicle on the Boulevard Montparnasse which was packed with a ton of explosives. It did not go off because there was no one to prime the bomb. Those behind the attack, students from an extreme right-wing group pressing for the preservation of French Algeria, had gone off to commit a robbery to get funds to escape abroad, and had been arrested during that crime.
It was the last known attempt to kill de Gaulle.
Leon Trotsky, organiser of the Red Army that helped Lenin to success in the Communist revolution in Russia, was assassinated in Mexico in August 1940, 13 years after being forced into exile after he fell out with Stalin. It was the second attempt on his life that year. The previous May, he had survived an attack by Stalin’s henchmen when his bedroom was sprayed with 73 bullets – he escaped without a scratch.
He was eventually done for by a lone assassin who had befriended him over recent months. He buried an ice pick in Trotsky’s skull. He had been let through the usual security checks because Trotsky’s bodyguards had been busy belatedly bolting the stable door after the earlier attack: they had been installing an up-to-date security system.
A momentary lapse of concentration by Winston Churchill a decade before he was called upon to be prime minister, almost robbed Britain of its wartime leader.
In December 1931, during a lecture tour in New York, Churchill was nearly killed when knocked down by a car as he absent-mindedly stepped off a curb to cross Fifth Avenue, having looked the wrong way to check for traffic.
He had forgotten that Americans drove on the opposite side of the road and was hit by the vehicle, which was travelling at nearly 35mph from the other direction. He suffered serious head and thigh injuries and spent nearly three weeks in bed recuperating. But he fully recovered, to history’s good fortune.
The incident did have its silver lining. He made £600 (about £30,000 in modern values) from an article he wrote about
it for the Daily Mail the following January.
While serving as a First World War major on the Western Front in 1915, Churchill miraculously escaped death by just 15 minutes. He was ordered to meet a car sent by his Corps Commander, General Haking, on 26 November, which meant a three-mile walk across muddy countryside to make the rendezvous. He left in good time, and shortly before an artillery barrage opened up targeting his sector. When he reached the appointed spot, he learned that the firing had driven off his pickup. A staff officer told him that the meeting could take place later as it ‘was only about things in general and that another day would do equally well.’
A grumpy Churchill tramped the three miles back to his company headquarters to discover that a quarter of an hour after he had left his dugout, a shell had landed a few feet from where he had been sitting, destroying the shelter and killing the orderly who was inside. He later wrote, ‘When I saw the ruin I was not so angry with the General after all.’
Churchill’s own military valet also had reason to be thankful. Churchill had taken him with him for the meeting ‘to carry my coat.’
Churchill often reflected on this near-death episode and the effect of chance. ‘You may walk to the right or to the left of a particular tree, and it makes the difference whether you rise to command an Army Corps or are sent home crippled or paralysed for life.’
A Battle of Britain veteran revealed in 2000 how he saved Churchill from being shot by his own wife during a pre-war visit to an RAF station at Croydon in 1939. Clementine Churchill was being shown around the cockpit of a fully-armed Gloster Gladiator fighter plane. Winston was bending down in front of one of the guns when, according to James Sanders, Clementine’s host, her finger went unwittingly to press the firing button.
‘I knocked her hand away to stop her,’ he recalled. A year later, Churchill was prime minister.
Had anything happened to Churchill in the early years of the war, it is conceivable that Britain would have been run by a South African. The diaries of one of Churchill’s Private Secretaries, Sir John Colville, regarded as the most intimate inside account of the war premiership, relate how in October 1940, after the invasion scare appeared to be over but before the winter Blitz descended, insiders in Downing Street seriously contemplated the chances of General Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa, who Churchill trusted for military advice and had invited into the Imperial War Cabinet (just as Lloyd George had done in the First World War).
Smuts’ reputation, with his unparalleled experience of the workings of the war cabinet, stood high in London, and the idea of a Dominion head leading Britain was seen as the much-needed proof of the unity of the worldwide British Commonwealth at a time when Britain stood alone.
The seed of the idea, Colville suggests, was quietly fed into the King’s circle through the Queen, whom Colville’s mother knew, and other royal intimates. Two weeks later, Colville recorded in his diary that Queen Mary had been very taken by the idea and passed it on to George V, who also reacted favourably. As history turned out, the plan was never needed.
Although such an idea may sound far-fetched at this distance in time, the period was one of gigantic and unprecedented change. Barely four months earlier, as France tottered towards an armistice with Germany, the British Cabinet offered France a formal legal and political merger with the United Kingdom to try to stem defeat across the Channel. The French, in disarray, could not organise themselves in time to accept it. In such times, anything could seem a possibility.
Communism may have had its origins in an irritable skin disease. Writing in the British Journal of Dermatology in 2007, medical historian Professor Sam Shuster reported that there was credible evidence that Karl Marx suffered from a skin disease which can create a severe psychological disorder, fostering feelings of exploitation and alienation. He theorised that the affliction could very likely have given a significant push to the direction of thought Marx took which ended up with him inventing the theory that underpinned communism.
The researcher believed him to have been suffering from hidradenitis suppurativa, a repulsively messy disorder of the sweat glands that produces boils and pus-oozing spots. Although it was unclear when he first began to be affected by the disease, the symptoms were in evidence by 1864, when Marx was 46 years old and researching in the British Museum in London for his major work, Das Kapital, that lays out the conceptual theory of communism and which was published in 1867.
So it may have been all the misery, exasperation and feeling of oppression from these bodily ills that could, the medic suggests, have been the main driving force which created the state of mind that dreamt up a system of politics which was to plague hundreds of millions of people’s lives in the century to come.
British novelist Arnold Bennett died of typhoid in 1931 after a trip to Paris. He contracted the disease there from drinking a glass of local tap water. According to the most popular account, he had done so in order to demonstrate that the water in France was perfectly safe.
The last words of Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest scientific mind of all time, are unknown as he uttered them in German as he passed away in 1955 and the nurse who was with him when he died did not speak the language.
The Titanic disaster might have been prevented had a member of the crew not forgotten to hand over the key to his locker.
Second Officer David Blair was removed from the ship’s roster at the last minute before the Titanic’s departure from Southampton in April 1912. In the haste of being replaced, Blair failed to pass to his replacement the key to the crow’s nest locker which held the binoculars vital for the lookouts.
After the disaster, which cost 1,522 lives, one of the surviving lookouts, Fred Fleet, giving evidence to the US inquiry, confirmed that they did not have any binoculars on the voyage. Had they done so, he testified, they could have seen the iceberg earlier. When the chairman of the inquiry asked, ‘How much earlier?’ the lookout replied, ‘Well, enough to get out of the way.’
The key, which saved the life of Blair, was kept as a memento. His descendants put it up for auction in 2007. It fetched £90,000.
The world’s worst air disaster, the collision of two Boeing 747 jumbo jets at Tenerife’s Los Rodeos airport in the Canary Islands on a Sunday evening in March 1977, was indirectly the result of a minor terrorist act. A small bomb planted by a group campaigning for independence for the Canaries had exploded at midday at the airport on neighbouring Las Palmas causing the airport to be closed. All flights were diverted to the Tenerife.
This resulted in the airport becoming hopelessly overcrowded. Fog descended during the afternoon which hampered operations further. The collision, between an American Pan Am 747 and a Dutch KLM jumbo, happened because of confusion about the aircrafts’ whereabouts in the fog. The Dutch plane, trying to take off, careered into the American 747 that was taxiing and had unknowingly strayed on to the main runway. Five hundred and eighty-three passengers died. There were just 70 survivors – all from the American craft.
Accident investigators of the 1998 crash of a Swissair flight from New York off Canada’s Nova Scotia coast recommended one crucial change to in-flight procedures. They urged that airlines should drastically shorten the checklist that pilots are required to follow to detect the source of cabin fires. They discovered that at the time of the crash, Swissair’s checklist took 30 minutes to go through. The flight had crashed only 20 minutes from the first signs of smoke on board.
Air Canada’s flight 143 from Montreal to Edmonton in July 1983 nearly ended in catastrophe when it ran out of fuel midway through its journey. Pilots glided the Boeing 767 for more than 100 miles before making a successful emergency landing on a disused airstrip near Winnipeg, narrowly missing a motor racing event that was being held there.
Investigators discovered that the ground crew had got their metric and imperial measurements mixed up. Instead of loading the plane with 22,300kg of fuel (or 49,060 imperial pounds), they had only loaded 22,300 po
unds.
Air Canada had just taken delivery of its first four 767s. The craft was the first of the fleet to be calibrated in metric units. Up until then, all the airline’s planes were measured in imperial – and the crew carelessly forgot.
The beaching on to rocks on the Cornish coast of the 1,840 ton cargo ship RMS Mülheim in March 2003 was caused, the accident investigators found, by the captain catching his trousers on a control lever, falling over and knocking himself unconscious. He was the only person on the helm at the time. By the time he had recovered consciousness, the vessel was aground on the rocky coastline near Sennen. She lost up to half her cargo, which washed out to sea. The ship was a total wreck, and eventually broke up seven months later.
In the most serious of more than 20 incidents since the Second World War in which American nuclear weapons have either been involved in major accidents or fires which released radioactive material or where missiles have actually been lost, a B-52 bomber carrying two 24-megaton nuclear weapons broke up in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina, in January 1961, four days after the inauguration of President Kennedy. One of the bombs fell into a marshy area and has never been recovered. The other crash-landed and scattered across a wide area. When it was recovered and analysed, scientists found that five out of the six safety devices had failed. Only a single switch had prevented the bomb from detonating. The weapon was 2,000 times more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima.
