Not seeing any telltale blood, he determined that the bullet hadn’t penetrated his lungs. “He pinked me,” Roosevelt told a party official. I want to see him.” Roosevelt asked the shooter, “What did you do it for?” With no answer forthcoming, he said, “Oh, what’s the use? Turn him over to the police.”Īlthough there were no outward signs of blood, the former president reached inside his heavy overcoat and felt a dime-sized bullet hole on the right side of his chest. The man who had been propelled to the Oval Office after an assassin felled President William McKinley bellowed out, “Don’t hurt him. The well-wishing crowd morphed into a bloodthirsty pack, raining blows on the shooter and shouting, “Kill him!” According to an eyewitness, one man was “the coolest and least excited of anyone in the frenzied mob”: Roosevelt. The candidate’s stenographer quickly put the would-be assassin in a half-nelson and grabbed the assailant’s right wrist to prevent him from firing a second shot. As he stood up in the open-air automobile and waved his hat with his right hand to the crowd, a flash from a Colt revolver 5 feet away lit up the night. as Roosevelt entered his car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel. The shooting had occurred just after 8 p.m. READ MORE: How Teddy Roosevelt Crafted an Image of American Manlinessīloodstained shirt worn by President Theodore Roosevelt photographed following an assassination attempt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1912. Only with the speech completed did he agree to visit the hospital. Although his voice weakened and his breath shortened, Roosevelt glared at his nervous aides whenever they begged him to stop speaking or positioned themselves around the podium to catch him if he collapsed. “I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot not a rap,” he claimed. Only two days before, the editor-in-chief of The Outlook characterized Roosevelt as “an electric battery of inexhaustible energy,” and for the next 90 minutes, the 53-year-old former president proved it. The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.” “Fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet-there is where the bullet went through-and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. Holding up his prepared remarks, which had two big holes blown through each page, Roosevelt continued. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bullet-riddled, 50-page speech.

“It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” the wounded candidate assured them. The horrified audience in the Milwaukee Auditorium on October 14, 1912, gasped as the former president unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. (Credit: Stock Montage/Stock Montage/Getty Images)Ĭlearly, Roosevelt had buried the lede.

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