A Short History of Political Assassinations in America: from Alexander Hamilton to Donald Trump

“Our politics must never be a literal battlefield. We resolve our differences at the ballot box – not with bullets,” US President Joe Biden piously opined after the bungled assassination attempt on his predecessor (and possible successor) Donald Trump in July.

Biden’s record in telling whopping lies with a straight face vastly exceeds the exaggerations of Trump. Indeed, it is a wonder that the President of the United States’ nose does not already extend a la Pinocchio to the orbit of Mars.

For the United States has always resolved its most crucial political differences and presidential choices by bullets not ballots.

As the former H. Rap Brown, now Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, rightly said, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”

For stating this Inconvenient Truth as a young man, al-Amin languishes today at the age of 80 in a remote jail serving a life sentence for two murders he certainly did not commit. Another man even openly confessed to the crimes.

In fact, the crucial role of assassination to resolve the political disputes of the United States precedes the institution of universal (white male only) democracy in 1828 by almost a quarter century. In 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr – a crass amateur by the standard of later operators – personally gunned down a helpless defenseless former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel that Hamilton had been led to believe was purely ceremonial at Weehawken, New Jersey on July 11, 1804.

As remains true of all political assassinations of leading political figures in the United States to this day, the dark, cold, clear political context and motive for the murder was immediately wrapped behind an absurd and sentimental lie – another American Specialty.

Burr was said to merely resent the fact that Hamilton’s single Electoral College vote in 1800 was directed to putting Thomas Jefferson rather than Burr himself into the White House to succeed John Adams.

In reality, Hamilton with his plans for a practical, economically united and mighty, industrializing Union stood in the way of Burr’s plots, backed by cabals of Southern white racists and the British Empire, to create an enormous, sprawling slave empire over Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Hamilton opposed slavery and was determined to abolish it, which also helped seal his death sentence.

It was a policy that was still openly, mercilessly and obsessively pursued till the Civil War, and then revived by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in their policies of routine toppling and invasions of Spanish speaking nations across the Western Hemisphere and the Caribbean throughout the 20th century.

Similarly, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth on April 15, 1865 is presented as the act of a melodramatic, romantic loner.

But Booth has been reliably documented as merely the spearhead and (willing) tool of a far-flung conspiracy openly aided and supported by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and legendary Army of Northern Virginia General Robert E. Lee himself. For which they both certainly deserved to have been hanged.

The assassination of now forgotten President James Garfield in 1881 by Charles Guiteau was attributed to disappointment by his murderer at not receiving a federal position. It was the same “deranged, tragic, contemptible loner” myth that would be used in the 1960s to cover up the clear political motives and plots behind the killing of President John F Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King.

In 1901, the murder of twice elected hugely popular President William McKinley was used to clear the way for a new era of American aggression and expansion that swallowed the ancient kingdom of Hawaii, which McKinley had publicly pledged to respect and protect. TR then moved to carve out a separate country – Panama – from Colombia with which to build the US-controlled Panama Canal.

The murder of McKinley was carried out by an impoverished anarchist who was the tool of Emma Lazarus – to this day a mythical feminist, revolutionary darling of the American Idiot Far Left. And Lazarus for decades had been the close associate and almost certainly lover of Prince Peter Kropotkin, who ran for 40 years the Anarchist International from London under the protection of the British Empire.

From this protected safe haven, Kropotkin’s Anarchist organization slaughtered many enlightened leaders around the world dedicated to protecting their national economies from Anglo-French internationalist control.

The details of the shooting of President McKinley in Buffalo, New York on September 6,1901 by anarchist Leon Czolgosz bore astonishing parallels to the evisceration of Russia’s great and much-loved Liberator Czar Alexander II on the streets of St. Petersburg with a shrapnel grenade by Ignacy Hryniewiecki on March 13,1881. Once again, an impressionable young woman Sofia Perovskaya with close conspiratorial and sexual ties personally to Kropotkin was the direct orchestrator and personal inspirer of the murder.

The 1930s ironically saw two violent US political deaths that appeared to be efforts to kill a president and potential president, but in fact were not.

Giuseppe Zangara wildly fired shots apparently at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in Miami on February 15, 1933. But in fact, he hit his real target, Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

Cermak, no lily pure saint himself, was trying to get control of Chicago’s billion-dollar-a-year liquor industry and other rackets from the infamous Capone Mob, then led by Frank Nitti. Zangara appears to have been the button-man designated to carry out the hit, which he did. FDR just happened to be there at the time, and in fact comforted the dying Cermak after the attack. Making the hit on Cermak nearly 1,400 miles from Chicago (America is big) removed the danger of the mob being brought under direct federal investigation for any obvious involvement.

On September 8, 1935, FDR’s most formidable political opponent, Louisiana’s de facto dictator, former governor and serving senator Huey P. Long was shot dead on the floor of the magnificent Capitol Building in the state capital Baton Rouge. Conspiracy theories claiming to implicate FDR, his party bosses and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ever since, but not the slightest iota of evidence to support any of them has ever emerged.

However, in 1989, in Bucharest, Romania, of all places, I met an 89-year-old courtly Louisiana retired doctor who was told by a Baton Rouge priest on his deathbed that the padre had himself years before taken the deathbed confession of one of Long’s loyal but incompetent bodyguards. This dying muscleman had confessed that when the alleged killer, respected physician Dr. Carl Weiss entered the state Capitol, he was carrying in his jacket not a gun but a bulky legal deed to sign with Senator Long to end an acrimonious and well-known land dispute between them. However, Long’s bodyguards thought he was pulling out a gun and riddled the poor doctor with more than 40 bullets. They also mortally wounded their own boss by accident.

Had Long lived, he likely would have cost FDR the 1936 election by drawing so many voters from him across the South and the US Heartland to throw the election to republican candidate Alfred Landon.

James Forrestal, first US Secretary of Defense, was not shot, but his suicide was likely the cover for his murder when he plunged or more likely was thrown (in a manner consistent with a method prescribed in the CIA handbook on how to carry out assassinations produced only a few years later) from the 12th floor of the US Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.

Forrestal, a devout Catholic, had not appeared suicidal at all to his brother and other friends who had visited him in the hospital and was determined to go public with details of ultra-secret US research programs that remain heavily classified to this day.

The ultimate classic US political assassination of course was the murder of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. Far from being obsessed with killing the president, Lee Harvey Oswald appears to have been a patriotic US Marine who faked his own defection to the Soviet Union under CIA direction and remained under agency control when he was returned to the United States.

In his extraordinary, well documented book “JFK and the Unspeakable” (2008), researcher and historian James W. Douglass deploys formidable evidence to present Oswald as a loyal patriot who had saved Kennedy’s life from a similar plot to kill him in a crossfire while passing through Chicago in a motorcade only three weeks before.

The ultimate mastermind of the assassination was clearly former CIA chief Allen Dulles. Kennedy’s successor Vice President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover both appear to have been aware of the plot and protective of it.

Kennedy’s death unleashed a wave of political killings across America, usually of skeptics or inconvenient eyewitnesses to what really happened in Dallas, Texas on that day. At least 200 unexplained, bizarre and mysterious deaths were recorded over the next 14 years. Even one of the most powerful mafia bosses in America, feared Chicago crime chief and torturer Sam Giancana, was blown away in his own home right before he was due to testify before a Senate committee investigating assassination.

The American public and its ever fearless, revered, overpaid, idolized and glamorized, ridiculously pretentious thousands of intrepid reporters swallowed the ridiculous story that poor Oswald had fired off all the necessary bullets to be accounted for in record time from a clunky, unworkable 6.5 x 52mm Carcano Model 38 infantry carbine from more than 100 feet up at a right angle at a receding target going downhill. Clearly, none of them had ever handled a rifle in their lives.

But so successful was the myth of the “Lone Gunman” unpredictable and devoid of any true political motivation, interest or concept, that it was also used successfully to protect the real killers, directors and political contexts of the assassinations of JFK’s brother, Senator Robert Kennedy and of Nobel Peace laureate Dr. Martin Luther King, both in 1968.

In fact, Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted killer – yet another tragically deranged, mad “Lone Gunman” and John Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in Washington, DC on March 30,1981 both displayed evidence of extreme psychological manipulation of the kind the CIA routinely used in its notorious MKUltra program that began in 1953, continued for 20 years and was only terminated – at least officially – in 1973.

Two years after MKUltra was – at least officially – shut down, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, driving force behind the quadrupling of oil prices that had crippled the US economy and plunged the Western industrial world into crisis, was shot dead on March 25 1975 by a disturbed nephew Prince Faisal bin Musaid who had just returned from the United States. Musaid was convicted quickly of regicide and was beheaded before he could be extensively questioned and examined.

The unsuccessful attempt to assassinate former president and once again Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania at a rally on July, 13 2024 revived all the hoary old cliches, myths and unfounded stereotypes about disturbed young single, or unhappily married young white men who relieved their sexual frustrations by letting fly at random at sitting presidents or potential White House contenders.

“Once again, five weeks since the first attempted assassination of a current or former president in over 40 years, the public still has precious few answers about 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks,” the New York Post admitted on August 26.

Of course they don’t. And they never will, as long as their Betters and Minders, the self-appointed Guardians of Plato’s Perfect Utopia, stay in control.

Somewhere in the lowest circles of Hell, Allen Dulles is laughing.

And for telling the Truth about America’s Political Process Decided by Bullets, Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, an innocent man, remains behind federal bars for two murders he never committed.