The Plots Against the President

by Sally Denton

  The third car in the madcap convoy was driven by a Miami police officer and carried forty-six-year-old William Sinnott, a former New York City policeman who had once guarded Roosevelt as governor and came to Bayfront Park to pay his respects. Sinnott had been shot in the head. Also in the third car was Margaret Kruis, a twenty-three-year-old tourist from New Jersey who had been shot in the hand and whose head was grazed by a bullet. Mabel Gill, the wife of the president of the Florida Light and Power Company, was critically wounded, having been shot in the abdomen. Russell Caldwell, a twenty-two-year-old chauffeur from Coconut Grove, lay across the backseat with a bullet embedded in his forehead.

  The night resident at sleepy Jackson Memorial was reading a “girlie” magazine when suddenly someone banged on the door to the emergency room. “Open the door for the president of the United States!” a voice boomed. With that, a Secret Service agent wheeled in Roosevelt. The two other cars arrived shortly afterward, and the hospital was swarming with the wounded victims and dozens of police officers. Moley was beyond relieved to see Roosevelt standing, with the help of Gennerich, obviously uninjured and exhibiting remarkable equanimity. One reason for Roosevelt’s peculiar composure under the circumstances was his initial assumption that the assassin’s intended target was Cermak—not him.

  “F.D.R. had talked to me once or twice during the campaign about the possibility that someone would try to assassinate him,” Moley later wrote in the Saturday Evening Post. “To that extent, I knew, he was prepared … But it is one thing to talk philosophically about assassination, and another to face it.”

  The battered and bleeding gunman was transferred to a squad car and whisked away to the jail at the Dade County Courthouse, accompanied by Moley, in his capacity as an academic criminologist. Meanwhile, Roosevelt and his entourage of friends, bodyguards, and law enforcement officers began piecing together what had happened. When word came that the assassin had been identified as an Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara, Roosevelt assumed that Zangara was a Mafia hit man whose intended target was the mayor of Chicago. Otherwise, Roosevelt reasoned, the assassin would have shot him while he was vulnerably seated atop the car. Indeed, a gangland war was occurring in Chicago, and Cermak was widely known to be cracking down on the organized crime syndicate headed by Al Capone. Cermak’s support of the repeal of Prohibition stood to decimate Capone’s bootlegging empire. Just weeks earlier, Capone’s enforcer had been shot by a member of Cermak’s personal police detail. Cermak had received retaliatory threats and ordered a bulletproof vest to be ready upon his return to Chicago. He had traveled to Miami with a retinue of Chicago detectives serving as personal bodyguards. At the time, Miami was crawling with Chicago gangsters who were hanging around the Hialeah Racetrack. Ironically, a horse named “Roosevelt” won the second race that day, a winning ticket paying $3.35.

  Still assuming that the gunfire had not been meant for him, Roosevelt called his wife. It was ten forty P.M., and Eleanor had just arrived at their East Sixty-fifth Street town house after giving a speech at the Warner Club. “These things are to be expected,” she had said calmly, upon hearing the news from a distraught butler. Franklin and Eleanor spoke for a few minutes. Learning that her husband had held Cermak in his arms prompted her to write that the ride “must have been awfully hard on Franklin. He hates the sight of blood.”

  Roosevelt spent four hours at the hospital, visiting the victims and awaiting word of their condition. He was able to see them all except for Mrs. Gill, who was undergoing surgery. At two A.M. he was driven back to the Nourmahal, where he spent the night, having postponed his return to New York until the next day.

  There, in the well-appointed saloon of the luxury yacht, Roosevelt downed a tumbler of whiskey while Moley reported the results of his interview with Zangara: Roosevelt, not Cermak, had indeed been the target. The assassin’s shots went awry when he lost his balance on the chair on which he was standing.

  Moley had observed Roosevelt closely over the many hours and was astonished by his self-possession and compassion for the victims. He recalled the moment:

  Roosevelt’s nerve had held absolutely throughout the evening. But the real test in such cases comes afterward, when the crowds, to whom nothing but courage can be shown, are gone. The time for the letdown among his intimates was at hand. All of us were prepared, sympathetically, understandingly, for any reaction that might come, now that the tension was over and he was alone with us. For anything, that is except what happened.

  There was nothing—not so much as the twitching of a muscle, the mopping of a brow or even the hint of a false gaiety—to indicate that it wasn’t any other evening in any other place. Roosevelt was simply himself—easy, confident, poised, to all appearances unmoved.

  … And I confess that I have never in my life seen anything more magnificent than Roosevelt’s calm that night on the Nourmahal.

  Word of the shooting spread quickly, as newspapers and newsreels reported the dramatic events. Extra editions and bulletin announcements blanketed the country. The attempt on his life, and his courage in the face of crisis, brought Roosevelt a surge of public support. If he had disembarked from the Nourmahal a wealthy dilettante, he returned to it a hero. “The President-elect, feeling the bullets were intended for him, straightened up, set his jaw and sat unflinchingly with calm courage in the face of danger which would be expected from one of his family,” the New York Times said of his heroism.

  The next morning, February 16, Roosevelt returned to Jackson Memorial Hospital to visit Cermak and the other victims. On the ride from the pier to downtown, his car was encircled by a phalanx of motorcycle police, and Secret Service agents stood on its running boards. As on the day before, unprecedented crowds lined the route. When he was wheeled down the hospital corridors to Cermak’s room, all the staff lined up in awe of the paralyzed man who had acted with such heroism.

  “Tony, I hope you’ll be up and around soon. We’ll need you at the inauguration.”

  “I’m glad it was me instead of you,” Cermak reportedly answered, though later accounts disputed this exchange. Whether apocryphal or real, the sentiment was a poignant reflection of how the two men would be bound to each other throughout history.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Too Many People Are Starving to Death

  Investigators, including Moley, who was the first to interrogate Zangara at the Dade County Jail, worked quickly to determine the motive, intent, and background of the Italian-born itinerant laborer—and, especially, whether he had acted alone. Zangara had railed against capitalists from the moment he began shooting, indicating an obvious political motivation for the assault. “I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.” Roosevelt—the quintessential capitalist from one of America’s wealthiest families—was his target and had his aim not been thwarted, Zangara would have radically changed the course of history. What had transpired in Miami’s Bayfront Park—the identity of the hero or heroine who saved Roosevelt’s life and whether Zangara had an accomplice, as several witnesses claimed—was intensely scrutinized as Florida police and prosecutors scurried to build a criminal case.

  J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the U.S. Bureau of Investigation in Washington, set out to determine the broader implications, assigning a special agent in Miami to assist in the local investigation and sending out a bulletin to all his agents throughout the country requesting information on Zangara. Since the Secret Service was the lead agency, Hoover’s agency “conducted only minor, collateral investigations,” as he put it. He coordinated his efforts with both the U.S. attorney general and the Secret Service, as the agencies pursued possible co-conspirators and followed Zangara’s elusive trail from Italy to New Jersey, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Panama, Los Angeles, and ultimately Miami. An operative from the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Department reported to Hoover that Zangara had been identified as “among the bonus diehards who were still on the streets of Washington” in August 19
32.

  On February 16, Hoover received an urgent telegram from one of his officers informing him that Zangara was a suspected member of “an Italian anarchistic terrorizing group with headquarters at a farm near Newark, New Jersey,” where the explosives detonated in a recent post office bombing had been manufactured. Other intelligence information received in the proximate days following the shooting indicated that Zangara “was the representative of a certain group of Communists or Anarchists in Cuba,” according to U.S. Justice Department files, and that the plot against Roosevelt had been formulated the previous December in Galveston, Texas. A longtime Russian informant of Hoover’s sent him a confidential letter stating that he had seen Zangara at a vetcherinka—“dances conducted by the Russian Anarchist groups.” One particularly intriguing communiqué from a British intelligence agent stated that Zangara had ties to an international seditionist organization that had carried out the assassination of French president Paul Doumer the previous year. That organization, according to the informant, had been thwarted in an attempt to kill President Hoover in Palo Alto, California, when he went to vote in the November election.

  Hoover was inundated with letters from witnesses insisting that another small Italian man had accompanied Zangara and from informants claiming direct knowledge that Zangara had not acted alone. A municipal worker in Miami reported that while replacing the old flag at the bandstand with a newer one more befitting of the president, he saw Zangara sitting on a park bench between two women a full five hours before Roosevelt was scheduled to arrive. All three were speaking a foreign language, and the two women were carrying oversize handbags.

  Zangara himself was cooperative and boastful, and even wrote a jailhouse “autobiography” detailing his actions.

  When I fired the first shot, the chair I was standing on moved and the result was that it caused me to spoil my aim, and at the distance of at least thirty feet to miss by one foot. I then tried to get my aim again but after I had fired the first shot the people crowded around the car and I could hardly see Roosevelt’s head. I saw two heads in front of the President’s and figured on firing another shot between those two heads but the bullet struck them both in the head. And this is what saved his life. This was also the reason for me shooting six people with a five shot gun.

  Investigators reconstructed the events of February 15 that began when the thirty-two-year-old Zangara left his boardinghouse early in the morning and went to the Bostick Hotel. “Someone sent me here and I am looking for a room,” he told the hotel manager. Carrying a small black package under one arm, he said that he needed a place “to be quiet” until six P.M. He paid $1.50 for the room, where he spent several hours pacing and chain-smoking, while wracked with his chronic stomach pain. In the early evening, he loaded his gun and began walking toward Bayfront Park. Surprised by the size of the crowd even hours before Roosevelt was expected, Zangara became anxious and pressed his way toward the elevated bandstand in the forty-acre park.

  What happened next is mired in controversy and contradiction. At least two eyewitnesses—a forty-six-year-old carpenter named Thomas Armour and a woman named Mrs. Willis McCrary—claimed they saw Zangara and another man move to the front of the bandstand at approximately eight P.M., an hour and a half before the shooting. Mrs. McCrary described Zangara’s companion as dark, of the same diminutive stature as Zangara, and wearing a blue coat, white striped trousers, and a pair of white and tan sport shoes. Seated behind Mrs. McCrary in the second row of stadium seats—folding chairs made of wood and metal that were fastened to each other and bolted to the ground—was her friend Lillian Cross. Cross, the forty-eight-year-old wife of a Miami physician, told police that she had climbed onto her seat to get a better view of Roosevelt. From that vantage point, the five-foot-tall Cross had an unobstructed line of sight to the rear of the presidential car, twenty-five feet away.

  Suddenly, she said, Zangara hopped onto the small chair with her, causing her to lose her balance and nearly collapsing the folding seat. “Don’t do that please. You’re going to knock me off,” she told him, her seat tottering. As she turned to him, Cross saw that he was her same height while standing on tiptoe. At the same moment, he reached his right arm over her right shoulder, and she saw that he was holding a pistol. Her immediate thought was, “He is going to kill the president!” In a split second she pushed his arm up, she later claimed, deflecting his straight shot at Roosevelt. His arm, according to numerous witnesses, was raised above the heads of those in front of him, with his hand pointed down toward the presidential vehicle. The revolver was so close to Cross that the gunpowder of the first shot burned her cheek. Zangara continued shooting until he emptied all five rounds and “two Legionnaires and three Miami policemen” crashed into him “like a ton of bricks,” according to several accounts.

  Robert Gore, the newspaper publisher who had come up with the idea for a Roosevelt rally in Miami, was standing next to Margaret Kruis, who had been shot in the hand and whose hat was grazed by a bullet later found in Cermak’s shirt collar, with a piece of her hat fabric still attached to it. Gore carried the young woman away from the scene, placed her in the care of another spectator, and rushed back to the pile of people who had tackled Zangara and were pummeling him. Gore told police that Cross was on top of the suspect, trying to strangle him, and that Zangara was yelling, “I want to kill the president! I kill the president. Too many people are starving to death. I’m glad I got Cermak.” Gore’s account, though strongly challenged by Cross, who claimed that Zangara didn’t speak at all, and by numerous other witnesses, gave rise to the early and continuing theories that Cermak was the intended target.

  Armour, the carpenter who was standing behind Zangara when he fired the first shot, dismissed Cross’s testimony as hogwash. Armour discounted Cross’s claims that she had saved Roosevelt’s life by knocking Zangara’s arm. Armour reported that Zangara’s first shot was unimpeded and poorly aimed, and that it was he, Armour, who had grabbed Zangara’s forearm and forced it downward as Zangara continued his shooting rampage. “I sprang but before I could get him he fired the first shot. I grabbed his right arm, which held the gun, between the wrist and the elbow with my right hand before the second shot exploded,” Armour wrote in an affidavit. “I then pushed the arm which held the gun up in the air. An officer jumped over the benches from the front and knocked Zangara off the bench.”

  For months, and then years, Cross and Armour would dispute each other’s testimony, each calling the other a liar. Initial press accounts credited Armour with the heroism. But after Florida Democratic congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen—daughter of William Jennings Bryan—suggested that Cross be awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, Roosevelt invited Cross to attend the upcoming inauguration, and her legacy as the woman who saved Roosevelt’s life was sealed. When she sold her story to a true-crime magazine, it became nationally sensational. That did not stop the controversy in Miami, however, where Armour supporters, irked by her fame and fortune, carried on a long-standing campaign to convince Roosevelt that Cross had lied. Nor did her story waver when Zangara himself contended, “Nobody take my arm, sure, one lady over there on my side when I try to shoot president on a little iron chair and when I try to shoot him the chair move because the lady, she move, and I missed the first shot and the lady try to get away. She no try to touch me because she was scared.” But Zangara’s confessions and jailhouse memoir would vacillate. Publicly he would blame Cross’s interference for the shooting of the other victims when he had intended to kill only Roosevelt. Privately, though, he told his attorneys that he went along with her account because he didn’t want to “deprive Mrs. Cross her glory.”

  Miami police reportedly doubted Cross’s story, but, perhaps like Zangara, they were reluctant to spoil the inspirational tale of the petite housewife who saved the president’s life. In the end, the “little lecture on manners” from H. L. Edmunds, the tourist from Iowa, “possibly had a far greater effect,” a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote. “
It halted Zangara in his tracks … From that time on he stayed back where he was, walled in by spectators at an inconvenient distance from his ultimate target.”

  Whatever the truth about the heroics, Zangara was performing in less-than-optimal conditions. As Robert J. Donovan, author of The Assassins, wrote, “The fact remains that Zangara was a poor marksman firing at a difficult target from an unstable perch under trying conditions and at a considerable range and an unfavorable angle.”

  “I’m such a little fellow I didn’t have a chance,” Zangara concluded.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Typical of His Breed

  The first newspaper accounts of Guiseppe Zangara emphasized his foreign origins: “The little Italian, defiant at first, sat quiet and almost courteous as they questioned him.… His bulging eyes dilate in the dim light as he speaks. His hair, dark and curly, is awry. He sits on a narrow bench, nude after the officers have removed his clothing to search for other messengers of death … His bone-like arms are taut, his fingers are clasped around two slender, brown knees. His face is dark, the heavy growth of beard common to his race showing prominently.”