WILLIAM MCKINLEY
1901 WILLIAM MCKINLEY ASSASSINATION – After nine days, US President William McKinley died from the anarchist’s bullet that struck him in Buffalo, N&. The President was busy shaking hands with visitors to the Pan-American Exposition on 6 September 1901, and smiled as a dark-haired man with a bandaged hand reached the head of the line. When Leon Czolgosz, aged 28 was a few feet from the President, he pulled out the pistol his false dressing concealed, and fired twice at the President. “I done my duty!” was the killer’s cry as his victim staggered backwards. One of the President’s guards immedately felled the assassin with a smashing blow to the face. The stricken President cried weakly: “Go easy with him, boys!” But the bullet had done its work, and the president succumbed to gangrene in the pancreas. Secret Service investigations followed rumours that an archist gangs had decided to kill the President, but all organized groups disavowed any such intent, warning however, that disaffected lone individuals might threaten the President’s life. Czolgosz appears to be just such an individual, having been denounced in the anarchist journal Free Society as a dangerous crank who might even be a police spy. So the warning that “only a single heartbeat separates Teddy Rossevelt from the White House” is justified and Americans must come to terms with an intellectual aristocratic cowboy who knows how to “rough ride” as President.
(Twentieth-Century Murder Martin Fido)