Assassins need luck (see 1914: Gavrilo Princip shoots the Archduke Ferdinand and his Duchess), and Giuseppe Zangara was simply very unlucky when he tried to assassinate the newly elected president Roosevelt. Zangara was an Italian immigrant, a bricklayer, and had become convinced that the US president was causing him internal pains, a perhaps not uncommon delusion at any time(Herbert Hoover had been his original intended victim).
When he discovered that Roosevelt was giving a speech in Miami, Zangara joined the crowd watching the end of the parade, and stood on a chair (Zangara was five feet tall) to get Roosevelt into the line of fire. Roosevelt was exhausted. The American public did not know that Roosevelt was a post-polio paraplegic, and it was only with great difficulty that he had managed to raise himself in the car to respond to the cheering crowd. Just after the car stopped, only yards away from the waiting Zangara, Roosevelt slumped back in his seat, saying to a newsreel cameraman: ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t do it’.
Zangara opened fire and managed to get off five or six shots at his now out-of-sight target, while struggling with members of the crowd who began tackling him. The whole episode lasted five seconds. Roosevelt was unhit, but five others were shot, including Mayor Cermak of Chicago. Cermak subsequently died of his wounds, and the fact that Cermak was a noted enemy of Al Capone led to wild speculation that he had been the real target all along. Zangara, despite being clearly mad, was sent to the electric chair. His last words were ‘Pusha da button’, and he is one of the few assassins (or wannabe assassins) to feature in a musical: Sondheim’s Assassins.
What Could Have Happened Next?
Perhaps the only certain answer to a ‘What if?’ question is Mao Zedong’s response to the question: ‘what if Khrushchev had been assassinated, not Kennedy?’ Mao said that whatever else may have happened, he was quite sure Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs Khrushchev. But while Kennedy’s vice-president – the Texan Lyndon B Johnson – proved, improbably, to be one of the great American reformers, it is hard to see Roosevelt’s vice-president – another Texan, John Garner – being a similar surprise. Roosevelt once asked Garner what he would do if the Cubans shot an American, and Garner responded ‘depends on the American’. This sounds witty, but Garner was probably not intending to be witty. More chillingly, when the great black contralto Marion Anderson sang at the White House in 1939 for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Garner is said to have refused to clap and sat with his hands by his side. If Zangara’s luck had been in, this man would have been US president. He was furious when Roosevelt ran for a third term in office, and ran unsuccessfully against him in the Democratic primary of 1940. Garner does become president in a 1999 Superman comic, Superman: War of the Worlds (after Roosevelt is killed by Martians). In this unappealing parallel universe, the British PM is Oswald Mosley.