AFTER THE NOURMAHALSAILED INTO BISCAYNE BAY on February 15, Astor and his passengers held a farewell dinner. As dessert was served, reporters scurried aboard and the president-elect told them about the twelve “perfectly grand” days of fine swimming and bone-fishing. “And I didn’t even open a briefcase!” he exulted, a carefree attitude at a time of crisis that might have caused some controversy had the evening proven uneventful.
Roosevelt didn’t tell the press about the practical joke he had played on the cruise, a good example of the hijinks he enjoyed. The yacht contained a small mimeograph machine that produced a daily “newspaper” made up of news briefs obtained by radiogram to keep the passengers at least modestly informed of events. FDR added an item reporting that the U.S. Supreme Court had issued a ruling condemning quickie divorces and ordering all estranged husbands and wives to return to their spouses pending further review. One member of Astor’s party had been divorced by his wife and was contemplating remarriage. As his friend blanched, FDR laughed uproariously and told him: “Forget it—it’s all made up!”
The plan was for FDR to leave the port at 9:00 p.m. in a green Buick convertible for a short reception at the garish bandshell in Bayfront Park, then take an overnight train that would arrive in New York the following afternoon. Ray Moley had come down to meet the ship and brief FDR on the Cabinet. He was in the third car of the motorcade with Astor and Kermit Roosevelt when they saw the crowds already lining Biscayne Boulevard. Moley and Astor each remembered the other remarking how easy it would be to shoot FDR.
A few moments after this conversation, the motorcade pulled up to the bandshell. Darkness had fallen and the amphitheater was illuminated with red, white, and blue floodlights. An American Legion drum-and-bugle corps played patriotic songs. Local radio covered the event live. Gus Gennerich, FDR’s powerfully built bodyguard, hoisted Roosevelt up on the top of the backseat of the car.
FDR spoke for less than a minute in the casual tones he favored. He talked about catching fish and how much weight he gained on his vacation: “One of my first official duties will be taking the ten pounds off.” This was about as far as Roosevelt liked to venture off the cuff with a big crowd. Time was short and he wrapped it up by saying he looked forward to coming back to Florida the following year. Standing nearby was Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, who was vacationing in Miami and hoped to win federal help for his bankrupt school system and to mend fences after his disastrous treatment of FDR at the Chicago convention the previous summer.
The speech was briefer than anticipated—a disappointment, no doubt, for the throngs who had lined up hours in advance. After Roosevelt handed over the microphone, a member of a newsreel crew that had missed filming him climbed on the back of the convertible and asked him if he would repeat his remarks for the camera, a common request in those days of unreliable equipment. When FDR demurred, the man pleaded that he had traveled a thousand miles for the pictures. Roosevelt looked irritated and waved him off, before being helped back into his seat, where he made a smaller target.
“That unquestionably saved his life,” Vincent Astor said later.
Giuseppe Zangara was a thirty-two-year-old unemployed New Jersey bricklayer who stood a mere five foot one and weighed only 105 pounds. He told anyone who would listen that his stomach hurt. He didn’t intend it as a metaphor for the hunger and despair of the Depression, but it became one. Zangara had assassination in mind for years, having waited with a gun in his pocket for a glimpse of King Victor Emmanuel of Italy during a parade in 1923. But because the guards were over six feet tall, he could not even see the king, he recounted in a recently discovered jailhouse memoir.
This became a problem for him in Miami, too. Zangara had wanted to kill Herbert Hoover and had lingered around the fringes of the Bonus Army march in Washington the previous summer. But then he moved south and began plotting to kill the new president. He arrived only an hour and a half before FDR’s appearance, not in time to stand or sit in front. When he tried to push himself there, he was rebuffed by H. L. Edmunds, a tourist from Ottumwa, Iowa, who reminded him that women and children were sitting at the front and told him sternly that he was showing bad manners.
Like the rejected newsreel request, that little lecture on crowd etiquette probably changed history. Zangara settled for the third row, less than ten yards from the back of the Buick. He was angling for a better view when the president-elect quickly finished his speech and sat down.
Standing just ahead and to the right of Zangara was Lillian Cross, a forty-eight-year-old housewife. Like Zangara, she was only about 100 pounds and five feet tall. When spectators began to leave their seats after FDR finished speaking, she and Zangara hopped up on the same rickety bench and stood on their tiptoes for a better sight line. Behind them stood Thomas Armour, a forty-six-year-old Miami carpenter, attending the event with his teenage son. Cross and Armour would each later claim to have saved Roosevelt, and they may both have been right.
Zangara got off five shots from twenty-five feet. They sounded to Astor like the popping of the magnesium flashbulbs still used by news photographers. One hit the back of the car, just inches from Roosevelt; the others wounded bystanders. “Stop that man!” a woman screamed. “Don’t let him kill Roosevelt!”
“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,” a frustrated Zangara recalled. That was apparently Cross’s doing, though unintentionally jostling a bench (and getting her foot caught in it) was hardly the heroic act that later resulted in her being profiled in every newspaper in the country and nominated for a Congressional Medal of Honor.
Armour—a reserved man who made for a less tabloid-friendly hero than Mrs. Cross—had to fight for recognition, but a policeman and others who witnessed the shooting believed he deserved it. After the first shot, the spectators anywhere near the line of fire did what bystanders do in such circumstances—they ducked. This gave Zangara a clear view of Roosevelt’s head. According to Armour, he grabbed the assassin’s arm and broke his direct aim as he got off four more shots, then forced his arm into the air to avoid hitting people on the ground. Within seconds, another man helped him wrestle Zangara to the pavement.
Six people were wounded by the five bullets, including Mayor Cermak. Shortly after he began chatting with the president-elect by the side of the car, a shot penetrated his rib cage, and the crowd saw a red stain expanding across his white shirt.
By now, it was pandemonium. “Lynch him!” someone shouted as Secret Service agents moved in on Zangara. “Kill Him! Cut his throat!” Within moments, Zangara was handcuffed to the rack on the back of the car carrying Moley and Astor. Three policemen held down the suspect, with a fourth balanced precariously on the running board, secured to the sedan only by Moley’s finger clinging to his belt-loop. Moley feared the car would capsize. Along the route, traumatized spectators asked: “Has Roosevelt been killed?”
In fact, Roosevelt was unscathed. “Get him out of here!” Gus Gennerich yelled as he threw himself over FDR’s chest, giving him a case of sore ribs. The driver of the car, a Miami policeman, began accelerating out of the park. FDR, taking a risk that he might be shot by another hidden assailant, twice insisted that the driver stop and see whether Cermak needed help getting to the hospital. Finally, the wounded mayor was lifted into the seat next to him.
The president-elect was genuinely fearless that evening. It was almost a family tradition: His cousin Theodore was shot in 1912 while standing in the back of a car and went on to deliver his speech with a flesh wound. FDR also understood the importance of seeming fearless to the public—of investing an already harrowing tale with a mythic quality. Indeed, much of the public story of what happened in Miami came from Roosevelt himself, who the next day invited reporters into his private railroad car en route to New York. Between cigarette puffs, he described the events with a perfect understanding of the newspapermen’s need for dramatic narrative. He also knew that the right depiction of his leadership under fire would offer him a heroic springboard into the White House:
“Just then I heard what I thought was a firecracker, then several more…the chauffeur started the car…. I looked around and saw Mayor Cermak and Mrs Gill [another shooting victim] collapsing…I told the chauffeur to stop…. He did, about 15 feet from where we started. The Secret Service men shouted, ‘Get out of the crowd.’ The chauffeur started again and I stopped him again….
“Looking back, I saw Mayor Cermak being carried…. He was alive but I didn’t think he was going to last. I put my left arm around him and my hand on his pulse, but I couldn’t find any pulse.
“After we had gone another block, Mayor Cermak straightened up and I got his pulse…. I held him all the way back to the hospital…. It seemed like 25 miles…. I talked to him all the way. I remember I said, ‘Tony, keep quiet—don’t move. It won’t hurt if you keep quiet and remain perfectly still.”
Eleanor told a friend, “That drive to the hospital must have been awfully hard on Franklin—he hates the sight of blood.” But the story was public relations gold. The image of the next president of the United States cradling a wounded man in his arms, reassuring him that everything would be fine, made an indelible impression on Americans who were themselves wounded in some way that February. Like the flight to Chicago the summer before and the Inaugural Address less than three weeks away, the Miami shooting offered a chance to crystallize public impressions and shape his presidency—and Roosevelt knew it.
At Jackson Memorial Hospital, doctors credited FDR with helping to keep Cermak from going into shock. The tiny hospital staff had a shock of its own that night. When the motorcade arrived, the night resident on duty, with no radio at hand, still hadn’t heard about the shooting. He was sitting with his feet propped up, reading a “girlie” magazine, when the loud voice of a Secret Service agent demanded: “Open the door for the President of the United States.” Assuming it was a joke, the annoyed young doctor shouted: “Tell him to piss on the floor and swim in under it.”
That story didn’t make print at the time, but another received wide publicity and added to the Roosevelt mystique. It was reported as fact that when FDR went into Cermak’s hospital room to check on him, the mayor looked up at the president-elect and said: “I’m glad it was me instead of you.” This was the invention of John Dienhart, a Hearst reporter from Chicago who doubled as Cermak’s drinking buddy and PR man. “Jesus,” Dienhart said years later. “I couldn’t very well have put out the story that Tony wanted it the other way around.”
Zangara was quickly depicted publicly as an addled anarchist, though the jailhouse memoir he dictated shows no sign of mental illness. He was bent on regicide. “I see Mr. Hoover, I kill him first. Make no difference. President just the same bunch. All same. Run by big money,” he testified. The fascism of Mussolini held no allure for him and the FBI was never able to find evidence of any Communist connections. And had he been a Mafia hit man aiming to kill Cermak—a popular notion for many years—he would not have made his attempt in front of a huge crowd. Of course none of this stopped the conspiracy theories. Just as Zangara was sure that the world was run by a few capitalists, many Americans were sure that Zangara himself must be the tool of larger interests. Although legally sane, according to the psychiatrists who examined him, Zangara was diagnosed as “perverse,” “erratic,” and “anti-social.” But if his politics were strange and unfocused, so were those of thousands of people battered by the Depression. There was little organized communism or fascism in the United States in 1933, but plenty of confused anarchism and hatred of the wealthy. Zangara differed mostly in his willingness to act on it.
If the Iowa tourist hadn’t insisted on manners, if the newsreel operator hadn’t failed in his plea, if the five-foot housewife hadn’t jostled the bench, if the alert carpenter hadn’t grabbed Zangara’s arm—then John Nance Garner would have become president of the United States. Under the newly ratified Twentieth Amendment (and by common agreement before that), the vice president-elect succeeded to the presidency on the death of the president-elect.
Like word of his nomination in Chicago, Garner did not hear the news until the following day, long after radio listeners around the world learned of it. His rule on not being disturbed at his Washington hotel after 9:00 p.m. was inflexible. At five feet one, with eyebrows he described as “like two caterpillers rasslin,” “Cactus Jack” Garner of Uvalde, Texas, would have been FDR’s polar opposite as president—a libertarian with little interest in dramatic action or the theatrics of governing. “The great trouble today is that we have too many laws,” he said in 1932. “I believe that primarily a government has two functions—to protect the lives and property rights of citizens. When it goes further than that, it becomes a burden.” He had made brief headway as a presidential candidate in 1932 because W. R. Hearst admired his isolationist views.
No one can know for sure whether Garner would have failed as president, but it’s hard to imagine the sixty-four-year-old “Texas Coolidge”—a nickname he liked—inspiring the country over the radio in the dismal winter of 1933. As Roosevelt’s running mate, he made only three campaign speeches all year, and the Democrats considered themselves fortunate he didn’t deliver more. (In one, he pledged to “never do anything” as vice president.) The political scientist Richard Neustadt later speculated that “Garner’s voice, had he become president, would have been as bad as Hoover’s.” More lackadaisical leadership would likely have led to serious social upheaval.* The consequences of a Roosevelt assassination, the Literary Digest concluded at the time, “might have been more disastrous than the imagination can picture.”
Vincent Astor arrived at Jackson Hospital to find his friend sitting placidly in a white hospital jacket. He suggested that in view of the rumors on the street, FDR put out a statement. “Your mind, Vincent, works very slowly. I did that three minutes ago,” Roosevelt replied.
Rumors were spreading fast. FDR’s daughter, Anna Dall, had first heard an erroneous report that her father had been shot five times. At the hospital, Franklin called Eleanor to tell her what happened. Years later, she remembered him saying that night that if someone wanted to kill him and didn’t care if he was himself caught or killed, there was nothing the Secret Service could do. “You can’t live with that on your mind all the time—you’ve got to forget it,” he told her. “We will just have to force ourselves never to think of these possibilities, otherwise life will be impossible.” Irvin McDuffie, FDR’s valet, said he could “throw off anything,” including an assassination attempt. “He believed what was to be would be.”
But when it was Eleanor’s safety at issue, FDR took a less fatalistic view. Some hours later, he called Eleanor again to tell her that he was dispatching Secret Service to protect her. “Don’t you dare do such a thing,” a friend heard her say over the phone. “If any Secret Service man shows up in New York and starts following me around, I’ll send him straight back to where he came from.” When Franklin insisted, she dug in. “Nobody’s going to try to shoot me,” she told her husband. “I’m not that important.”
The president-elect remained at the hospital for two hours as Cermak’s condition stabilized for the moment (all but one of the other five suffered only minor injuries). Then he returned for the night to the Nourmahal. Moley was mightily impressed that even when he was finally off-stage, FDR remained unperturbed: “There was nothing—not so much as a twitching of a muscle, the mopping of a brow, or even the hint of 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.” Seven years after the event, when he had turned sharply against the New Deal, Moley still averred that “I have never in my life seen anything more magnificent than Roosevelt’s calm that night on the Nourmahal.” A Secret Service agent, curious about the president-elect’s nerves, looked into his cabin several times that evening. Each time, he was fast asleep. The next day, FDR himself made sure the reporters on his train knew he had “slept like a top.” It was apparently true but also part of the aura he intentionally created.
If FDR wasn’t nervous about his safety, the rest of the country had the jitters. When his train arrived in New Jersey, he was escorted to New York by a thousand policemen. Six days later, a crudely wrapped shotgun shell was found at a Washington, D.C., Post Office addressed to “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Washington, D.C.” Sent by a crank, it was nonetheless the lead story in The New York Times and other papers, lending even more drama to the assassination attempt story.
The mail to Hyde Park suggested that many Americans believed Roosevelt had been spared by divine intervention. “God saved you, not only the dear God above, but that little lady Mrs. Cross,” wrote Anne Bodek from New Haven. “Now you’ll be one of our greatest presidents in history.” Joseph Williams wrote: “Just as God made You the President of the American people, as He preserved You at Miami, I feel sure that he has destined You to be the Saviour of Our Country.” Clergy took up the theme the following Sunday. The public reaction resembled the aftermath of the attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, just two months after he took office. By surviving assassination attempts, both FDR and Reagan established a warmth in their relationship with the American people that had not existed when they won landslide victories the previous November.*
Back in Miami, the aftermath of the shooting played out quickly. When Mayor Cermak died from a postsurgical infection during the first week of Roosevelt’s presidency, Zangara faced more serious charges. He was tried and executed only a little more than a month after the February 15 incident, one of the shortest periods from crime to execution on record in the United States.
FDR was personally opposed to the death penalty, but he said nothing to influence the sentencing. After the Miami judge used his courtroom to preach for handgun control, Zangara was allowed to say a few words. “I want to kill the president because I no like the capitalists,” he told the court. By the time of his execution, Zangara had convinced everyone who talked to him that he had acted alone. With his stomach still hurting, he welcomed his trip to “Old Sparky,” the state of Florida’s infamous electric chair. “Pusha da button!” he shouted just before dying.
Miami was Franklin Roosevelt’s first crisis, and his handling of it did much to set the tone for his entrance into the presidency. After experiencing some buyers’ remorse following his election, many voters were coming to believe that here was the leader—even the dictator—they had been praying for. The people will “close ranks behind him to a degree that would have been impossible had not a crackbrained coward tried to kill him,” editorialized the New York Post. “To a man, his country rose to applaud his cool courage in the face of death,” wrote Time magazine. “He is a martyr president at the start of his term.”
*William Manchester has written that with “another Hoover, the United States would have followed seven Latin American countries whose governments had been overthrown by Depression victims.”
*Like FDR in 1932, Reagan was elected in 1980 largely on an anti-incumbent tide. Then, two months after taking office, he was wounded by a bullet fired from the gun of John Hinckley, outside the Washington Hilton. The elan he displayed in the aftermath (“Honey, I forgot to duck,” Reagan reportedly told his wife Nancy) was similar to Roosevelt’s. Taking a bullet helped Reagan push his budget and tax proposals through Congress. Before the assassination attempt, the so-called Reagan Revolution did not have the votes to pass.