Please note that the following is a digitized version of a selected article from White House History Quarterly, Issue 57, originally released in print form in 2020. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.Org No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All photographs contained in this journal unless otherwise noted are copyrighted by the White House Historical Association and may not be reproduced without permission. Requests for reprint permissions should be directed to rights@whha.org. Contact books@whha.org for more information. 2020 White House Historical Association. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.
The Biggest GUNFIGHT in Secret Service History The Failed Attempt on Truman’s Life at Blair House ALAN CAPPS
HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY
The President is well and amply guarded by good and brave men both in uniform and in the Secret Service. —Harry S. Truman
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OPPOSITE: PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM E. CARNAHAN, HA RRY S . TRUMAN LIBRARY ABOVE: HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY
opposite
Surrounded by Secret Service agents, President Harry Truman crosses Pennsylvania Avenue in February 1950. While the White House was under renovation, Truman made the one block commute between his temporary living quarters at Blair House and his office in the West Wing much like an ordinary pedestrian, until he was finally persuaded by the Secret Service to be driven across the street. above
President Truman waves from the highly visible front porch of his residence at Blair House. The proximity of the front door to heavily trafficked Pennsylvania Avenue was a serious concern for the Secret Service.
o ffic er les li e co f f elt was one of four officers on duty in front of Blair House on Wednesday, November 1, 1950. For his three colleagues—Donald Birdzell, Joseph Davidson, and Joseph Downs—November 1 was their regular duty day, but Coffelt was not meant to be at work that day. He had agreed to change roster assignments with Bradley Allen, who wanted to work on his house.1 The four uniformed officers shared their duty posts with three United States Secret Service agents detailed to presidential protection duties—Floyd (“Toad”) Boring, Vince Mroz, and Stewart Stout. Boring was stationed on the sidewalk, Mroz was in the agents’ office inside Blair House, and Stout was also on duty inside. There were two other members of the protection detail—one located in the basement of Blair House and a second stationed in the rear of Blair House.2 Blair House, located across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House and the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB), had been “home” to President Harry S. Truman, his wife, Bess, and their daughter, Margaret, since 1948, and it would remain so until 1952. Ongoing renovations that involved gutting the White House had necessitated the move. The work had been deemed vital to address the dangerous structural weaknesses, particularly in the first family’s living quarters, but the Secret Service viewed the security of Blair House with apprehension, given the proximity of its front door to the general public and Pennsylvania Avenue. For the first couple of days after the move, President Truman just walked back and forth across Pennsylvania Avenue from and to Blair House while he continued to work in the Oval Office in the West Wing, which was not under renovation. The Secret Service had arranged for the traffic lights in all directions to turn red to allow him to cross Pennsylvania Avenue, but this white house history quarterly
created a traffic nightmare and Margaret Truman wrote that stopping all traffic made her dad feel guilty. Truman ordered the practice stopped, telling his protection detail, “I’ll wait for the light like any other pedestrian.”3 The result was even greater chaos. A crowd of people surrounded Truman at the stoplight, making the Secret Service extremely nervous, and the traffic slowed to a crawl along Pennsylvania Avenue. Once persuaded to give up on his ordinary pedestrian idea, the president was driven by the Secret Service on a circuitous path from a rear door of the West Wing to an alley entrance behind Blair House.4 The routine on November 1 would be no different. Following a series of meetings in the Oval Office, President Truman presented the Medal of Honor to Colonel Justice Chambers of the United States Marine Corps in a Rose Garden ceremony at noon. There followed two further meetings in the Oval Office, first, with the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the British ambassador to Washington, Sir Oliver Franks, and then with W. Stuart Symington, a fellow Missourian and good friend of the president. At approximately 1:00 p.m., accompanied by his Secret Service protection detail, President Truman returned to Blair House for lunch with his wife and mother-in-law. Following a short nap, he planned to resume his day’s activities with a visit to Arlington National Cemetery for the dedication of a monument.5 Earlier in the day two men, Oscar Collazo and Grieslio Torresola, left their hotel—the Harris, located a block or so from Union Station. They had arrived the previous evening from New York City. They walked across to the U.S. Capitol and wandered around the grounds. After an hour or so they hailed a cab. Their destination was the White House. The cab driver drove past the White
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the top of a flight of steps, was right on Pennsylvania Avenue. The front door even appeared to be open with only a screen door barring entrance. A guard house was located at each end of the roughly 130 feet frontage of Blair House. Each one had a uniformed police officer sitting inside on duty. Another uniformed officer stood at the base of the flight of steps along with a man in plain clothes who they assumed was a U.S. Secret Service officer. Collazo and Torresola had no idea what or who was behind the screen door in terms of security. However, they reasoned that if they approached Blair House from either side, they could rapidly overwhelm the police officers and Secret Service agents on duty outside by employing the element of surprise. Then one or both would bull-rush the screen door and burst into Blair House. From there they would have to improvise as they sought out President Truman to assassinate him. Satisfied that they had, in theory, a workable plan, the two men returned to their hotel. They knew their odds of surviving were minimal, but they white house history quarterly
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Once back in their room at the Hotel Harris (left) after formulating their Plan B to assassinate President Truman, Collazo and Torresola prepared their weapons: a 9 mm Luger (right, top) and a 9 mm Walther P.38 semiautomatic pistol (right, below). They left the Harris to return to Blair House with more than sixty rounds of 9 mm ammunition—a portion of which was carried in a paper bag by Collazo.
LEF T: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL A SSOC IATION / RIGHT: HAR RY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY
House on Pennsylvania Avenue to the point where he would drop his fare, the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventeenth Street, NW. The sight of the White House, with construction scaffolding, heavy equipment, and large numbers of workers, was probably not what Collazo and Torresola expected. How would they ever find their way through to their target, the president of the United States? What had been a formidable undertaking now seemed to be impossible, until the cab driver explained that while the White House was undergoing renovation, the president lived at Blair House, on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue across from the OEOB. He even pointed out Blair House as Collazo and Torresola got out of his cab. With their original plan to assassinate President Truman in the White House in tatters, the two men set about trying to formulate an expedited Plan B. As they slowly walked along in front of the OEOB looking across Pennsylvania Avenue, it occurred to them that the change of location might well be fortuitous. The front door to Blair House, at
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H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y O F WA S H I N G T O N D . C .
The route by which Collazo and Terresola approached Blair House began two blocks east on Pennsylvania Avenue at Riggs National Bank (seen here c. 1959).
would have achieved their goal and brought worldwide attention to Puerto Rico’s demand for independence from the United States. Two days before their planned assassination attempt, Puerto Rico had erupted in violence. The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PPN), led by Pedro Albizu Campos, demanded complete independence. The PPN repudiated any efforts by other political groups, most notably the Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico, to negotiate a new political commonwealth status for the island. Ironically, as David McCullough notes in his biography of Truman, the president “had done more for Puerto Rico than any previous President. He favored the right of the Puerto Rican people to determine their political relationship with the United States and had said so several times.”6 However, to Collazo and Torresola, both members of the PPN, President Truman was a symbol of the system, and as Collazo insisted at his trial after the attempted assassination, “You don’t attack the man, you attack the system.”7 Once the two had returned to their hotel, the objective for Torresola, who white house history quarterly
was far more comfortable with weapons and a pretty good marksman, was to make sure his partner was conversant and comfortable using a 9 mm Walther P.38 semiautomatic pistol. Collazo had fired handguns before but had never before fired a semiautomatic pistol. Torresola had a 9 mm Luger, and between them, they left the hotel to return to Blair House with more than sixty rounds of 9 mm ammunition contained within the pistols, in extra magazines, and loose in a paper bag carried by Collazo. Once again they hailed a cab. The two were dropped off on the corner of Fifteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Riggs Bank across from the Treasury Department. It was around 2:12 p.m., and Pennsylvania Avenue was, as usual, crowded with people enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. The two men walked along Pennsylvania Avenue, past Blair House, in one final reconnaissance, and then quietly turned around at the corner of Seventeenth and Pennsylvania and walked back, once again past Blair House, to their original starting point in front of Riggs Bank.
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THE GUNFIGHT Collazo turned around once again and began walking back up Pennsylvania Avenue, past Lafayette Square, toward Blair House. All the time he walked, measuring his pace, he glanced across toward Torresola, who had crossed over Pennsylvania, walked in front of the White House, and, upon reaching the corner of Seventeenth and Pennsylvania, crossed back over. The two men were now on the same side of the street approaching each other. Collazo walked past the guardhouse on his approach to Blair House. Officers Boring and Davidson were talking with each other. Collazo reasoned there was no sense in engaging them if all he had to do was deal with Officer Birdzell and sprint up the steps into Blair House. Torresola could be relied upon to engage Boring and Davidson immediately after he had taken out Officer Coffelt in the guardhouse that he approached from the west. Collazo walked right up to Officer Birdzell, who had his back to him. Collazo fumbled to pull the weapon from his suit pocket, trying to cock the gun and release the safety. He pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. The gun did not fire. Officer Birdzell, however, heard the familiar sound of the cocking of a weapon and the ominous click of a misfire. He pivoted around only to confront Collazo about 5 feet from him fumbling with his gun, clutching it to his chest with his right hand and hitting it with his left hand, the orientation of the weapon now pointing downward. Collazo pulled the trigger again, and this time the gun fired, but the trajectory took the bullet into Birdzell’s right knee. It became the first shot in what was described later as “the biggest gunfight in Secret Service history.” It lasted approximately thirty-nine seconds.8 Collazo’s surprise at the weapon firing allowed Birdzell in a split second afterward to somehow get past him into
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the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, drawing his gun in the process. He opened fire on Collazo but did not hit him. What Birdzell had done, however, was to draw Collazo’s attention momentarily away from the open door of Blair House. Officers Boring and Davidson, both of whom had reacted to the initial gunfire by opening fire on Collazo, used the momentary diversion to take up better firing positions. A combination of adrenaline and panic gripped Collazo. He continued pulling the trigger of his Walther P.38, firing erratically at no particular target. Bullets flew everywhere, including across Pennsylvania Avenue, grazing the sleeve of a Metropolitan Police officer, and across Seventeenth Street. Collazo had quickly emptied the magazine of his weapon, necessitating that he reload the Walther. He crouched down on the steps of Blair House.9 Boring and Davidson continued to fire at Collazo from their position next to the guardhouse. They were joined by Agent Mroz who, on hearing the initial shots looked out a window, saw people running, and spirited out of the office inside Blair House into the alleyway. He came round behind Boring and Davidson, who were trying to get a better angle on Collazo. Mroz saw Collazo and fired at him, but then reasoned with his two colleagues already engaging the assailant it would be more advantageous to circle back around through Blair House and come out onto Pennsylvania Avenue from the other side. Mroz took off again, and unbeknown to him, Collazo had been hit in the chest and had collapsed on the sidewalk in front of the steps.10 Agent Stout, who had been stationed inside in the main entrance hall with Agent Mroz, on hearing the firing commence, responded immediately, but not by rushing out of the screen door into a situation of which he had no appreciation. His training as a Secret
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This diagram of the gunfight outside of Blair House was published by the Philadelphia Inquirer soon after the incident. Although one of the labels indicates that President Truman watched the scene unfold through a second story window, it is uncertain whether he could have seen more than the aftermath of the shooting.
H A R R Y S . T R U M A N L I B R A R Y.
Service agent allowed him to assess the situation without any visual awareness of what was taking place outside, and he concluded that if a gunfight had erupted outside, the odds were that any potential assailant could come crashing through the screen door. He unlocked the cabinet next to the desk where he was sitting, retrieved the Thompson submachine gun stored there, and assumed a kneeling position at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor. He would be the next, and possibly last, line of defense, protecting President Truman and his family upstairs. Any assailant who crashed through the screen door would meet with a hail of fire. However, everything happened so fast that by the time he retrieved the weapon the firing had stopped. Torresola, meanwhile, had quickened his pace as he approached the
entrance to Blair House from the west toward Collazo. He passed the guardhouse where Officer Coffelt was stationed, and he fired at him four times. Cofflet, hit three times, slumped into his chair. Torresola then confronted Officer Downs, who was in plain clothes moving down the basement walkway to a door at the west end of Blair House.11 Downs drew his weapon upon hearing Torresola’s shots, but Torresola shot him three times. Although severely wounded, Downs managed to fall through the basement door and slam it shut after him, denying Torresola a way into the house. Torresola continued to move forward toward the main entrance still unseen by Boring and Davidson, who remained focused on Collazo, and Agent Mroz was now racing through Blair House to come around to the western
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side. Birdzell, lying in the middle of the street, had the best view of the entire front of Blair House and both assailants. Torresola turned his attention to Birdzell and shot him, hitting him in his other knee. The magazine of Torresola’s Luger was now empty. He had to reload in order to deal with Boring and Davidson and to make it through the open door. Torresola could not see the wounded Collazo lying on the sidewalk. Half hidden behind the hedges in front of the house, Torresola started to reload a new magazine, ready to continue the attack. Suddenly, a .38 special round struck Torresola just below his left ear, killing him instantly. Officer Coffelt had somehow managed to get himself out of the guardhouse and draw his weapon. With one well-placed shot he brought down Torresola.
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THE AFTERMATH
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Within seconds after the shooting began, Torresola lay dead in the hedges in front of Lee House (above left) and a wounded Collazo lay at the foot of the steps leading to the Blair House front door (above right). opposite
Spectators, journalists, and police officers crowded around the scene of the shoot-out in front of Blair House immediately after the incident ended. Reporters documented every detail, photographing the wounded Collazo (top left) before he was transported for medical care, and examining a broken finial on the fence in front of Blair House (top right), likely shot off by a stray bullet.
RIGHT: HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY
The head of the Secret Service, U. E. Baughman, who soon arrived on the scene, immediately saw that President Truman would not be persuaded to change his schedule and ordered a substantial increase in the protection detail for the visit to Arlington. The president adhered to his prepared comments, and the crowd of several hundred people had no indication of what had taken place at Blair House within the hour. Back at the Oval Office later in the afternoon, keeping to his regular press conference schedule, President Truman insisted he had never been in any danger. The following day when he set off for his daily morning walk—accompanied by a more considerable entourage of Secret Service agents and press—Time magazine reported President Truman as saying, “A president has to expect these things.”17 The same article also quoted the president as telling his chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, who had also served as governor of Puerto Rico for a year, “The only thing you have to worry about is bad luck. I never have bad luck.”18
LEFT: STUTTERSTOCK
In less than a minute it was all over. Torresola lay dead in the hedges on the western side of Blair House. Collazo, wounded but not mortally, lay at the bottom of the steps. Officers Birdzell and Downs were severely wounded. Officer Coffelt lay mortally wounded on the sidewalk. What about the intended target of Collazo and Torresola, President Truman? Accounts differ as to exactly what took place during the attempted assassination. According to Margaret Truman, her mother shouted at her husband, “Harry, someone’s shooting our policemen,” which prompted the president to rush to the window to look out.12 McCullough says the gunfire awakened the president, who “jumped from his bed and rushed to the window.”13 President Truman wrote, “I watched the whole thing from my window.”14 While there is little doubt that the president did witness the later stages of the shootout, the issue of someone seeing him at the second-floor window of Blair House and yelling at him to get back is open to question. In their extensive coverage of the assassination attempt, Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge note that the angles of sight from the sidewalk to the second-floor window prevented any of the Secret Service detail from actually seeing the president at the window. The authors also note in the after-action reports no member of the Secret Service detail could remember shouting anything to the president or even seeing him at the window.15 What is not in doubt was the coolness and calmness of the president after the assassination attempt. Charlie Ross, the White House press secretary, asked whether the president would still attend the scheduled event at Arlington Cemetery. The president simply answered, “Why of course.” Ross later recounted he had “never seen a calmer man.”16
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TOP LEF T AND RIGHT: STUT TERSTOCK / BOT TOM: HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY
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C O F F E LT A N D O A T H O F O F F I C E : U. S . S E C R E T S E RV I C E / P L A Q U E : A L A M Y
Officer Leslie Coffelt (above), having fulfilled the Oath of Office made in 1942 when he was appointed to the U.S. Secret Service Division (above right), was the sole fatality among the officers who successfully protected President Truman and foiled the assassination attempt. His “loyalty, bravery, and heroism beyond the call of duty” are memorialized near the entrance to Blair House with a plaque dedicated on May 25, 1952, by President Truman. The president also attended Coffelt’s funeral at Arlington Cemetery (opposite) and in a letter to Coffelt’s widow, Chessie, expressed that the debt he owed for the officer’s supreme sacrifice was beyond his power to discharge.
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T O P L E F T : A B B I E R O W E , H A R R Y S . T R U M A N L I B R A R Y / T O P R I G H T : U. S . S E C R E T S E RV I C E BOTTOM: AP PHOTO BY JOHN ROUS
TOP: GETTY IMAGES / BOTTOM: AP IMAGES
Officers Birdzell and Downs recovered from their wounds and eventually returned to duty. Oscar Collazo was tried and found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair. However, in 1952, and as a gesture to the people of Puerto Rico, President Truman commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. He served twenty-nine years in Leavenworth Penitentiary before being pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. He returned to Puerto Rico and died in 1994. Officer Leslie Coffelt died of his wounds several hours after the assassination attempt. His death weighed heavily on President Truman. There has always been speculation President Truman chose not to seek reelection in 1952 because of the death of Leslie Coffelt. In his column in the Washington Post on April 3, 1952, Drew Pearson wrote: “An unreported factor behind President Truman’s decision to retire was the anguish and strain that the Truman family still feels over the attempted assassination of the President on November 1, 1950, when Leslie Coffelt was killed.” Pearson also reported President Truman told Congressman Morgan M. Moulder of Missouri, “Did you ever stop to think how you would feel if another man laid down his life for you? Well, that’s the way I feel about Leslie Coffelt. It’s men like him or some other good man who are really in danger in situations like that—not the President, but the men entrusted with his protection.”19
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NOTES
opposite top
Officers Joseph Downs and Donald Birdzell both recovered in a hospital after the gunfight. Downs was shot in the chest and abdomen and Birdzell was wounded in both legs. opposite bottom
After recovering from his wounds, Oscar Collazo was convicted and sentenced to death. President Truman later commuted the sentence to life in prison. He is seen here on February 28, 1951, in handcuffs while being moved from from one court building to another during a recess. above
AP PHOTO/JOHN ROUS
On December 12, 1950, President Harry S. Truman presented medals to the officers who saved his life. From left to right are: Officers Joseph Downs and Donald Birdzell, Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder, Chessie Coffelt (who accepted the medal for her late husband), Officer Joseph O. Davidson, President Truman, and Secret Service Special Agents Floyd Boring and Vincent Mroz.
The epigraph is from President Harry S. Truman’s remarks at the dedication of a plaque honoring Officer Leslie Coffelt, May 21, 1952, online at Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, www.trumanlibrary.gov. 1.
Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge, American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill President Truman and the Shoot-out That Stopped It (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 56.
2. Deanna L. Diamond, “Secret Service,” in Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement, ed. Larry Sullivan (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2005), 3:841. 3. Quoted in Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973), 228.
The young reporter’s name: Ben Bradlee. Hunter and Bainbridge, American Gunfight, 261–62. 10. It was never clearly ascertained who shot Collazo. There is even speculation that the bullet that struck him in the chest may have also been as the result of a ricochet off the stair rail on the steps. Ibid., 276. 11. Hunter and Bainbridge describe Joseph Downs as being a “classic wrong place—wrong time guy.” Even though he was a uniformed White House Police Officer, he was in civilian clothes. His job that Wednesday was to drive the truck known as the Grocery Wagon and purchase food for that day’s Blair House dinner. Ibid., 224. 12. Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman, 488.
4. Ibid., 228–29.
13. McCullough, Truman, 811.
5. President Truman would dedicate an equestrian statue to Field Marshall Sir John Dill, who had been the British representative in Washington, D.C., to the Combined Chiefs of Staff during World War II. Dill died in November 1944 and was accorded the honor of being buried in Arlington National Cemetery, only the twentysecond non-American to have such an honor extended by the United States.
14. Harry S. Truman, Where the Buck Stops: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman, ed. Margaret Truman (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 94.
6. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 812. President Truman had also named the first native Puerto Rican as governor of the island and extended Social Security to all Puerto Ricans.
17. Quoted in “Fanatics’ Errand,” Time, November 13, 1950, 20–22.
15. Hunter and Bainbridge, American Gunfight, 264. 16. Quoted in Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 460.
18. Quoted in ibid. 19. Quoted in Hunter and Bainbridge, American Gunfight, 266.
7. Quoted in ibid. 8. Ronald Kessler, In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect (New York: Crown Publishing, 2009), 8. 9. Marion Preston was the name of the Metropolitan police officer whose sleeve was grazed by one of Collazo’s bullets. He subsequently recounted his story to a young journalist in town for a job interview and, who being at the right place at the right time, used his initiative to conduct the interview and capture as many details as possible.
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