Patricia is far too trigger-happy to acquaint herself with the facts
“Now the big danger is that Irish protesters will be more at risk from George Bush’s trigger-happy security people than ever from terrorist actions.”
Next day on the RTÉ radio programme ‘Liveline’, a man who had spent many years in an American police force called to protest that no secret service agent had ever fired a shot in defence of the president since the force was established in the 1860s, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Many people will be able to remember the more highly publicised attempts on the lives of various presidents.
In July 2001, George W Bush was safely in his executive suite when Robert Pickett, a crazed accountant, fired a shot towards the White House and then put the gun in his mouth in an apparent attempt to kill himself, but an alert secret service agent brought Pickett down with a shot to the knee and saved his life.
That shot was not fired in the defence of the president, but to save Pickett’s life.
When John Hinckley, Jr, shot President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981, outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC, he was trying to impress the actress Jodie Foster and was the only one who fired any shots.
The president made a full recovery, but his press secretary, Jim Brady, was not so lucky. He was shot in the head and suffered permanent brain damage.
Some five-and-a-half years earlier two attempts were made on the life of President Gerald Ford.
On September 5, 1975, Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, one of the group of women in Charles Manson’s infamous gang, tried to shoot the president while he was shaking hands with people in the crowd outside a Sacramento hotel.
As he proffered his hand to Fromme, she drew a Colt .45 and had it just inches from his face.
It should have blown his head off. Everybody froze momentarily as she pulled the trigger repeatedly before the gun was wrestled from her.
She cried in bewilderment that the automatic pistol was loaded. She had inserted a full clip of ammunition, but had not realised it was necessary to inject the first bullet in the chamber manually and then the others would load automatically.
Two weeks later in San Francisco another woman, Sara Jane Moore, actually fired a shot at Ford, but she was 40 feet away and somebody in the crowd knocked her arm into the air and the shot discharged harmlessly. She was promptly seized by the crowd, again without any shots being fired by the secret service.
They did not fire any shots either in Dublin when a protester rushed from the crowd to throw what turned out to be an egg at President Richard Nixon as he drove through Dame Street in an open top car on October 5, 1970.
The incident received extensive coverage in the United States and there were some garda complaints about the arrogance of the secret service, but those were mild in comparison with the complaints about the arrogant behaviour of the gardaí themselves. Yet all of that was promptly forgotten, because the Arms Trial began the following day.
The secret service did not fire any shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, when President John F Kennedy was shot and killed.
On February 15, 1933, little over a fortnight before Franklin D Roosevelt’s inauguration as president, an attempt was made on his life during a visit to Miami.
Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian bricklayer, was disarmed by people around him but not before firing several shots as the president-elect drove by in an open top car.
He missed Roosevelt but hit a number of people, including the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who died almost three weeks later.
“I shoot kings and presidents; capitalists got all-a money and I got bellyache all-a time,” Zangara explained. “I don’t like no people.” He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death. He was clearly in a hurry to get out of this world.
On March 20, 1933, two weeks to the day after Cermak’s death and just 32 days since he had tried to shoot Roosevelt, Zangara met his fate. When a preacher came to read the prayers as he was being taken from his cell, Zangara shouted, “get to hell out of here, you sonofabitch.” He asked to be allowed to walk without being held. He strode purposefully into the death chamber and sat down in the electric chair. His famous last words were shouted at the sheriff at the controls: “Pusha da button!”
FROM the date of his crime, Zangara’s execution was the fastest American execution of the 20th century.
The authorities in Florida had the kind of cavalier attitude towards justice then that they have exhibited towards the counting of votes in this century. In 1912 former President Theodore Roosevelt ran for the White House as a third party candidate. While campaigning in Milwaukee on October 14 of that year, he was shot outside the hotel where he was due to address an election rally.
Roosevelt’s stenographer, a former American footballer, jumped on the diminutive would-be assassin and disarmed him without any other shots being fired. “Any man looking for a third term ought to be shot,” the would-be assassin explained. Although he hit Roosevelt in the chest from close range, much of the force of his .32-calibre bullet was spent going through a bundle of papers that the former President was carrying in an inside pocket.
Roosevelt famously went on to address the election rally. Holding aloft a bloodstained copy of his prepared speech through which the bullet had passed, he said, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” His new party then became known as the Bull Moose Party.
Roosevelt had been elected vice-president in 1900, but moved into the White House the following year after President William McKinley was shot, just six months into his second term. McKinley was hit in the chest and abdomen at an exhibition in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901.
Secret service agents disarmed his assassin and were roughing him up when McKinley shouted: “Be easy with him boys!” Initially it was thought that McKinley’s wounds were not fatal, but medical treatment was still relatively primitive and he developed gangrene and died eight days later.
In all of the attacks on the presidents, not one shot was fired by the secret service, so there was clearly no justification for Patricia McKenna’s assertion that the agents are trigger-happy. She obviously did not know what she was talking about.
Her remarks exhibited ignorance and poor judgment, which she compounded the following day by her refusal to withdraw the unjust allegation, despite being offered repeated opportunities to do so on Joe Duffy’s ‘Liveline’ programme.
It was Patricia who was trigger-happy in shooting her mouth off. If she thought her babble was obscuring her ignorance, she was just fooling herself.
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