It was a morning that will forever be burned into my memory. Thursday, June 6, 1968, in the early summer after completing the eighth grade, I awakened at my grandparents’ home thinking it would be just another day of doing chores at their farm in Central Texas. As I started putting on my work clothes, my grandfather solemnly walked into the bedroom where my brother James and I slept and said, “I’ve got some bad news, and I bet you can guess what it is.”
James and I looked at each other and had no idea what Grandaddy was talking about. We shrugged our shoulders and said, “We give up. What happened?”
“Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed last night after he won the California presidential primary. He died just like his brother did four and a half years ago, and Martin Luther King did two months ago. Not sure where America is going and when this is gonna stop.”
In a state of shock, James and I looked at each other and wondered who would be next. With the three front-page assassinations that had taken place since November 1963, there was no reason to think this would be the last one.
Four years later, Alabama Gov. George Wallace was shot in Maryland and paralyzed from the waist down while running for president. Three years after that, two assassins acting two weeks apart tried but failed to gun down President Gerald Ford in September 1975. Next came President Ronald Reagan, who was shot but miraculously recovered in March 1981.
I have purposely not mentioned the names of the cowards who performed these violent acts because they are not worthy of having their names in print. They were mad men and women who sought and received their “15 minutes of fame” and deserved their decades of ignominy in prison.
We got a reprieve from high-profile assassination attempts in America from March 1981 to July 2024. But two summers ago in Butler, Pa., then–presidential candidate Donald Trump was shot by another goon. He soon recovered. Then, he was again targeted by another would-be assassin two months later on a golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla. Most recently, on April 25, a gunman allegedly targeted the president and other high-ranking officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington but was subdued before entering the room where Trump was seated.
There have been several other verified incidents in which someone threatened to do harm to the president: in Dayton, Ohio in March 2016; Las Vegas in June 2016; Reno, Nev., in November 2016; North Dakota in September 2017; Washington in October 2018 and August and September 2020. Those are just the threats while Trump was on American soil I’ve seen reported in the press. No doubt, there have been other security concerns that aren’t known beyond Secret Service circles.
With so many threats aimed at Trump since 2016, the amount of Secret Service protection necessary to protect his life must now be multiplied. I never want to get news like I got in the summer of 1968.