American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out that Stopped It [Hardcover]

Stephen Hunter (Author), John Jr. Bainbridge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2005

November 1, 1950 -- an unseasonably hot afternoon in sleepy Washington, D.C. At 2:00 P.M. at his temporary residence in Blair House, President Harry Truman takes a nap. At 2:20 P.M., two Puerto Rican natives approach from different directions. Oscar Collazo, a respected metal polisher and family man, and Griselio Torresola, an unemployed salesman, don't look dangerous, not in their new suits and hats, not in their calm, purposeful demeanor, not in their slow, unexcited approach. What the three White House policemen and one Secret Service agent guarding the president cannot guess is that under each man's coat is a 9mm German automatic pistol and in each head, a dream of assassin's glory.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, nearly assassinated President Harry Truman. If this historical fact surprises you, you're not alone. American Gunfight, a new account by suspense novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Stephen Hunter and journalist John Bainbridge Jr., examines this largely forgotten episode in meticulous detail, including the conspiracy surrounding it and the misconceptions associated with the would-be assassins. As the book makes clear, it's remarkable that these two men even came close to succeeding, given the disorganized nature of the plot. Intending to attack the president at the White House, they only learned in passing from a cab driver that it was being renovated and that Truman was in fact living at the nearby Blair House. When they made their assault on Blair House, they quickly lost their element of surprise when Collazo's gun misfired, leading to a 38-second shootout in front of the residence that left Torresola and one policeman dead. Meanwhile, Truman witnessed the action from an upstairs window.

At his ensuing trial, Collazo was depicted as a crazed fanatic, but the authors argue that this simplified assessment unnecessarily dismisses a potential political conspiracy involving Puerto Rican nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos, who was believed by some to have masterminded the plot in an effort to bring attention to his cause. Hunter and Bainbridge provide in-depth portraits of Collazo and Torresola, as well as the Secret Service agent and three White House policemen who saved Truman's life. The descriptions of the remarkably light presidential security of the era reveal much about 1950s Washington, D.C., a time in which the president would take a daily walk around the neighborhood with just a bodyguard or two in tow. As a result of the attack, the Secret Service would forever change the way it guarded the president. This fast-paced book reads like a detective thriller, shifting quickly between various story lines and characters, including a second-by-second breakdown of the gunfight itself. The potboiler narrative may seem over the top at times, with its conjecture and imagined internal dialogue, but this comprehensive account succeeds in bringing this unlikely plot vividly to life. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly

On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, engaged in a sustained gun battle with Secret Service agents at Blair House. Their goal was to assassinate President Harry Truman. It's curious that the two men haven't found a place in popular memory like other presidential assailants. But this attempt deserves attention because it was explicitly political and because it permanently altered Secret Service practices. Hunter, esteemed for his film criticism and macho adventure novels, teams up with former Baltimore Sun journalist Bainbridge for this richly detailed account of the motives and destinies of virtually everyone connected to the skirmish. This is an ambitious attempt to achieve time-lapse history. The actual confrontation took less than a minute; rather than save it up for the end, the authors spread it across much of the book, interspersed with background material on the participants. The book reads like the product of a film lover/action novelist and a journalist rather than a work of history, with the shootout described in stream-of-consciousness, and melodramatic, cliff-hanging chapter endings. To the authors' credit, though, interpretations are presented as such, and their handling of the recorded events is not only convincing but compelling.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition first Printing edition (October 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743260686
• ISBN-13: 978-0743260688
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #408,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #20 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( T ) > Truman, Harry

More About the Author

Stephen Hunter won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism as well as the 1998 American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Writing in Criticism for his work as film critic at The Washington Post. He is the author of several bestselling novels, including Time to Hunt, Black Light, Point of Impact, and the New York Times bestsellers Havana, Pale Horse Coming, and Hot Springs. He lives in Baltimore.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good But Not What it Could Have Been, October 30, 2005

By 

Charles Dexter Ward "carsc" (Hicksville, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out that Stopped It (Hardcover)

I had been anxiously looking forward to reading this book since I first saw it on amazon a few months ago. Stephen Hunter is a great author & the perfect person to elucidate the story of the violent attempt on the life of Harry Truman by a pair of desperate Puerto Rican nationalists. This isn't your "usual" assassination attempt with a lone person firing a single gun but a 40-second gun battle pitting a pair of gunmen against the frighteningly casual security arrangements at Blair House where the President was staying. It's an incident that many Americans may have forgotten but it is well worth remembering, if only for the courage of the White House policeman who stopped the more dangerous of the two assassins despite having been mortally wounded himself.

The book starts out very well with little biographies of some of the people involved & a description of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement & some of the events in Puerto Rico that led to the assassination attempt in Washington, DC. Hunter is at his best in this book in describing the people inovlved & in giving enough of a history of the Secret Service, Puerto Rico, etc. without slowing his story down.

Reading this background information, it is easy to get excited about the desription of the gun battle that is coming. Hunter's specialty in his novels is writing about guns & gunfights & the book promises to be both informative & exciting when it gets to the gunfight itself. Unfortunately, when he does get to the gun battle, he falls into a sort of flashback/flash forward style of writing with very brief accounts of the assassination interspersed with more Puerto Rican history & more biographical information. As a result, the story of the actual assassination attempt becomes hard to follow & confusing & Hunter's incessant digressions rob the incident of its inherent interest & tension. He should have gotten the background stuff out of the way & then stayed with the events of the day--I'd have been willing to wait.

Hunter also has a tendency to repeat himself, especially when it comes to his opinions on the effects of being caught in a gunfight & his theories on how police marksmanship training should be conducted. Besides that fact that he tends to harp on these topics, the evidence he brings forth from this particular gun battle is thin. Of course, he may be right about what he says, but this gunfight isn't a good example of what he's trying to say--not to mention the fact that this sort of thing isn't what the book is ostensibly about. At another point, he devotes an entire chapter to a "point of view" description of part of the gunfight through the eyes of the participants. I felt this really fell flat, especially since he was simply repeating things he had just told us about without the fancy pov stylings.

This being said, the book is readable & fairly short so you can get through it in an evening, although it isn't the page-turner I had hoped it would be. And the best thing about reading it is that it will remind you of the good people who stand between people like you (& me) & the monsters of the world. God bless Les Coffelt & his family.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Forgotten history, November 10, 2005

By 

John Bowes (Oxford, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out that Stopped It (Hardcover)

An admirable job of reacquainting us with this event. The hero of the piece displays amazing strength and focus. The parallels to the family men who terrorize us today are sobering. But too much background and some poor editing distract the reader (I've never seen so many exclamation points outside of a middle school).

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been a great magazine article ..., April 28, 2006

By 

Dean W. (Kansas City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out that Stopped It (Hardcover)

In a nutshell, this is a compelling story that's essentially ruined by horrible prose. The authors have adopted an almost "Memento"-esque flashback method of telling the backstories of all the personalities featured--no matter how mundane or irrelevant the detail. There's a great deal of repetition of key events and plot points as a result. I could live with this, but what absolutely ruined the book for me was the constant use of past and present tenses interchangeably--often within the same sentence! Additionally, the prose slips from formal to conversational too easily to suit me, though this is far less annoying than the incessant changing of tenses. It made me feel as if I was reading a book that had been hastily cobbled together over a weekend.

The authors introduce one of their interminable flashbacks at one point by saying "this book is about 38.5 seconds of gunfight, however ..." and therein lies the problem. This is undoubtedly a fascinating story, one with which most Americans are probably unfamiliar, and one that definitely deserves to be told. However, it would have read much easier as a 10- or 12-page magazine article; stretching it out into 325 pages really seems unnecessary.