A history of political violence from a seasoned reporter's notebook

Leaders can face tragic penalties for making history.

And journalists who are 80 years old face the consequences of living long enough to sadly see those tragedies play out all too often.

On top of all that, when you’ve covered politics on and off since 1968 — and you think you’ve seen or heard it all — you really haven’t.

My earliest memories of a political assassination came before I became a reporter.

A few days before my 16th birthday in November of 1960, a personal invitation to attend the presidential inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy wound up in my mailbox. It was a personal thank you note for organizing teams of “Teen Dems” in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan’s GOPer country.

I did not go to the inauguration, but JFK’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, came to the U.P. and autographed what is now my tattered poster face of her younger brother with a big “Thanks!”

Two years later, shortly before my 18th birthday in November of 1962, JFK was assassinated. It sent students from our political science classes at Northern Michigan University out onto the campus green in disbelief and tears.

For a younger generation, the heroic inhabitant of “Camelot,” the shining city on the hill, was gone.

A young reporter in Chicago in 1968

By 1968, an unforgettably volatile year in America, I was a reporter for the legendary City News Bureau in Chicago. Covering anti-Vietnam War demonstrations was now on my street schedule.

On March 31 of that year President Lyndon Baines Johnson, shocked the nation when he announced he would not seek re-election because of a division “in the American house right now.” The Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam war were splitting the country.

But it was the Vietnam War that broke him.

Then, days later, on April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who helped launch the Civil Rights Movement with pacifism, was assassinated on the terrace of the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tenn., by an escaped fugitive named James Earl Ray.

Chicago blew up, and so did our CNB news assignment schedule. Dr. King’s assassin was eventually sentenced to a 99-year prison term and died in prison.

Then, just two months after Dr. King’s murder, Democratic presidential primary contender, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated on June 6, 1968, by Sirhan Sirhan.

Stunningly, Kennedy’s eldest son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now running for president as an independent, wants Sirhan freed from his California correctional facility.

“My family and I do not,” said Chicago’s Chris Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s younger brother, in an exclusive Sneed interview several years ago.

Ronald Reagan, Tim McCarthy and Jim Brady

In March of 1981, a mentally ill man named John Hinckley Jr., attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, shooting the Republican president several times with a gun outside a Washington, D.C., hotel.

Dispatched to Colorado to check out where Hinckley had lived before he attempted to kill Reagan in a bizarre attempt to grab the attention of actress Jodie Foster, I was surprised to find a huge, red Target store billboard located across the street from Hinckley’s Colorado hotel room.

The “target” seemed sadly fitting.

Reagan, of course, survived the shooting, later saying he told of one the emergency physicians, "I hope you're a Republican.”

Also surviving was Tim McCarthy, the Secret Service agent who took a bullet to the chest protecting Reagan. The son of a Chicago Police sergeant, McCarthy grew up on the South Side and went on to serve as police chief of Orland Park for 26 years before he retired in 2020.

The most seriously injured was Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady, a native of downstate Centralia, who suffered a head wound that left him partially paralyzed. He and his wife Sarah became vocal gun control activists.

As for Hinckley, a jury found him mentally unfit for trial in 1982. He was released from a psychiatric hospital in 2016 and finally let go via a federal judge’s order in 2022.

He’s out.

The Latest Attempt …

Last Saturday, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, whose bad boy charisma, creative name shaming, and political savvy convinced a major chunk of American voters he could “Make America Great Again,” came within an ear lobe’s width of being assassinated in rural Pennsylvania, allegedly by Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, armed with a pumped up rifle.

The next day, Trump told a reporter for the Washington Examiner he had been “saved by God” and was going to “unite the country.”

Trump was among those urging Secret Service protection for RFK, Jr., which President Joe Biden ordered the independent presidential candidate be given on Monday.

There is no doubt political violence is a horrific stain on American democracy and assassination an abomination.

But when you’ve covered politics on and off as long as I have and you think you’ve seen or heard it all … don’t bet on it.