Yet he had no such qualms in Milwaukee.
First he steeled himself with several bottles of beer in a saloon near the Hotel Gilpatrick, where the former U.S. president was having dinner. Then, after the candidate had finished his meal and was waiting to be driven over to the city’s auditorium to deliver a campaign speech, Shrank would make his move.
John Schrank had always been at home in saloons. He’d been a saloon-keeper himself back in New York City. He presented himself to his fellow bar patrons not as an assassin-in-waiting, but as a newspaper reporter. He became friendly with the bartender, with the bar musicians. He asked them to play something patriotic. They obliged by striking up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and he bought them all a round. At a few minutes past eight o’clock, Schrank walked over to the hotel to wait with all the others who wanted to cheer the man who was running for president again, who was asking for a third term in the White House beneath the standard of a brand new political party: the Progressives.
John Schrank wasn’t drunk. He was clear-headed. He was primed and loaded for — not bear — but bull moose. He positioned himself close to the parked car, among those who now surged forward, having gotten word that Colonel Roosevelt was on his way out.
Schrank watched as TR first sat down in the tonneau of the open vehicle, and then impulsively bounced back up to acknowledge the cheering crowd. He flashed his famous toothy grin, lifted his hat in salute, and then…
Bang!
One shot was all that Schrank was permitted to get off before being tackled and pushed down to the ground. The gun was wrenched from his hand. A moment later he was dragged to the ex-president, who enjoined the crowd, now rising up as its own overzealous lynching party, not to harm him. Schrank was to be brought forward so that Theodore Roosevelt could look into the face of the man who had sought to kill him. After studying his assailant for a moment, TR turned to the police officers who had subdued him. “Take charge of him,” TR said. “See that no violence is done to him.”
Perhaps, thought Schrank, Roosevelt remembered that McKinley had prevented his own assassin from being beaten to death through similar pacifying words. Or perhaps it was simply in Teddy’s nature to be concerned for his attacker’s safety. Schrank didn’t hate Roosevelt. In fact, when TR died six years later and reporters sought a word or two from the hospitalized madman who had previously tried to kill him, Schrank was quoted as saying with absolute sincerity and quite unexpectedly, “A good man is gone. I did personally admire his greatness.”
What Schrank despised wasn’t TR the man. It was TR the “third termer.” The fact of the former president’s lust for another four years in the White House, which had motivated the creation of a new party to accommodate him, was the sole reason that this sufferer of “dementia praecox, paranoid type” wanted to have him removed permanently from the political stage.
George Washington had set a precedent that all other presidents had respected. Ulysses S. Grant would have preferred a third term, but delegates at the 1880 Republican convention had other ideas. TR hungered for the chance to step out upon that stage for a rousing third act, and it was up to John Schrank, a nondescript saloon-keeper, originally from Bavaria, to stop him.
By killing him.
And he almost did. Were it not for the fact that the bullet had to pass through both a metal eyeglasses case and a fifty-page speech (folded over), the missile would have gone straight into Roosevelt’s lungs rather than into the taut muscle of the ex-president’s barrel chest, where it remained, only a moderate inconvenience, for the rest of his life. Schrank had, to his misfortune, directed his bullet at the most armored spot on TR’s body.
When examined by Chief of Police Janssen at the Central Police Station of Milwaukee, Schrank answered quite a few questions, a good many going to motive. And yet it couldn’t be any simpler: America had the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to guide her. But she also had her traditions, and Schrank felt that the most sacred of them all was the unspoken two-term limit for occupants of the White House. It was so sacred to him, in fact, that he would kill to keep it upheld. Was there any other reason Schrank had pulled that trigger? Well, yes. It was because William McKinley had told him to.
It wasn’t only that one night after McKinley’s passing — this dictate of revenge from beyond the grave. A second spectral injunction was delivered to Schrank over a decade later: on September 15, 1912, to be exact. It manifested itself in the early hours of the morning in the form of a disembodied (though familiar) voice. Speaking to Schrank in a low and melancholy tone, the voice had said, “Let no murderer occupy the presidential chair for a third term. Avenge my death!” This second decree, ambiguous in its earlier incarnation, now had explicit clarity: Theodore Roosevelt deserved to die because he was trying to achieve what no man throughout the course of American history had done before. The monk-habited, famously mustached figure in the dark (was there a doffed Rough Riders’ cavalry hat resting in its lap?), complicit in the death of the man he’d served as vice president, was now culpable of a most grievous additional offense in the sick mind of John Schrank. A week later Schrank was off on a single-minded mission to deliver the White House on November 5 to either President Taft (whose rupture with his friend and mentor TR had contributed to the creation of the Progressive or “Bull Moose” party) or the priggish Presbyterian academic Woodrow Wilson.
To the shock and consternation of those who formed the ex-president’s entourage in Milwaukee, the Bull Moose chose, in characteristically operatic fashion, to deliver every word of the prepared speech — all eighty minutes of it — to those who had assembled to hear him — this in spite of having just been shot in the chest. Only after completing the address did he consent to be taken to a hospital.
In the end, the former president made a full recovery. Unfortunately, the delivery of that speech (deemed inspiringly heroic by some and suicidally reckless by others) failed to sway the masses by numbers sufficient to win him the election. The prize went to the priggish Presbyterian academic.
On November 15, a court-ordered sanity commission was convened to determine if Schrank was sufficiently compos mentis to stand trial for his crime. The committee’s unanimous finding: the lonely, politics-obsessed saloon-keeper wasn’t sane by even the most generous definition of the word, and was therefore not accountable for his actions.
Which brings us back to 1940, whence this story began. Dr. Remley had lain awake, had walked the halls, had fretted without respite over a patient who had up to that date, July 18, seldom troubled him before. It was all quite mystifying to the doctor, especially since Schrank, generally a rapt observer of events of national political import, had stopped listening to the gavel-to-gavel radio coverage of the Democrats’ National Political Convention — had simply switched off the radio and not switched it back on, retreating silently inside himself.
Failing to glean the cause of this change in Schrank was the good doctor’s own fault. Had he cudgeled his brains just a little harder, he might have come to realize that the reason for his patient’s debilitating despondence lay in the very day itself. Because July 18, 1940, was a red-letter day in the annals of presidential politics. It was the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (fifth cousin to Teddy) formally accepted his party’s nomination for a third term as president of the United States.
And there wasn’t a thing in the world that Uncle John could do about it.