The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara
Picchi, Blaise
soporific, nor that such a reliance on "balancing" the pronouncements of official sources affects the quality of reporting at the most basic level of information-gathering. Mainstream papers tend to...
...Many people agreed...
...Was he frightened...
...Cross basking in undeserved fame eventually made him mad enough to begin lobbying for a Medal of Honor for himself...
...All the chiefs of people, never alone...
...Cross's story, as did most Miamians, but the national press wanted the plucky little housewife so that's what America got...
...He brought it up constantly during his questioning, interjecting it into his simplistic political views: "I shoot kings and presidents, capitalists got all-a money and I got bellyache all-a time...
...News is gathered systematically by men stationed at all the outlets of it, like guards at the gates of a walled city...
...He insisted on pleading guilty, saying, "I kill capitalists because they kill me, stomach like drunk man...
...Goodbye to all poor peoples everywhere...
...Lots of people stick around him and you got to take chance to kill him...
...Sitting atop the back seat of a convertible, he rode slowly through the packed crowds and stopped in front of a stage full of VIPs, among them the mayor of Chicago, Anton J. Cermak...
...A native Floridian, Picchi paints an evocative picture of a vanished Miami that conveys the texture of a bygone age, interviews the still-living persons who were there on the fatal night, digs up never-published documents, and presents a Zangara who is intriguingly reminiscent of Celine, the French writer who was cleared of charges that he collaborated with the Nazis when the judges agreed that "He was too much of a loner to collaborate with anybody...
...This opened a legal door for Zangara to claim that his bullet had not caused Cermak's death, but he insisted on pleading guilty...
...72 February 1999 • The American Spectator...
...He go all the time with a bunch...
...Either Armour or Mrs...
...At first Armour maintained a tightlipped resignation, but seeing Mrs...
...It is no accident that this criticism sounds so up-to-date, even though Julian Ralph of the defunct New York Sun made it in 1903...
...All he did was speak to the prisoner in broken English interspersed with a few Spanish words such as "hombre" and "amigo," but an excited reporter fell for it and the rest of the press corps followed suit...
...Mabel Gill and Mayor Cermak...
...He said and did all the right things at the right times: He stopped the car twice to pick up the wounded...
...Was he rattled or petulant...
...Walter Winchell, who was in Miami that night, immediately concluded that Zangara was not a presidential assassin but a hit man for the Chicago mob who had been sent to shoot the man he did in fact shoot: Mayor Anton Cermak...
...Relieved that he had escaped unhurt...
...Who saved FDR's life by spoiling Zangara's aim—Mrs...
...firing a .32 revolver at the presidential party...
...He had met his first test under fire, and he had impressed not only his associates, but the press and the nation...
...Cross's death in the 1950's received national attention while Thomas's 1973 passing drew only local notice...
...he gunman was a naturalized Italian bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara who stood all of fivefoot-one, hence his awkward firing position...
...That his behavior this night was fresh in the minds of the nation that heard his First Inaugural address established his presidential bona fides as no mere speech could: The people around FDR were watching him to see how this man who was about to lead a troubled nation would react to the attempt on his life...
...FDR arrived at the political rally tanned and relaxed from a deep-sea fishing trip on Vincent Astor's yacht...
...In no time Hardie, a typical Southern lawman who split heads and infinitives, was routinely described as "something of a linguist," which was soon expanded to "interpreter...
...Whatever happened, all five shots missed FDR and hit others...
...The Secret Service ordered FDR's driver to get out of the park but the president-elect countermanded them and went back to pick up the wounded...
...The attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt is almost forgotten today, but for connoisseurs of Fate there is nothing quite like it...
...On the way to the hospital he cradled Anton Cermak's head on his shoulder and kept talking to him—"Tony, keep quiet, don't move, Tony"— a steady murmur of encouragement that doctors later said kept Cermak from going into shock...
...He was electrocuted on March zo in what still stands as the swiftest legal execution in this century...
...The Miami police doubted Mrs...
...Some 30 feet from the car, a man in the third row of spectators was standing on tiptoe on a rickety chair, his arm stretched over the heads in front of him, FLORENCE KING'S most recent book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...Since Cermak and Mrs...
...I don't like no peoples," he explained...
...Cross appeared as a guest on the popular national radio show "We the People," hosted by the renowned Gabriel Heatter, and Armour bombarded the network executives with affidavits, gaining nothing but a reputation as a crank...
...The crowd and the police pounced on the gunman...
...Gill were still alive, Zangara was arraigned on four counts of assault with intent to kill, with a murder charge pending should one or both of them die...
...Lillian Cross, the doctor's wife, or Thomas Armour, the trusty carpenter...
...It's a measure of his unknowable personality that he was able to be both stoic and cocky in the death chamber...
...Sentenced to four terms of zo years each, he told the judge, "Don't be stingy, give me hundred...
...To the minister intoning sonorous prayers he snapped, "Get to hell out of here, you sonofabitch," and strode toward the chair unassisted, shouting, "I go sit down all by myself...
...The whole picture changed for Zangara when Anton Cermak died on March 6, two days after FDR's inauguration...
...The other 15 minutes of fame went to Dade County Sheriff Dan Hardie, a third-grade dropout who emerged as a mellifluous specialist in foreign languages after he claimed to be the only person who could make himself understood to Zangara...
...Lillian Cross, wife of a Miami doctor, who was also standing on a chair...
...It was on this note of personal courage, graciousness, and self-confidence that he was to assume the reins of government seventeen days later...
...History got the last word: Mrs...
...cousins when convenient...
...Mainstream papers tend to lash out at the "less-disciplined" work to be found, for example, in certain political monthlies, but that doesn't keep them from latching onto stories generated by their bastard The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara: The Man Who Would Assassinate FDR Blaise Picchi Academy Chicago / 273 pages / $26.95 REVIEWED BY Florence King A t 9:15 on the evening of February 15, 1933, the greatest "what if" in American history was played out in Miami's Bayfront Park...
...Unlike the Oswalds of this world he had no taste for turgid political manifestos...
...An atheist, he believed only in "what I see...
...he calmly talked Cermak out of shock, and he visited the victims that night and returned to the hospital the next day with flowers, cards, and baskets of fruit...
...Born in 1900 in Calabria, the province at the toe of the boot, he was a sickly child made sicker by a brutal father who beat him, starved him, and put him to work at the age of six, .',F,AA when his chronic stomach pain began...
...Give me electric chair...
...Directly behind him was Thomas Armour, a Miami carpenter...
...He rejected an appeal.44 Sentenced to four terms of 20 years each, Zangara said, 'Don't be stingy, give me hundred.' 7 M eanwhile, as the country hung on the fates of the two victims, a wacky controversy heated up...
...The story of the attempt on FDR's life has never been told except in a few magazine articles, but now Florida criminal lawyer Blaise Picchi has filled the 65-year gap with The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara, a book that is impossible to put down...
...The FBI investigation proved him right: He belonged to nothing and no one...
...Two people were seriously wounded: a Mrs...
...He sounded like an anarchist, yet he condemned them along with Communists, socialists, and Fascists, proudly insisting that his views were "nobody but mine," a claim borne out by a search of his room...
...He appeared unfazed, calm, deliberate, cheerful—throughout the shooting itself as well as during its aftermath...
...Gill, but his rationale was not so much cold and psychopathic as matter-of-fact and practical: "You can't find a king or a president alone...
...Cermak was a reform mayor and dedicated anti-Prohibitionist who had made enemies in the underworld, but Zangara insisted that he wanted to shoot only "kings and presidents" and disclaimed all ties to all groups except the bricklayers' union, which, he said, he had joined only because he had to...
...After making a brief speech from the car, he was talking privately with the dignitaries who came down from the stage to greet him when five shots rang out...
...Cross and invited her and her family to sit with the Roosevelts at Inauguration, but when Florida Congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen, daughter of William Jennings Bryan, nominated her for the Medal of Honor, supporters of Thomas Armour began beating the drums for their man...
...This pain A Date Which Should Live in Irony The American Spectator • February 1999 71 became the central fact of his life...
...No point living...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...He may be our most interesting assassin, if only because he was a registered Republican whose chief motivation seems to have been hypochondria...
...Cross grabbed the gunman's arm to deflect his aim—both so claimed afterwards —or perhaps it was the unsteady chair...
...His last words, spoken to Sheriff Hardie at the controls, were "Pusha da button...
...His death came about through a misdiagnosis of his injuries that his doctors tried to cover up by citing a pre-existing condition...
...In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, virtually every word and action of the president-elect was reported to the nation...
...he assured the crowd that he was all right...
...Mindich quotes a New York journalist as saying, "No one looks for [news] anymore...
...He was none of those things...
...FDR had personally thanked Mrs...
...That February evening he was still an unknown quantity...
...Nervous...
...It went on for six years, peaking when Mrs...
...A reporter-witness compared it to a man hopping into a barber's chair...
...Directly in front of him was Mrs...
...The chief of government you no see alone...
...FDR stayed four hours at the hospital, showing by his actions what he would soon express in words about the needto banish fear...
...Land, sky, moon," and said he felt no remorse over wounding Cermak and Mrs...
...As they put the hood on him he called out, "Viva Italia...
...Martin's...
...the few books he owned were English-language aids...
Vol. 32 • February 1999 • No. 2
