Terrorism, 1950
KELLY, TOM
Terrorism, 1950 When Puerto Rican nationalists tried to murder Harry Truman. BY TOM KELLY According to the flyleaf, "Everything in this book is true according to transcript, interview, secondary...
...they thought that Truman lived in the White House until a cab driver told them that he was temporarily living in Blair House across the street...
...In the brief, abortive revolt that preceded the assassination attempt in New York by a few days, he stayed home while five of his followers were being riddled with bullets...
...He was, they say, "smart...
...Fiery Pedro, a Harvard Law School graduate, was "a fighter against imperialism, a plotter of revolution, a man of almost saintly composure and assuredness [who] dazzled them all with his courage, his strength, his absolutism, his wit, his powerful oratory and his way of seeing through things to the absolute core...
...Hunter and Bainbridge then try to blow it all down in one big breath...
...Maybe it was the Spaniards, who "had left a legacy of violence" in Puerto Rico...
...Stephen Hunter, a Washington Post movie critic, has written a book about the attempted assassination of Harry Truman, and shares the blame with John Bainbridge Jr., who is described as a Journalist Lawyer, coupling two professions despised by millions...
...Walker went out, carrying a white napkin on a pole, while the Maximum Leader waited inside...
...After a three-day siege, he and a young man named Rivera Walker surrendered...
...Maybe Hunter has seen one Oliver Stone film too many...
...The main players are long dead, but Hunter and Bainbridge seem able to move back in time and into the heads and hearts of the assassins, as well as bystanders, innocent or not, at home and abroad, and hear with their ears, see with their eyes, and read the thoughts that ran around in their brains...
...The oddest thing about this odd book is the argument the authors are having with themselves...
...On Page 87 they report, matter-of-fact, that Grisella and Oscar did think Truman was in the White House and, when the cabby told them otherwise, they were so surprised that they felt "slapped in the face...
...There were five uprisers and all five were shot, four fatally...
...American Gun Fight purports to be the up-to-now suppressed account of what really happened on that November day in 1950 when two Puerto Rican heroes (according to the authors) made the fatal attempt to free their island home from the tentacles of the Octopus to the North...
...Why shoot Truman, that gentle, dedicated man...
...The authors offer a list of the myths they believe the gullible public was tricked into believing by the FBI and the Secret Service: The assassination attempt was thrown together on the run...
...Never mind the transcript, interview, secondary source or official document...
...Why did Simon and Schuster publish this book...
...They say, of the items listed: "Every single one of them is wrong...
...He was very smart...
...They try hard to make Griselio and Oscar heroes, and El Pedro a superhero...
...Perhaps Bainbridge feels, as lawyers often do, that the truth isn't important as long as you can persuade a jury...
...Maybe the publisher had a couple of idle presses, a lot of paper, and a desire to keep busy...
...The assassins were Griselio Torreso-la, who was killed, and Oscar Collazo, who killed a policeman but survived...
...What lover of crackpot nationalists could object to that...
...One said Albizu was "a gentlemanly Puerto Rican, not brilliant intellectually but of good habits and appearance...
...Truman was never in any mortal danger, and, due to the machinations of the government, the public regarded the attempt as a joke, a farce, an opera bouffe...
...Or maybe it was simply the inspired idea of their leader, "fiery Pedro Albizu Campos...
...The authors aren't quite sure, but they offer us choices...
...This book is without substantial new facts, but loaded with suppositions, deductions, and opinions...
...At Harvard he failed to maintain the C average required, but two professors recommended him for the law school anyway...
...Actually, every single one of them is right...
...Maybe it was the Americans, who arrived there after the Spanish in 1898, "advancing behind piety and bayonets," and who had changed "their language, their customs and even the spelling of the name of the island itself...
...the assassins were upset by newspaper reports of what was going on in Puerto Rico, where an equally silly group of men were attempting a coup...
...Why did they write this loopy book...
...They assure us that Oscar, Griselio, and El Pedro were able planners...
...These noble savages weren't after him, they were after "the president of the United States...
...Interpretations, deductions and opinions, which should be clear from context, are our own...
...let's get to the interpretations, deductions, and opinions...
...They seem to believe that, with a little bit of luck, El Pedro would have been the Father of a Brave New Country...
...How would they have gone about it...
...Would they have shot the guards in the guardhouse, run up the long curving path to the front door, shot the guards there, and then run around the huge building, shooting guards and innocent bystanders, until they found out where the president was...
...Consider the planning...
...Meanwhile, their leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, was sitting out an uprising in Puerto Rico...
...Harry Tom Kelly is a veteran Washington, D.C...
...Why is the country that fought a civil war to abolish slavery, rescued Puerto Rico from "gold hungry" Spain, helped defeat Hitler, saved the Philippines from Spain, and brought Saddam Hussein, the butcher of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, to judge and jury, the villain...
...Why did they want to kill the president...
...The authors seem persuaded that the attempt to kill Truman was perfectly understandable and, indeed, noble...
...Oscar, the one who survived, says it was nothing personal...
...reporter...
...BY TOM KELLY According to the flyleaf, "Everything in this book is true according to transcript, interview, secondary source or official document...
...The other said he was "unusually courteous and gentlemanly . . . and his work, if not brilliant, has been thorough and absolutely satisfactory...
...Perhaps, like many dedicated members of the modern media, they believe it is part of their job to present America as an exploiter of mankind and greedy gobbler of other peoples' goods...
...El Pedro's courage wasn't always dazzling...
...He had run for president of Puerto Rico and received 5,000 votes out of the hundreds of thousands cast...
...the grim fact that Truman would have been dead was beside the point...
...They had intended to gun down Harry Truman in the White House...
...On Page 41 they mock the idea that the assassins were so out of touch with reality that they thought that Truman was in the White House until the cabby told them he was across the street...
Vol. 11 • March 2006 • No. 26
