History has a way of getting away from us. If we are old enough, our triggered memories may call up with difficulty the remodeling of the White House, begun soon after Truman defeated Thomas Dewey in 1948, which necessitated the Trumans living a couple of years in nearby Blair House (once owned by the famous Blair family of the Jackson and Lincoln eras). We may even recall that awful day in 1954 when four Puerto Ricans shot up Congress.

With a bit more effort, perhaps, we may recall that two Puerto Ricans attempted to assassinate President Truman as he napped after lunch on Nov. 1, 1950, at the Blair House domicile. (In many minds, the two events-the 1950 and the 1954 shootings-are often confused and entwined.)

One reason for our sparse consciousness of that 1950 Truman event, other than the erosion that time makes on our memories, is that it all took place in only 38.5 seconds.

Another reason is that assassination attempts on presidents and presidential candidates have become increasingly commonplace occurrences, and this 1950 incident gets lost in the list.

John Wilkes Booth took out Lincoln, Leon Czolgosz got McKinley, Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald shot John Kennedy, and Charles Guiteau slew Garfield. Giuseppe aimed at Franklin Roosevelt, but got Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead.

Arthur Bremer wounded George Wallace, Samuel Byck aimed at Richard Nixon but killed a policeman and a pilot, "Squeaky" Fromme shot at Gerald Ford, Richard Lawrence tried to get Andrew Jackson, John Schrank went after Teddy Roosevelt, and John Hinckley wounded Ronald Reagan (and his press secretary).

The Truman attempt tends to get lost in repetitive ricocheting rhythms.

Washington Post writer and novelist Stephen Hunter, assisted by former Baltimore Sun writer and attorney John Bainbridge, Jr., have reconstructed a thorough analysis of those forgotten 38.5 seconds in 1950 and of what led up to them and of what followed in their wake. "American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill President Truman -- and the Shoot-out That Stopped It" (Simon & Schuster, 2005, 368 pp.). Our Washington Post daughter gave me an autographed copy in May.

Two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, loyal to the charismatic Don Pedro Albizu Campos and opposed to U.S. possession of Puerto Rico and to Gov. Luis Munoz Marin, converged from two different directions at Blair House (which is really two connected houses-the old Blair House and the old Lee House). When the shooting stopped, Collazo was slightly wounded and Torresola was dead and, among the seven Secret Service agents and White House Police who had stood beween them and the napping underwear-clad Truman, one was dead and two others wounded.

Collazo, tried later, steadfastly maintained that the scheme had been hatched up the night before and that it had no ties to the aborted revolutionary uprising going on at the same time in Puerto Rico. But reporters Hunter and Bainbridge believe otherwise, and their book provides a biographical profile of every person connected with the event and pieces together painstakingly the evidence of this being an elaborately conceived plot many people and many days in the making.

Truman, being the fearless World War I veteran, climbed out of bed when he heard the shots, and went to the window overlooking the scene. He missed being seen and perhaps shot by the skilled gunman, Torresola, who apparently was killed by a single shot to the head fired by dying security officer Les Coffelt.

One consequence of the Blair House blast-out was that presidential security and training after 1950 were very greatly upgraded, although not effective enough to prevent the successful assassination of President Kennedy only 13 years later.

As I said, history has a way of getting away from us. That shooting electrified the nation back in 1950, but time has passed. I had completely forgotten or repressed it, until this book brought back memories stowed away when I was an impressionable 14-year-old absorbed in politics and political ambitions. Maybe that is when I first began to think that there had to be a better vocation for me than politics -- a thought confirmed for me later on by three assassinations in the 1960s and by the shameful shenanigans of Richard Nixon.

Larry McGehee, professor-emeritus at Wofford College, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu

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