The Presidency: Never Safe Enough

Never before in its 194 years had the White House, the world's most recognizable symbol of democracy, been sprayed by bullets. The British invaders torched the building in 1814, but there was no gunplay there, since the unprepared Americans wisely chose to run away. Abraham Lincoln stood at his bedroom window and listened to Civil War cannonading across the Potomac, but the Confederates never reached the White House.

The two fanatic Puerto Rican nationalists who tried to assassinate Harry Truman in 1950 attacked him when he was living across the street in Blair House while the White House was being renovated....