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Sam Byck and the Assassination of Richard Nixon

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy first make mad.  Am I mad? I doubt it.”—Samuel J. Byck, January 14, 1974 Of the 45 presidents of the United States, 19 of them have had assassination attempts made on them.  Only four of these assassination attempts have been successful, and all four were accomplished with guns.  Other ways to kill presidents have included a hand grenade, thrown at President George W. Bush in the Republic of Georgia in 2005; an attempt by Argentine anarchists to blow up a train carrying President-Elect Hoover in Argentina in 1928; a letter-bomb sent to President Truman in 1948; and poisons like anthrax mailed to Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.  Most every other assassination attempt was made with a gun. But there was one assassination attempt that was different, that was a more elaborate plot.  This was the plot to kill President Richard Nixon on February 22, 1974.   It involved a gun, but the gun was not inten

I Did Not Kill President Garfield

“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”—Benjamin Disraeli In every country and in every time and in every point in history, citizens complain about corruption in their government. There are always people saying it’s never been worse. Sometimes they’re correct about that, too, but really, in most cases, you can find at least one point in history where corruption had been worse than however terrible it might happen to be right now. In America, for all the corruption that might be going on in the national and state capitals today, it’s reasonable to say that in the 1870s, corruption was much worse. Scandals plagued the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, and his successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, didn’t manage to do much to clean things up, despite high expectations from the voters and his own best intentions. One big issue on the minds of critics of the day was the buying of offices, where a politician was allowed to offer a job to someone in exch