The Intrigues Behind Political Assassinations in America: From Abraham Lincoln to Charlie Kirk

H. Rap Brown, a Black revolutionary, famously declared during the 1967 racial riots in Detroit that "violence is as American as cherry pie." This violence can be seen in the endless wars waged by the U.S. around the globe, in the gun violence and mass shootings plaguing American cities, but it also appears in the political arena as well. Ten American presidents--Andrew Jackson (1835), Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), Warren G. Harding (1923), Harry S. Truman (1950, John F. Kennedy (1963), Richard Nixon (1974), Gerald Ford twice (1975), and Ronald Reagan (1981)--have all been the targets or apparent targets of assassins, as have five presidential candidates: Theodore Roosevelt (1912), Franklin Roosevelt (1933), Robert F. Kennedy (1968), George Wallace (1972), and Donald J. Trump (2024). Eight governors, seven U.S. Senators, nine U.S. House members, eleven mayors, a U.S. Treasury Secretary (Alexander Hamilton) and seventeen state legislators have also been victims of political violence. So have the country's first Secretary of Defense, a White House Counsel and a Secretary of Commerce, a CIA biochemist, numerous journalists and witnesses to state crimes, and even Beatles singer John Lennon, likely killed by a CIA agent. Then there's Epstein and Charlie Kirk.

Successful, professional, credentialed historians reliably attribute known assassinations in this country to deranged loners--or "lonely oddballs with a firearm fixation" . The Intrigues behind Political Assassinations in America makes a highly documented and compelling counter argument.