During 1972 presidential campaign, a future assassin got within feet of Nixon in Ottawa

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump revived a violent American tradition, in which political office-holders and campaigners have been struck down by bullets with a frequency not seen in other Western democracies.

The incident on Saturday in Butler, Pa., evoked comparisons to the fatal shootings of four U.S. presidents: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy.

Also liberally mentioned in recent days were the survivors of such shootings: Theodore Roosevelt, an ex-president running for office again in 1912, and Ronald Reagan, who was just several weeks into his first term when he was struck in March 1981.

Somewhat surprisingly, the very last shooting in a presidential campaign has received less attention. While Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace in May 1972 was not in the position of strength that Trump currently is in terms of his candidacy, both men have been viewed by critics as demagogues who ratcheted up the national political temperature with incendiary and, to some, racist language.

Wallace famously said «segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,» and blocked two Black students trying to enter the University of Alabama in 1963 while governor.

«You knew it was probably going to happen at some point, but you pray every day that it doesn't,» Peggy Wallace Kennedy, his daughter, told Smithsonian Magazine in 2022 of the shooting.

It might not have happened at all had Wallace's shooter, Arthur Bremer, succeeded in doing what he originally set out to do in mid-April 1972 — gun down U.S. president Richard Nixon during a state visit to Ottawa. That's according to a federal probe, and previous reporting from Don Sellar of the Southam newspaper chain, the Canadian