April 6, 2006
Post-Shooting Presidential Wisecracks Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:30 AM EST A few days ago, this Web site marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attempted assassination of President Reagan with an article on our main page. Since the President survived that attack, it’s easy to remember the incident as almost a lark. It helps that Reagan was alert enough to get off a few of the one-liners for which he was famous. Most of us will recall “Honey, I forgot to duck,” spoken to his wife (a line borrowed from the boxer Jack Dempsey), and “I hope you guys are Republicans,” to his surgeons. But he made quite a few other jokes of varying degrees of hilarity, some of which are listed here. Going back another century, this summer will mark the 125th anniversary of President James A. Garfield’s assassination, which I am researching for the “Time Machine” column in our print magazine. That event has a much darker tinge, since Garfield died of his wounds after two and a half agonizing months. He suffered much more severely than Reagan and was often unable to write or speak, and in any case, Garfield was considerably less ready with a quip than his namesake cartoon cat (or Reagan). But as he lay dying, he did manage to get off a decent one every now and then. In an 1888 diary entry, which can be read here, Rutherford B. Hayes, who had preceded Garfield as President, recounts a visit from William T. Crump, a White House attendant who had nursed Garfield after the shooting: “He [Crump] tells many things showing that Garfield during his illness was in full possession of his faculties; would joke but never smiled even when everyone else laughed. ‘Once Mrs. Garfield was reading items from the morning paper to the President. The death [of] Dean Stanley was read. The President said: “A letter to Mrs. Dean Stanley should be written.” Then an item that Sitting Bull was starving in the North. Mrs. Garfield said: “They better let him starve.” The President hated the oatmeal the doctors required him to eat every morning. He said: “Oh no, send him my oatmeal.”’”
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