Drama at Blair House: the attempted assassination of Harry Truman

American Handgunner, March-April, 2006 by Massad Ayoob

Coffelt's first and only shot is the last one of the gunfight. The deadly battle lasted no more than 40 seconds. Some 30 rounds have been fired. Torresola is dead, and Coffelt is dying.

The Lessons

Hunter and Bainbridge have done their homework. "American Gunfight" is laced with explanations of tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, and the many other physio-psychological phenomena that hit people in shootouts.

The attack on Blair House was really a home invasion. It was thwarted only because the defenders were armed and ready, their Colts loaded and strapped to their hips. Inside, one Secret Service agent raced to unlock the Thompson sub-machine gun maintained for such contingencies, but by the time it was out of its cabinet and up and ready, the gunfight was over. There are lessons here for more modest homes than Blair House, homes protected by their owners, not the elite of bodyguards.

Stephen Hunter believes three key lessons emerge from the incident. One is police should carry powerful semiautomatic pistols. In 1950, there wasn't a single law-enforcement agency of any size issuing autoloaders to the rank and file. Not until 1967 would Illinois State Police break ground by adopting the S&W Model 39 9mm, and not until the 1980s would other major agencies follow suit. The quest for something more potent than 158-grain lead round nose .38 Special didn't begin in earnest until the 1960s.

Hunter and Bainbridge wrote, "The second lesson is: shoot two-handed. The one-handed shooting techniques of the agents and officers turned out to be woefully inadequate. By contrast, Griselio, shooting with both hands on the gun, was able to operate with frightening efficiency. He took three men out of the fight in very few seconds, including the longest effective shot in the fight, the one that hit Don Birdzell in the second knee; only the incredible courage of Coffelt to get himself back in the fight, though fatally wounded, and to make a great shot prevented what could have been a catastrophe. It's even possible Les made that great shot two-handed himself, but it can't be stated with certainty as no witnesses saw that part of the fight. Meanwhile the Secret Service agents, firing one-handed, fired three shots--all were ineffective. Don Birdzell fired five shots one-handed; he missed with all five. Police officer Joe Davidson fired six shots one-handed and only one of them, believed to be a ricochet, was effective, and not immediately."

The third point of the authors is firearms training needs to be practical and job related. Hunter doesn't feel the training of the time--oriented toward one-hand, single action bulls-eye shooting with light wadcutter ammunition was adequate. He's correct.

"American Gunfight" is filled with incisive, detailed study of particular elements of this incident. Consider their analysis of why Boring's headshot on Collazo failed to take effect: "He hit right where he was aiming and blew a .38 caliber hole in the man's hat. It's just that not enough of the man's head was in that part of the hat. It was a big hat but a small, flattish head. The bullet, rather than punching through skull to the deep part of the brain, knocking out all the controls and toppling the brain-owner forward, simply cut a groove through Oscar's hair, flaying a laceration into his skull. But other factors may have made Floyd's shot all but impossible; he was hampered by the policies of two narrow-minded agencies--his own bureaucracy was un-budgeable, and the laws of physics are un-malleable. As a cost-saving measure, the Treasury Department had installed a Star progressive reloading machine at the Treasury firing range, so empty casings could be economically reloaded--the cost savings per round rose with the number of rounds fired; it would have made any mid-level government accountant's heart warm and toasty. Floyd had, in fact, just finished firing 300 of those rounds, reconfirming, even grooving for himself, the relationship between his sight picture and the strike of the bullet. Thus, when he aimed at Oscar's forehead, he had every expectation of striking Oscar's forehead.