Gunfire Outside Blair House: The Attempt on Truman’s Life

A President Living Across the Street

In the autumn of 1950 Harry Truman did not live in the White House. Engineers had found serious structural problems in the old mansion, and the Trumans moved into Blair House, a historic townhouse across Pennsylvania Avenue, while the building was gutted and rebuilt. The arrangement had a security cost. Blair House opened almost directly onto a public sidewalk, and its protection rested on a few uniformed White House police officers in sentry booths and a small number of Secret Service agents. On the afternoon of November 1 the president was upstairs, resting, in a house that was far easier to approach than the one he had left.

Forty Seconds on the Sidewalk

Shortly after two in the afternoon two men walked toward the house from opposite directions. Oscar Collazo came along the front steps; Griselio Torresola approached from the west, near the sentry booth. Collazo’s pistol failed at first, and when it fired he shot officer Donald Birdzell in the leg. Gunfire then broke out on both sides. Torresola shot Leslie Coffelt and Joseph Downs; Coffelt, mortally wounded, still fired back from his booth and killed Torresola. Collazo was wounded and captured on the steps. The whole exchange lasted well under a minute, with roughly two dozen shots fired, and neither man got inside. Coffelt died in hospital a few hours later.

The Cause Behind the Attack

Both attackers belonged to the Puerto Rican Nationalist movement, which wanted the island independent of the United States. Only days earlier, nationalist uprisings had broken out in several Puerto Rican towns and had been put down. The attackers rejected the political arrangement then taking shape, in which Washington was allowing Puerto Rico to draft its own constitution while remaining under American authority. They hoped that an attack on the president would draw the world’s attention to the question. Truman is reported to have remarked afterwards that a president has to expect such things.

A Trial, a Commutation, a Memory

Collazo was tried for the murder of Officer Coffelt, convicted in 1951, and sentenced to death. In 1952 Truman commuted the sentence to life in prison. Collazo was released in 1979, after President Jimmy Carter commuted it again, and he lived in Puerto Rico until his death in 1994. The attack led to tighter protection around the president and his residences. Leslie Coffelt is remembered for giving his life to defend the man in the house behind him, and the shooting is still taught as a turning point in the history of presidential security.

Blair House After 1950

The Trumans moved back into the renovated White House in March 1952. Blair House, which the government had bought in 1942, remains the president’s official guest house, where visiting heads of state and other dignitaries stay when they come to Washington. The complex has since grown to include neighboring townhouses, and it sits inside a much tighter security perimeter than it did in 1950, when a stroll along the sidewalk was enough to reach the front door. The attack is a reminder that the protection of presidents, now taken for granted, was shaped in large part by moments when it failed or came close to failing.