Teddy Roosevelt Lies
A 3rd Term For Progressive President
Taft's A Fraud
President Shot On The Way To Speech
Strong as a Bull Moose
Just before 8:00 the evening of Oct. 14, 1912, as Roosevelt was entering a car on his way to deliver a speech at a campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a mentally-unstable assailant named John Schrank fired a .38-caliber bullet point-blank into the ex-president’s chest. Roosevelt waved off his doctor and insisted on being driven to the rally and delivering his prepared remarks. With the bullet lodged in his chest and blood slowly seeping into his shirt, Roosevelt began his speech by telling the crowd: “I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”
What happened next was grand theater, as described in the reporter’s eye-witness account reprinted below. For over an hour Roosevelt delivered his speech, driving the crowd of 15,000 into paroxysms of anxiety whenever he occasionally winced in pain, paused for a drink of water, or seemed to falter as his voice grew weaker. But each time, the Spanish-American War veteran and renowned big-game hunter rallied his legendary strength, calmed the worried crowd, and continued. When he finished the speech, the crowd roared with a response the reporter said was “deafening.” And little wonder!