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A Downed Pilot Who Ran Away in a Stolen Enemy Plane and Other Historic Escapes

Khalid Elhassan September 13, 2020 28 min

A P=51 making a low level pass on a German airplane. Art Station

12. Teddy Roosevelt Stunned an Audience by Stating “I Don’t Know Whether You Fully Understand That I Have Been Shot“

Teddy Roosevelt campaigning in 1912. ThoughtCo

In 1912, former American President Theodore Roosevelt had come to regret his decision to leave the White House in 1908. So he returned to the campaign trail, running for president as candidate of the Bull Moose Party. On October 14^th of that year, he made his way to a podium at the Milwaukee Auditorium and opened with the unremarkable statement “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible“.

Next, however, he delivered one of the most remarkable lines ever uttered on the presidential stump: “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have been shot“. As the horrified audience gasped, TR unbuttoned his vest, to reveal a bloodstained shirt beneath and demonstrate his lucky escape from death. The former president then topped his previous statement with an even more memorable one: “it takes more than that to kill a bull moose!“

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.