← Back to the front page

What Lincoln’s Pockets Held When he Died and Other Presidential Oddities

Khalid Elhassan July 15, 2021 36 min

Secret Service agents bust counterfeiters in 1879. United States Secret Service

President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 — President Theodore Roosevelt on the campaign trail in 1904. The Press Democrat

17. When Teddy Roosevelt Was Shot

Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest person to ever become US president, decided in 1908 that two terms were enough. So he did not run for reelection that year and instead groomed his close friend William Howard Taft to succeed him in the Oval Office. By 1912, however, Teddy, or TR as he was often known, had come to regret his decision to walk away from the White House. So he returned to the campaign trail and ran for president as a candidate of the Bull Moose Party.

On October 14^th of that year, Teddy Roosevelt made his way to a podium at the Milwaukee Auditorium to make a campaign speech 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 stump: “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have been shot“. As the horrified audience gasped, Teddy Roosevelt unbuttoned his vest, to reveal a bloodstained shirt beneath.

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.