When Harry Truman Almost Fell Victim to Leftist Bloodlust

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Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola were not members of the Communist Party. When they tried to murder U.S. President Harry Truman, they did so for the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism, and there is no indication that either of them had any desire to make the island of enchantment into an outpost of the international proletarian revolution. Nevertheless, this all happened during the early years of the Cold War, and while Collazo and Torresola may not have been interested in the international proletarian revolution, the international proletarian revolution was interested in them. And they certainly made use of its tactics.

Truman was an odd choice as a target, since he actually supported Puerto Rican self-determination. After the assassination attempt, he supported a Puerto Rican plebiscite on independence, in which 81 percent of Puerto Ricans voted to remain part of the United States. So Truman was in no way some kind of colonialist oppressor. Collazo, however, explained (in words that were redolent of Marxist theory) that the president was not just an individual: he was “a symbol of the system. You don’t attack the man, you attack the system.”

And so on November 1, 1950, Collazo and Torresola stormed into Blair House, where Truman was living while the White House was being renovated. They opened fire and hit a White House police officer, Leslie Coffelt, who managed to fire back, killing Torresola, before he himself died. In the ensuing gunfight, Collazo was wounded, but survived.

Truman was upstairs in his quarters and was unharmed. Collazo was given the death penalty, but Truman commuted his sentence to life in prison; many years later, in 1979, President Jimmy Carter further commuted his sentence to time served, and he walked free. The New York Times noted that “the commutation was expected to clear the way for the release of four Americans held by the Cuban Government. President Fidel Castro had offered to exchange the prisoners for the Puerto Rican nationalists.” Collazo returned to Puerto Rico, where he spent the rest of his days in the limelight as a hero of the independence movement.

The attempted assassination of Harry Truman demonstrated typical leftist assumptions. Collazo and Torresola thought that a dramatic act of violence would draw attention to the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism. Their assumption that a cold-blooded murder of a man who was not an enemy of their cause would gain them sympathy makes no sense except in light of the leftist conviction that people can be compelled through terror to accept tyranny. Collazo and Torresola were not in a position to unleash a reign of terror a la the French or Bolshevik Revolutions, but they were willing to murder a president to show people the dangers of opposing Puerto Rican independence.

This was a quintessential expression of the left’s bloodlust and thirst for violence, and leftists duly took note. The Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), to which Elias Rodriguez, the man who recently murdered two Israeli Embassy officials in Washington in order to advance the cause of Palestine, was linked, has written admiringly of the Puerto Rican nationalists who tried to murder Harry Truman.

“One often overlooked chapter in the history of the McCarthy witch hunt,” says the PSL on its website, “was its implementation in Puerto Rico. Under the cover of the fighting the ‘war on communism,’ the U.S. colonial authority issued orders to jail and kill Puerto Rican nationalists.” In the course of Puerto Rico’s struggle against the colonialist oppressor, the Puerto nationalist leader Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos “sent Puerto Rican Nationalists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola to the Blair House in Washington, D.C. to assassinate Truman. Torresola was killed and Collazo was critically wounded in a shootout with capital police and Truman’s bodyguards. Collazo was initially sentenced to death, but based on the strength of the movement for Puerto Rican independence, Truman commuted his sentence and he was eventually freed in 1979.”

Another Marxist publication, Workers World, lionizes Collazo and Torresola in similar terms, along with other Puerto Rican nationalists, and concludes: “The uprisings of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico failed to overthrow U.S. colonial rule, but they inspired attempts from other forces, forces this time guided by both nationalism and Marxism-Leninism that knew the necessity of armed revolution.”

It’s clear: the hard-left considers Collazo and Torresola to be heroes, and the reason why they are considered heroes is because they attempted to murder Harry Truman. If there is anything leftists love, it’s bloodshed. “Free Palestine” warriors today hold the same assumptions, as Cody Balmer, Elias Rodriguez, and Mohamad Sabry Soliman, among so many others, have recently shown us.