Historical Figures Who Survived Assassination Plots
Throughout history, powerful leaders have made plenty of enemies. Some of those enemies got creative with their revenge plans, but not all assassination attempts go according to plan.
Weather conditions, pocket items, sheer luck, or just plain incompetence have saved numerous historical figures from meeting an early end. The stories of these survivors reveal just how close history came to taking a completely different turn.
Here is a list of historical figures who walked away from assassination plots that should have ended their lives.
Theodore Roosevelt
Getting shot in the chest would send most people straight to the emergency room, but Theodore Roosevelt wasn’t most people. In 1912, while campaigning for a third presidential term in Milwaukee, a saloonkeeper named John Schrank fired a bullet directly at Roosevelt’s heart.
The bullet punched through Roosevelt’s steel eyeglass case and his 50-page speech folded in his jacket pocket, which slowed it enough to lodge in his chest muscle rather than killing him instantly. Roosevelt calmly assessed that he wasn’t coughing blood, figured his lung was fine, and proceeded to deliver an 84-minute campaign speech while blood flows through his shirt, famously telling the horrified crowd that ‘it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.’
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson survived what might be the luckiest escape in presidential history. On January 30, 1835, an unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence stepped out from behind a pillar at the U.S. Capitol and fired a pistol at Jackson’s back from just a few feet away, but the gun misfired.
Lawrence immediately pulled out a second pistol and fired again at point-blank range, and incredibly, that one misfired too. The furious 67-year-old president then beat Lawrence with his walking cane while shouting ‘Let me alone! I know where this came from!’
Experts later calculated the odds of both guns failing at 125,000 to 1, leading many to believe divine intervention had saved Jackson’s life.
Fidel Castro
If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic sport, Fidel Castro would have more gold medals than Michael Phelps. The Cuban leader reportedly survived an estimated 638 assassination attempts during his lifetime, many orchestrated by the CIA using methods that sound more like cartoon plots than serious espionage.
The schemes included exploding cigars, poison pills hidden in cold cream, a contaminated diving suit, and even a plot involving his former lover Marita Lorenz who was supposed to slip poison pills into his drink. Castro lived to be 90 years old, outlasting multiple U.S. presidents and making a mockery of every agency that tried to take him down.
King Zog I of Albania
King Zog I holds the dubious distinction of surviving more than 55 assassination attempts during his rule of Albania from 1928 to 1939. One particularly dramatic incident occurred at the Vienna State Opera in 1931 when two assassins opened fire on the king, who reportedly became the only known head of state in history to fight back during an assassination attempt by pulling out his own pistol and returning fire.
Zog was shot twice in 1924 while entering parliament but recovered and eventually staged a coup to reclaim power. The constant threat of death became such a normal part of his life that he reportedly traveled with a food taster and trusted almost no one.
Pope John Paul II
Pope John Paul II nearly died on May 13, 1981, when Turkish assassin Mehmet Ali Ağca shot him four times in St. Peter’s Square in front of thousands of pilgrims. The bullets struck his abdomen, left hand, and right arm, causing severe blood loss and nearly killing him before emergency surgery saved his life.
What made this story even more remarkable was the Pope’s response afterward—he visited Ağca in prison, forgave him personally, and the two developed an unlikely correspondence. The Pope later credited the Virgin Mary with guiding the bullets away from vital organs, allowing him to continue his papacy for another 24 years.
Adolf Hitler
Hitler survived an astounding 42 confirmed assassination attempts, with the most famous being the July 20, 1944 plot at the Wolf’s Lair. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in a briefcase under the conference table during a military meeting, but Hitler was saved when someone moved the briefcase to the other side of a thick wooden table leg, which absorbed much of the blast.
The explosion killed three officers and wounded more than twenty others, but Hitler escaped with only minor injuries and burns. His survival led to a brutal purge of suspected conspirators, with thousands executed in the aftermath.
Charles de Gaulle
French President Charles de Gaulle survived numerous assassination attempts, particularly from the Organisation Armée Secrète, a group opposed to Algerian independence. The most famous attempt occurred in 1962 when assassins ambushed his motorcade at Petit-Clamart, firing over 140 bullets at his car.
De Gaulle and his wife miraculously escaped unharmed despite multiple bullets puncturing the vehicle’s tires and bodywork. The French president remained remarkably calm throughout the ordeal, reportedly brushing broken glass off his jacket and complaining only about a ruined shirt collar before continuing his journey.
Alexander II of Russia
Alexander II of Russia survived at least six assassination attempts between 1866 and 1880 before his luck finally ran out. The first attempt in 1866 involved a revolutionary named Dmitry Karakozov, who fired at the Tsar outside the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg, but someone in the crowd bumped his elbow at the last second and the shot missed.
In 1867, another assassin’s weapon broke while attempting to shoot Alexander at the World’s Fair. The Tsar’s reforms, including the emancipation of Russian serfs, made him enemies on all sides—conservatives thought he went too far while revolutionaries thought he didn’t go far enough.
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan came terrifyingly close to death on March 30, 1981, when John Hinckley Jr. fired six shots at him outside the Washington Hilton Hotel. One bullet ricocheted off the presidential limousine and struck Reagan under his left arm, lodging just an inch from his heart.
The 70-year-old president walked into the hospital under his own power, not realizing how seriously he’d been wounded until he began coughing up blood. Reagan’s wit never left him though—he famously told his wife Nancy ‘Honey, I forgot to duck’ and quipped to the surgical team ‘I hope you’re all Republicans.’
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford holds the unfortunate record of surviving two separate assassination attempts within 17 days in September 1975. The first attempt came from Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, who pointed a gun at Ford in Sacramento, California, but the weapon didn’t fire.
Just 17 days later, Sara Jane Moore fired a shot at Ford in San Francisco, but a bystander grabbed her arm just as she pulled the trigger, causing the bullet to miss. Both women were sent to prison, and Ford continued his presidency remarkably unfazed by the back-to-back threats on his life.
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria survived at least eight assassination attempts during her 63-year reign, making her one of history’s most targeted monarchs. The first attempt came in 1840 when Edward Oxford fired two pistols at her carriage while she was pregnant with her first child, but both shots missed.
Strangely, each assassination attempt seemed to increase her popularity with the British public, who rallied around their queen. Victoria herself remained remarkably calm about the threats, once noting that ‘it is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved.’
Yasser Arafat
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat survived an estimated 13 assassination attempts throughout his controversial political career. In 1985, Israeli fighter planes bombed his headquarters in Tunis, killing many people, but Arafat had stepped out for a morning jog and escaped unharmed.
In 1982, Israeli forces reportedly planned to shoot down a passenger plane they believed Arafat was on, but scrapped the mission when they realized it was his lookalike brother on board with injured Palestinian children. Arafat claimed he never slept in the same place two consecutive nights to avoid would-be assassins.
Josip Broz Tito
Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito defied Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s repeated attempts to have him killed after refusing to submit to Soviet control. Stalin famously declared ‘I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito,’ then sent multiple assassins after the Yugoslav president.
Tito eventually got so fed up with the attempts that he sent Stalin a blunt letter warning him to ‘Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them. If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.’ The assassination attempts ceased after Stalin’s death in 1953.
Abraham Lincoln
Before John Wilkes Booth successfully assassinated him in 1865, Abraham Lincoln survived at least five separate assassination plots during his presidency. The schemes ranged from a Baltimore plot to knife him down, attempts to send him clothing infected with yellow fever and smallpox, two different shooting attempts, and a plot to blow up the White House.
One incident in 1864 involved a sniper shooting a bullet through Lincoln’s stovepipe hat while he rode alone at night, a close call that finally convinced him to accept better security. Lincoln seemed almost resigned to his fate, once remarking that if someone was willing to exchange their life for his, nothing could stop them.
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin survived a nearly fatal assassination attempt on August 30, 1918, when Fanny Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, shot him twice after he spoke at a factory in Moscow. One bullet struck his shoulder while another lodged near his lung, causing severe injuries and massive blood loss.
Lenin survived but never fully recovered, and historians believe the assassination attempt contributed significantly to his declining health and eventual death in 1924. Kaplan was executed just four days after the shooting, and the incident led to the ‘Red Terror,’ a brutal campaign of political repression against perceived enemies of the Bolshevik regime.
Qin Shi Huang
China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, survived three creative assassination attempts that read like action movie scenes. The first attempt in 227 BC involved an assassin named Jing Ke who hid a dagger in a map scroll, but accidentally revealed it too soon and ended up in a sword fight with the emperor that he lost spectacularly.
In 218 BC, an assassin hurled a 220-pound metal cone at what he thought was the emperor’s carriage, sending it off a cliff, but Qin Shi Huang was actually traveling in an identical decoy carriage. The emperor became so paranoid about assassination that he reportedly slept in a different room every night and had the layouts of his palaces kept secret.
The Price of Power
These survivors represent a tiny fraction of the countless assassination plots throughout history, but their stories share common threads of luck, paranoia, and the violent costs of leadership. Some walked away with nothing more than torn clothing and good stories, while others carried bullets in their bodies for the rest of their lives.
What’s remarkable isn’t just that they survived, but that many of them continued their work undeterred, refusing to let fear change their course or force them into hiding.
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