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Pushing through the crowd, Roosevelt made it to the car alongside his campaign advisers, stood on the floorboard and turned to acknowledge his admirers with a wave of his hat when Schrank pushed forward and raised his revolver. Already seated in the car, Albert H. Martin, Roosevelt’s secretary and a former football player, caught a glimpse of metal in the air and leapt from the vehicle.

“Everything seemed to happen at once,” Martin recalled. “There was a flash, the sound of a shot, and I was on the ground with the man. I threw one arm around his neck and held him fast. At the same time I caught his gun hand with my free hand and wrenched the revolver from him.”

Schrank strugged for a moment, “acting like a madman,” Martin noted, until the crowd set upon the would-be assassin and began to beat him, amid cries of, “Lynch him…kill him!” Martin managed to lift Schrank to his feet and hold him before Roosevelt.

“Don’t hurt the poor creature,” Roosevelt said, on his feet again and not yet aware that he’d been shot.

Roosevelt's manuscript and eyeglass case. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Someone in the crowd asked if he’d been hurt. “Oh, no,” Roosevelt said, smiling. “Missed me that time. I’m not hurt a bit.”

Martin and some police rescued Schrank from the angry crowd while Roosevelt and his advisers continued on, by automobile, to the auditorium. On the way, an escort observed a bullet hole in Roosevelt’s army overcoat, and Roosevelt touched it, finding blood on his fingertips. Despite efforts to persuade him to seek medical attention, Roosevelt was adamant that he speak to the people of Wisconsin, even if he died while doing so.

What brought them together in Milwaukee—Theodore Roosevelt and his would-be killer, John Flammang Schrank—on that cool night in October of 1912, was their differing opinions on whether any man should serve three terms in office as president of the United States. And what saved Roosevelt were the things he carried—a steel eyeglass case and a 50-page manuscript of his speech—tucked close to his chest, which absorbed the force of Schrank’s bullet and prevented a lethal wound. Roosevelt would carry the slug from Schrank’s .38-caliber revolver in his chest for the remaining six years of his life, a violent but proud reminder of the strenuous and dangerous life that he lived with such brio.