American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill President Truman--And the Shoot-Out That Stopped It [Paperback]

I had been anxiously looking forward to reading this book since I first saw it on amazon a few months ago. Stephen Hunter is a great author & the perfect person to elucidate the story of the violent attempt on the life of Harry Truman by a pair of desperate Puerto Rican nationalists. This isn't your "usual" assassination attempt with a lone person firing a single gun but a 40-second gun battle pitting a pair of gunmen against the frighteningly casual security arrangements at Blair House where the President was staying. It's an incident that many Americans may have forgotten but it is well worth remembering, if only for the courage of the White House policeman who stopped the more dangerous of the two assassins despite having been mortally wounded himself.

The book starts out very well with little biographies of some of the people involved & a description of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement & some of the events in Puerto Rico that led to the assassination attempt in Washington, DC. Hunter is at his best in this book in describing the people inovlved & in giving enough of a history of the Secret Service, Puerto Rico, etc. without slowing his story down.

Reading this background information, it is easy to get excited about the desription of the gun battle that is coming. Hunter's specialty in his novels is writing about guns & gunfights & the book promises to be both informative & exciting when it gets to the gunfight itself. Unfortunately, when he does get to the gun battle, he falls into a sort of flashback/flash forward style of writing with very brief accounts of the assassination interspersed with more Puerto Rican history & more biographical information. As a result, the story of the actual assassination attempt becomes hard to follow & confusing & Hunter's incessant digressions rob the incident of its inherent interest & tension. He should have gotten the background stuff out of the way & then stayed with the events of the day--I'd have been willing to wait.

Hunter also has a tendency to repeat himself, especially when it comes to his opinions on the effects of being caught in a gunfight & his theories on how police marksmanship training should be conducted. Besides that fact that he tends to harp on these topics, the evidence he brings forth from this particular gun battle is thin. Of course, he may be right about what he says, but this gunfight isn't a good example of what he's trying to say--not to mention the fact that this sort of thing isn't what the book is ostensibly about. At another point, he devotes an entire chapter to a "point of view" description of part of the gunfight through the eyes of the participants. I felt this really fell flat, especially since he was simply repeating things he had just told us about without the fancy pov stylings.

This being said, the book is readable & fairly short so you can get through it in an evening, although it isn't the page-turner I had hoped it would be. And the best thing about reading it is that it will remind you of the good people who stand between people like you (& me) & the monsters of the world. God bless Les Coffelt & his family.

An admirable job of reacquainting us with this event. The hero of the piece displays amazing strength and focus. The parallels to the family men who terrorize us today are sobering. But too much background and some poor editing distract the reader (I've never seen so many exclamation points outside of a middle school).

In a nutshell, this is a compelling story that's essentially ruined by horrible prose. The authors have adopted an almost "Memento"-esque flashback method of telling the backstories of all the personalities featured--no matter how mundane or irrelevant the detail. There's a great deal of repetition of key events and plot points as a result. I could live with this, but what absolutely ruined the book for me was the constant use of past and present tenses interchangeably--often within the same sentence! Additionally, the prose slips from formal to conversational too easily to suit me, though this is far less annoying than the incessant changing of tenses. It made me feel as if I was reading a book that had been hastily cobbled together over a weekend.

The authors introduce one of their interminable flashbacks at one point by saying "this book is about 38.5 seconds of gunfight, however ..." and therein lies the problem. This is undoubtedly a fascinating story, one with which most Americans are probably unfamiliar, and one that definitely deserves to be told. However, it would have read much easier as a 10- or 12-page magazine article; stretching it out into 325 pages really seems unnecessary.