The "One-Shot" Hero

To understand these assassination attempts we have to understand the concept of the "One-Shot" Hero. That is the best term that I can think of for it but the "shot" doesn't mean a gunshot.

A One-Shot Hero is someone who was previously obscure but becomes a well-known hero by some single action. This does not apply to a hero in a disaster or emergency, it must be an action that the hero initiated. 

The modern era of the One-Shot Hero began with Charles Lindbergh. In 1927 he was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. He wasn't the first to fly across the ocean, two British pilots had flown from Canada to Ireland years before. But it made him a national hero and a public figure for the rest of his life. 

There is an avenue nearby named for Charles Lindbergh. Image from Google Street View.

Niagara Falls has always been an avenue for One-Shot Heroes. People who have successfully gone over Niagara Falls in barrels are usually portrayed as heroes. But the list of people show that they have never been heard of before, or usually since. Well-known or successful people don't try to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. They tend to be people who have never succeeded at much, or are down on their luck. If only they can pull off going over the falls they will be a One-Shot Hero. This doesn't apply to tightrope walking, which takes a lot of skill. 

Defectors during the Cold War were often looking to be One-Shot Heroes, expecting to be welcomed and get a lot of media coverage in their new country. A U.S. Army sergeant named Robert Lee Johnson slipped into East Germany, wanting to defect. The Communist officers who interviewed him soon evaluated him as an immoral loser with a grandiose sense of his own importance, hardly the kind of person who would be useful to their cause. They persuaded him to stay in the army and procure secret documents for them.

Perhaps the classic would-be One-Shot Hero is Lee Harvey Oswald. His first attempt was to defect to the Soviet Union. He expected to be welcomed as a hero, imagining that his having been a radar operator with the U.S. Marines had given him technical knowledge that would be very valuable to the Soviets. Assigned to live in Minsk, Oswald clearly expected to be feted as a hero by the local people, and ultimately re-defected to the U.S. 

His second attempt to be a One-Shot Hero did literally involve shooting a gun. It was the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. This time his goal was another Communist country, Cuba. It was following the Cuban Missile Crisis and Oswald was convinced that killing Kennedy would make him a national hero there.

This brings us to the modern era of the assassination of a public figure as the route to being a One-Shot Hero. Almost always, an assassination attempt on a political leader or candidate has nothing to do with their politics. Sometimes it is to draw attention to an issue, whether saving redwood trees or starting a revolution, as with the two attempts on Gerald Ford. But it is more often simply a nobody wanting to take the One-Shot Hero route to being a somebody. A number of assassins, or would-be assassins have said something like "I just wanted to be somebody". 

We saw "Assassination Attempt On Donald Trump", July 2024.