From Adam Goodheart’s “10 Days That Changed History” (The New York Times: 2 July 2006):
FEB. 15, 1933: The Wobbly Chair
It should have been an easy shot: five rounds at 25 feet. But the gunman, Giuseppe Zangara, an anarchist, lost his balance atop a wobbly chair, and instead of hitting President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, he fatally wounded the mayor of Chicago, who was shaking hands with F.D.R.
Had Roosevelt been assassinated, his conservative Texas running mate, John Nance Garner, would most likely have come to power. “The New Deal, the move toward internationalism – these would never have happened,” says Alan Brinkley of Columbia University. “It would have changed the history of the world in the 20th century. I don’t think the Kennedy assassination changed things as much as Roosevelt’s would have.”