Shot in the chest, he kept talking

On 14 October 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning to return to the White House for the new Progressive “Bull Moose” Party. Outside his hotel in Milwaukee, a man named John Schrank shot him in the chest.

The bullet passed through his steel glasses case and a folded fifty-page copy of his speech in his coat pocket, then lodged in his chest. Roosevelt, an experienced hunter, coughed into his hand. There was no blood, so he reasoned the bullet hadn’t reached his lung.

He refused to go to hospital. At the auditorium he told the crowd: “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” He held up the speech with the bullet hole in it and spoke for about 84 minutes.

Doctors later decided it was safer to leave the bullet where it was. Roosevelt lost the election to Woodrow Wilson but carried the bullet for the rest of his life. He had once said the credit belongs to the man in the arena. He did not need to explain what he meant.