Washington ( CNN ) -- Ronald Reagan , shot and wounded by John Hinckley Jr. , on March 30 , 1981 , was the ninth American president , in or out of office , to be the target of an assassination attempt since the Civil War . Four presidents were killed . Will Hinckley go free ? 1865 : Abraham Lincoln was murdered at Ford 's Theatre in Washington by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth , who was tracked down hiding on a Virginia tobacco farm 12 days later and was shot to death trying to escape . Four co-conspirators , including a woman , were hanged three months later . 1881 : James Garfield , only four months in office , was shot at a railway station in Washington by disappointed office-seeker Charles Guiteau . Garfield died 11 weeks later . Guiteau was convicted and hanged within the year . 1901 : William McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo , New York , and died eight days later . Czolgosz was convicted only nine days after McKinley 's death and was electrocuted the next month . 1912 : Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt , who had succeeded McKinley in office , was making a campaign speech as the Bull Moose Party nominee in Milwaukee , Wisconsin , when he was shot and wounded by a New York saloon keeper , John Schrank , who was committed to a mental institution where he died 30 years later . Teddy Roosevelt finished the speech and lived the rest of his life with the bullet still inside his body . 1933 : President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt survived unscathed when five shots were fired by Guiseppe Zangara in Miami , Florida , but Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak , standing next to Roosevelt , was killed . Zangara pleaded guilty and was electrocuted less than five weeks later . His last words : `` Push the button . '' 1950 : Harry Truman , staying at Blair House while the White House was being remodeled , looked out the window as two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to storm the residence . A White House policeman and one of the attackers were killed , the other was to be executed , but Truman commuted his sentence to life , and President Carter eventually freed the gunman after almost 30 years in prison . 1963 : John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald as he was riding through the streets of Dallas . Oswald killed a Dallas policeman later that day in a nearby movie theater . Two days later , after police had arrested Oswald , he was shot to death by nightclub operator Jack Ruby as police led him through the Dallas Police garage . 1975 : Gerald Ford was twice the target of assassination attempts . Lynette ( Squeaky ) Fromme , a member of the infamous late 1960s `` family '' of convicted killer Charles Manson , was stopped by a Secret Service agent before she could fire during an event in Sacramento , California . Seventeen days later in San Francisco , Sara Jane Moore fired at Ford but missed when a bystander grabbed her arm . Fromme spent 34 years in prison , Moore served 32 . The 30 years since Hinckley tried to kill Reagan is the longest interval in American history without shots fired at a U.S. president .
President Carter freed a gunman who 'd been imprisoned for attacking Harry Truman . In 1933 , Chicago 's mayor was killed during an attack on Franklin Roosevelt . Teddy Roosevelt was shot while giving a speech in Wisconsin ; he finished the speech . In California , Gerald Ford was targeted twice in 17 days by two different armed women .