Plot Against Richard Nixon

Background

At the time, Richard Nixon was listed as sitting president. The record is categorized as attempted assassination with a high confidence level.

Event details

The reported method was planned aircraft attack. Failed; assailant died before aircraft could be flown.

Aftermath

Byck boarded a Delta Air Lines flight at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, killed a security guard, shot the co-pilot, and demanded the pilot fly the plane into the White House; when the pilot refused, Byck shot him as well. A police officer then shot Byck through a window of the aircraft; Byck shot himself and died at the scene. The pilot died of his wounds; the co-pilot survived. Because Byck was dead, there was no trial, and the incident received almost no media coverage at the time—it remained largely unknown to the public for years. Nixon was never in any immediate danger; the episode was later dramatized in the musical Assassins and the film The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

Historical significance

The Byck attack is one of the most overlooked serious threats against a president in modern American history, receiving almost no public attention at the time and remaining largely unknown for two decades. Two innocent airline workers were killed in the cockpit—deaths that were as consequential as they were obscure in the historical record. Byck's method—using a hijacked aircraft as a weapon against a ground target—was a concept later realized by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001; threat analysts have retroactively studied the Byck case as an early, unheeded precursor to aerial suicide attacks. The incident gained wider public awareness only after being dramatized in the off-Broadway musical Assassins and the 2004 film The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

Sources

• Samuel Byck — Wikipedia contributors
• List of United States presidential assassination attempts and plots — Wikipedia contributors