The Five Luckiest Potentates!

This posting is yet another result of my grand obsession that is the Rex Factor podcast. Seriously, you all need to be listening to this fantastic podcast. The other day, I was listening to the second of five segments about Queen Victoria, in which the always entertaining hosts (Graham Duke and Ali Hood) listed the assassination attempts on the Queen. After hearing the details of these attempts (7 in total), it got me wondering which ruler has had the most assassination attempts/plots on them. Oddly enough, with all the information available at our fingertips on the internet, this subject was surprisingly difficult to research.

Here's what I could find:

5. Hussein of Jordan:  After his father (King Talal) was forced to abdicate due to mental illness (reportedly schizophrenia), Hussein bin Talal became the King of Jordan in 1952 and reigned until his death in 1999. During his life, Hussein suffered at least 12 attempts of assassination, mostly during the 1950s and 1960s and he once wrote "that sometimes I have felt like the central character in a detective novel". The first attempt occurred on July 20, 1951 in Jerusalem. He was with his grandfather, King Abdullah I, when a Palestinian extremist opened fire on Abdullah and Hussein as the pair walked into a mosque for Friday prayers. Abdullah was killed, but the 15-year-old Hussein pursued the gunman. The assailant turned his weapon on the young prince, who was saved when the bullet was deflected by a medal on his uniform given to him coincidentally by his grandfather. 

In 1970, King Hussein survived an assassination attempt after gunmen opened fire on his motorcade as it was driving near his summer palace. The king was said to be unharmed but his driver was wounded in the attack, which took place in the town of Sweileh, 12 miles northeast of the capital, Amman. The king jumped out of his car and fired back at the attackers. Despite all the attempts on his life, King Hussein died of cancer in 1999 at the age of 63.

4. Charles de Gaulle: The French president from 1959 to 1969 survived a documented 31 attempts on his life. One was a roadside attempt while de Gaulle and his wife were traveling to their country home. A bomb made from a propane cylinder stuffed with just under 100 lb. of plastic lay buried in an innocent-looking sandpile alongside the road. As the car came abreast of the sandpile, the bomb exploded, causing their car to lurch sharply and throwing a sheet of flame across the roadway. De Gaulle ordered chauffeur, Francis Marroux to drive straight through the flames. Neither the De Gaulles nor Marroux was hurt. They continued on their way, merely stopping to change cars at a military barracks nearby.

But he couldn't hide from death's cold embrace forever. Charles de Gaulle died of a ruptured blood vessel while watching the evening news on television at home, at 79 years of age.

3. Adolf Hitler: The fact that there were 52 attempts, including 4 attempts before he became Chancellor, on Hitler's life says something about the level of hatred that this dictator inspired. The first of them was in 1921 when shots were fired at him after a speech. Over the course of the next 24 years, he survived poisonings, bombings, and shootings, but the craziest plan came from the USA. A group of US airmen hatched a plot to fly over Hitler's mountain retreat (Berghof) and drop huge quantities of pornographic material. The hope was that the normally puritan Hitler would go mad with lust and kill himself. The soldiers discussed the plan with a colonel, who said that the soldiers were maniacs with an insane plan. The plan was blocked by the military as foolish and silly. (Really? Why? Seems a perfectly solid plan. <rolling eyes>)

Hitler got his just desserts. In 1945, he committed suicide by gunshot, then was doused with gasoline and set on fire, along with his wife of 40 hours, Eva Braun (who herself committed suicide by ingesting cyanide). I couldn't think of a better way for him to spend his honeymoon.

2. Zog I of Albania: Ruler of Albania from 1925-1939, Zog survived 55 assassination attempts. In one instance, an assassin managed to shoot Zog twice from close range as he was entering Parliament. Zog let a guard subdue the would-be killer and, unflinching, walked on into the hall and took a seat at his desk, blood spurting from his wounds. After a while, he noticed that everyone else was understandably freaking out. So, covered in blood and riddled with bullet holes, he stood up and delivered a speech that basically said "Yeah, this happens quite a lot. You get used to it."

His one and only foreign trip, perhaps taken in the hopes that he would find fewer assassins abroad, led to an even more ridiculous attempt. While Zog was in Vienna in 1931, two assassins struck as Zog was getting into his car after an opera. Zog's reaction to the impending doom was characteristically impressive. He turned to face the assassins -- and pulled a gun and opened fire right back at the men. King Zog remained unharmed by his enemies until his final days. He died in exile in 1961, 100 percent death-by-assassination free.

1. Fidel Castro: Yes, the ruler in the top spot on this list is the much-loved/despised Cuban dictator. In the course of his life, there have been 638 attempts... by the CIA... all failures. Some such attempts allegedly included an exploding cigar, a fungal-infected scuba-diving suit, and a mafia-style shooting. Some of these plots are depicted in a documentary entitled 638 Ways to Kill Castro. One of these attempts was by his ex-lover Marita Lorenz, whom he met in 1959. She agreed to aid the CIA and tried to smuggle a jar of cold cream containing poison pills into his room. When Castro realized, he reportedly gave her a gun and told her to kill him but her nerve failed. Castro once said, in regards to the numerous attempts on his life he believes have been made, "If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal." As Castro retired at the age of 83 in 2008, one would assume that he's pretty safe from attempt 639.

So there you have the five luckiest rulers who managed to survive an unbelievable amount of attempted assassinations. As for Queen Victoria, with 7 assassination attempts, she is clearly in the top 10 along with other such notable figures as Yasser Arafat, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Alexander II of Russia.