The five weeks of Giuseppe Zangara

the long version

This is the first and, to date, the only definitive study of the attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Bayfront Park, Miami in February, 1933 -- an event which was largely eclipsed by the Great Depression, the Second World War, and a deliberate attempt by authorities not to permit widespread interest in it after it's culmination. The book details the events that occurred during the five weeks from the attempt on FDR's life to the execution of the perpetrator in Florida's electric chair only five weeks after the crime - believed to be the swiftest legal execution in the United States in the 20th Century. Within the book are vignettes biographies of the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who ultimately died as a result of wounds received during the attack; Governor David Shultz of Florida who signed the perpetrator's death warrant; Leonard F. Chapman, the warden of the Florida State Prison where the perpetrator was executed; and Giuseppe Zangara, the attempted assassin and murderer of the mayor of Chicago. The book also attempts to produce a slice of life and times during those five weeks in Miami, Florida, in the United States in general and the world at large and how people reacted to the event. It asks and attempts to answer the question of "Why"? Why did Zangara try to assassinate the president-elect? Was he a mob hitman as suggested by some and still intimated? Was he a madman -- criminally insane? Was he a tortured and twisted personality bent on making some mark in history for himself? There being no definitive answer at the time, the author leaves it to the reader to decide for him/herself. The book puts together resource materials mostly from newspaper accounts around the nation and the world of the daily happenings during those five weeks, FBI reports of the investigation, and the conclusions of other writers and conjecturers whose books and magazine articles would briefly touch upon this event but which was largely forgotten until this book's publication. Also included in its appendix is the unpublished manuscript of the prison warden, the "father" of the modern Florida prison system, on his impressions of the perpetrator as well as the never before published "memoir" of Zangara himself, written in the Florida death house on steno pads in the ten days before his execution explaining himself and his actions to the world. Accompanying the book are photographs of the principals taken at the time.