Lesser-Known Near-Deaths and Near-Misses

[Blackentheborg]

Abraham Bolden was the first ever African-American to become a secret service agent on a presidential detail, specifically for JFK. He was later fired in '64 and sentenced to six years in prison on bribery charges; he claims these were set up for his attempts at publicly revealing misconduct in the secret service and he was pardoned by Joe Biden a few months ago. He also insisted that there had been a foiled plot to assassinate JFK in Chicago on November 2nd, 1963, by a right-wing nut called Thomas Arthur Vallee.

The motel manager who alerted the feds in the first place said the room Vallee was using at the time he was arrested was being rented by a pair of "cuban nationals", who were never identified. Vallee was also a noted sharpshooter, being arrested with an M1 rifle, a handgun and 3,000 rounds of ammunition. The morning JFK was supposed to arrive, the special agent in charge of the Chicago office called the White House and recommended the president cancel his trip to Chicago, which he did.

 

[Coiler]

Roberto Clemente had asked many of his friends and teammates to come with him on the ill-fated December 1972 flight that resulted in his death. The highest profile of them was fellow future Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda. Cepeda declined (the reasoning is unknown, but he did), saving his life. Had he gone along, baseball would have lost two star players in one incident.

 

[StephenColbert27]

Roberto Clemente had asked many of his friends and teammates to come with him on the ill-fated December 1972 flight that resulted in his death. The highest profile of them was fellow future Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda. Cepeda declined (the reasoning is unknown, but he did), saving his life. Had he gone along, baseball would have lost two star players in one incident.

Clemente's death is even more depressing considering that he was flying down to try and keep the hands of the Somoza government off the relief packages so they could actually reach victims of the quake. Because if the great Roberto Clemente is there in person, surely not even Somoza would be so shameless.

Instead one of the great humanitarians to play any sport died a needless death. Just another thing to hate the Somozas for.

 

[Warthog]

There were planned assassination attempts in 1979 of Robert Mugabe (in Maputo) and Joshua Nkomo (in Lusaka). It's widely believed that the British foreign office tipped off the two leaders, based on British intelligence, or a deliberate leak by Ken Flower

Then the two assassination attempts on Robert Mugabe during the 1980 election campaign

 

[Yokai Man]

Sometime I knew but wasn’t quite sure on the exact details til I read Eight Days in May (great book btw) was that Himmler and Donitz nearly had a shootout by accident at Plön when they met on May 1,which would have not only ended with them dead but no one actually in charge of what remained of the Nazi forces per se.

What next?

Eight Days in May actually gives us some ideas in that regard. During the general meeting of every remaining political and military Nazi figure on May 3,Karl Frank proposed that they all moved headquarters to Prague as occupied Czechoslovakia was the most heavily armed and secured places still controlled by the Wehrmacht and could stall for time at least two weeks.

Jodl and Keitel were heavily in favor of the idea OTL and with Donitz dead no real opposition to that plan could exist,leading to the remaining high ranking Nazi officials moving to Prague and prolonging the war til at least early June. Jodl especially wanted to use the Netherlands as a bargaining chip to make the Western allies argue to a separate peace fire (obviously it wasn’t gonna happen but Volker Ullrich often points in a detailed manner in the book that even at that point the Nazis,especially Donitz,genuinely thought they could still win). Expect Norway and Denmark to be liberated more violently.

Incidentally,another under looked PoD is Helmut Schmidt not being caught by the British in April 27 and ending up in a PoW camp, which made him become a Social Democrat,especially after talks with a Lieutenant Colonel. He doesn’t get caught,he doesn’t become an SDP member. He already turned on the Nazis ideologically but in the scenario where he doesn’t get caught/go to a specific PoW camp and met a specific Lieutenant Colonel he becomes a CDS member instead.