If it had been I who had been shot, he wouldn’t have got away so easily … I’d have guzzled him first

Sincere, if slight, grief for McKinley – a cold-blooded politician he had never much cared for – struggled in Roosevelt’s breast with more violent emotions regarding the assassin, Leon Czolgosz. In his opinion, those bullets had been fired, not merely at a man, but at the very heart of the American Republic. They were an assault upon representative government and civilized order. Unable to contain his rage, he leaned forward and blurted a excoriation of Czolgosz in to the rain. “If it had been I who had been shot, he wouldn’t have got away so easily … I’d have guzzled him first.”

E. Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), 4