Four Go Free

Clemency given terrorists

Nov. 1, 1950; 2:15 p.m. A dull metallic click startled White House Guard Donald Birdzell as he stood watch at Blair House, where President Harry Truman was staying while the Executive Mansion was being remodeled. Birdzell turned to face a German P-38 automatic pistol held by Oscar Collazo, a Puerto Rican Nationalist. Both men began shooting. Birdzell was hit in both legs. Collazo sprawled on the sidewalk, wounded. Almost simultaneously another Nationalist, Griselio Torresola, attacked a nearby guard post with a Luger, killing a White House guard, Leslie Coffelt, and injuring Plainclothesman Joseph H. Downs. Before he died, Coffelt killed Torresola. From an upstairs window, Truman, awakened from a nap, peered out in his underwear.

March 1, 1954; 2:32 p.m. The quiet House chamber was occupied by 243 members when Lolita Lebron, a Puerto Rican Nationalist, walked rapidly down an aisle in the visitors' gallery. She held a German automatic pistol with both hands, pointed it at Speaker Joe Martin and shouted: "Puerto Rico is not free." Right behind her, two other Nationalists, Rafael Cancel Miranda and Andres Figueroa Cordero, held similar guns and sprayed the House floor with bullets. Martin escaped behind a column, but five Congressmen were wounded. The attacking trio were quickly seized. A fourth member of the plot, Irving Flores Rodriguez, was arrested in a bus terminal.

Last week President Carter granted clemency to the four Puerto Ricans remaining in prison. He had freed the fifth, Cordero, in 1977 because Cordero was dying of cancer. The White House cited "humane considerations" in freeing the terrorists. But the clemency also could help Carter politically among Hispanic voters in both Puerto Rico and the U.S. It was possible, too, that the release might make Fidel Castro more willing to respond to U.S. pleas that three Americans and a Puerto Rican charged with espionage be released from his jails.

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