I recently saw a video of the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I noticed how tall the deputies were who had Lee Harvey Oswald in custody, at least compared to their prisoner.

This sent me down quite a rabbit hole to discover the relative heights of the men who have attempted or carried out high profile historical assassinations and the leaders they targeted, looking at the timeframe of the 1860s -1960s.

As a benchmark, the average height of an American adult male was 5’6 is 1900 and 5’9 in 2000. However, Americans tend to elect leaders who are significantly taller than average.

The average height of the nine assassins I looked at was 168 centimeters, or 5’6. If you remove Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, whose guilt is disputed, and James Earl Ray, who recanted his confession and maintained his innocence for the rest of his life, the average height drops to 165 centimeters, or 5’5. The average height of the leaders they targeted was 180 centimeters, or 5’10.

A couple of interesting notes about individual cases.

At 5’8, John Wilkes Booth was taller than the average man at the time, but President Lincoln towered over him. Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson were both 6’4 and are tied aa our tallest president ever.

At 5’4, Gavrilo Princip had the largest height differential with his victim, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who stood at 6’2. It was the most catastrophic assassination as well, as it started World War I, which led to approximately 10 million military deaths and 9 million civilian deaths, not to mention millions of wounded and missing.

Leon Czolgosz and President McKinley were the same height.

James Earl Ray was 5’10 and the only assassin on the list who was taller than his target. Martin Luther King was 5’7.

• President Abraham Lincoln, 6’4 | John Wilkes Booth, 5’8
• President James Garfield, 6’0 | Charles Guiteau 5’5
• King Umberto I, estimated 5’6  | Gaetano Bresci, estimated 5’3
• President William McKinley, 5’7 | Leon Czolgosz, 5’7
• President Theodore Roosevelt, 5’10 | John Schrank, 5’5 (failed)
• Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 6’2 | Gavrilo Princip, 5’4
• President John F. Kennedy, 6’1 | Lee Harvey Oswald, 5’9
• Reverend Martin Luther King, 5’7 | James Earl Ray, 5’10
• Senator Robert Kennedy, 6’1 | Sirhan Sirhan, 5’5

Apart from their height, I couldn’t find many commonalities between the assassins. In terms of motive, where they lived, their occupations, or where the attacks took place, there were no noticeable similarities.