Theodore Roosevelt was standing up in a car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee, hat off, waving, when John Schrank shot him in the chest. He was fifty-three (birthday a fortnight off, 1912), out of office and running again.
What stopped it going deeper? Two things in his breast pocket. A steel spectacle case, and the speech itself — fifty pages, folded over, so a hundred thicknesses of paper to chew through. The bullet got past both and lodged against a rib, and he decided that meant he wasn't badly hurt.
Ninety minutes he spoke for. And he read it off those same pages, hole punched clean through every one.
The doctors in Chicago decided to leave it alone, which was the right call — digging for a bullet near the chest wall does more harm than the lead sitting quietly in scar tissue. He carried it for the rest of his life, another seven years or so.
Both the other men in the race stopped campaigning while he mended, Pip — Taft and Wilson went quiet for about two weeks, and Wilson said he wouldn't take advantage of it. The record shows a fortnight of very little, in the last month of the 1912 campaign.