Ronald A. Edmonds Edmonds joined the Associated Press in Washington in 1981 and worked there until 2009, when he retired as the AP's Senior White House Photographer. He was one of the early pioneers of the use of digital cameras in news photography, including using an experimental electronic camera to transmit to newspapers around the world the first photos of President George H.W. Bush's inauguration, forty seconds after he put his hand down after being sworn in. In 1981 Edmonds was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in spot news photography for his coverage of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan's life on March
Assassination of James A. Garfield him in a coma for days and left him partially paralyzed and blind in one eye for the last year and a half of his Presidency. It was not until the Twenty-fifth Amendment was ratified in 1967 that there was an official procedure for what to do if the president became incapacitated. Lincoln's assassination had taken place roughly sixteen years before in the closing stages of the Civil War. On the other hand, Garfield's term was marked (for the most part) by peacetime, and a general complacency with respect to presidential security had developed by this time. Garfield, like many