The Warren Commission found no evidence of FBI involvement in the assassination.97 And the HSCA, having examined the allegation of FBI complicity in the assassination, concluded that the FBI was “not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”98 (Both the Warren Commission and the HSCA had the good taste not to even ask the question of whether J. Edgar Hoover, individually, was involved.) And the earlier Church Committee, in 1975, after investigating the possibility of U.S. intelligence (specifically the FBI and CIA) being involved in the assassination, said it did not uncover “any evidence” of such involvement.99
Secret Service
One other U.S. intelligence agency has had the suggestion of complicity in the assassination leveled against it by the conspiracy theorists, the Secret Service, but nowhere near as much as the CIA and FBI.
The U.S. Secret Service, a bureau of the Department of the Treasury, dates back to 1865, the last year of the Civil War, when it was created primarily to combat the widespread counterfeiting of U.S. currency. Nearly one-third of all currency in circulation at the time was counterfeit, and the country’s financial stability was in jeopardy. In 1894, since the Secret Service was the only federal investigative agency at the time, it began to provide informal and part-time protection to the president. In 1902, following the assassination of President William McKinley the previous year, the Service, without statutory authority, and in addition to its anticounterfeiting mandate, assumed full-time responsibility for the protection of the president. Following the election of William Howard Taft in 1908, the Secret Service started protecting the president-elect. In 1913, Congress enacted legislation expressly providing for full-time Secret Service protection of the president. Although the Secret Service began protecting the vice president in 1945, it wasn’t until 1951 that Congress enacted legislation authorizing such protection, but only upon the vice president’s request. Legislation in 1962 required protection of the vice president, with or without his request.
During fiscal year 1963, the Secret Service had an average strength of 513 personnel, 351 of whom were special agents (weapon-carrying personnel, whether members of the Presidential Protection Division or some other division), with sixty-five field offices throughout the country. The core of the presidential security arm of the Secret Service is the White House detail, which in 1963 consisted of 36 special agents and 6 special agent-drivers.1
With respect to the Secret Service, for all intents and purposes the inquiry about complicity in the assassination begins and ends with the motorcade route. This is so because if the Service or any of its agents were involved in the assassination, they necessarily would have had a determinative or at least important hand in helping to make sure the limousine proceeded beneath Oswald’s window on Elm Street. But all the evidence shows they did not have such a hand; in fact, the Secret Service let it be known that it favored, for security reasons, a different destination for the motorcade, which would have meant a different route altogether, and no assassination.
On November 4, 1963, Gerald Behn, the special agent in charge of the White House’s Secret Service detail, called Forrest Sorrels, the special agent in charge of the Dallas field office of the Secret Service, to inform him of the president’s intent to visit Dallas “around November 21st.” He said that two buildings had been suggested for a luncheon site following the presidential motorcade—the Trade Mart, a new and attractive convention hall off the Stemmons Freeway to the northwest of Dealey Plaza, and the old Women’s Building located on the fairgrounds in the southern part of Dallas—and asked Sorrels to survey both sites. Sorrels immediately did and reported back to Behn that same day that “security-wise the Women’s Building appeared to be preferable” (because there were only two entrances to the building, whereas the Trade Mart had many entrances as well as suspension bridges on the second and third floors) but that, as opposed to the Trade Mart, the one-story building “wasn’t a very nice place to take the president” because the ceiling was low and the “air-conditioning equipment and everything was all exposed.”2 So Sorrels made no choice. However, Behn, who was in charge of trip security, did, announcing on November 5 that he favored the Women’s Building.3 But selection of the luncheon site was out of the hands of the Secret Service. It was to be decided by politicians.
Today, there are two main parties in Texas, the dominant Republican Party and the Democratic Party. However, in 1963 Texas was essentially a one-party state (Democratic) and the party was clearly divided along liberal and conservative lines. The relationship between the two wings of the party was so bitter and combustible that, for instance, they even engaged in fistfights on the floor of the 1960 Democratic national convention in Los Angeles. The liberals, led by Senator Ralph Yarborough, lobbied the White House hard for the Women’s Building, which not only had a larger seating capacity, permitting more of the president’s supporters to attend, but also had an atmosphere more compatible with that of the common man, the so-called working class. But the conservative wing of the party, led by Governor Connally, was fiercely opposed to the Women’s Building site, demanding that the luncheon be held at the Trade Mart, the headquarters in Dallas for the city’s predominantly conservative business community.4*
The White House ultimately deferred to the governor, and Kenneth O’Donnell, special assistant to the president, notified the Secret Service of its position on November 14,1963.5 A presidential advance man, Jerry Bruno, wrote in his November 15, 1963, diary entry, “The White House announced that the Trade Mart had been approved.† I met with O’Donnell and [Press Secretary Bill] Moyers who said that Connally was unbearable and on the verge of canceling the trip. They decided they had to let the Governor have his way.” As the HSCA concluded, “The Secret Service was, in fact, a bystander in the process; its protective functions were subordinated to political considerations.”6
However, just because the Trade Mart was chosen didn’t mean there was going to be a motorcade to get to it. Indeed, both Governor Connally and Frank Erwin, the executive secretary of the Texas State Democratic Committee, objected to the motorcade, fearing that because Dallas was so conservative, there might be some incident or sign along the parade route that would be embarrassing to the president. Connally also felt that the motorcade, requiring the president’s interaction with the crowd along the motorcade route, would put an excessive strain on the president, especially in view of his tight schedule.7 In the end, the White House wishes for a motorcade prevailed. Kenneth P. O’Donnell told the Warren Commisssion, “We had a motorcade wherever we went. Particularly when we went to a large city, the purpose of going there was to give the president as much exposure to the people…as possible. The speaking engagement was a luncheon which was rather limited. And the president would not want to leave Dallas feeling that the only ones that were able to see him were a rather select group.”8
The fateful decision to send the motorcade along Main Street and then in front of the Book Depository Building was somewhat preordained by the prior decision to make the Trade Mart the luncheon site. (If the Women’s Building, in a different part of the city, had been selected, the motorcade would not have passed by the Depository Building.) Sorrels and Winston G. Lawson, a member of the White House Secret Service detail in Washington who acted as an advance agent for the Dallas trip, obviously could have come up with a different route from Love Field to the Trade Mart without passing by the Book Depository Building. But Main Street had always been the traditional parade route in Dallas (including for the only previous presidential visit, by President Roosevelt in 1936, which Sorrels, who joined the Service in 1923, had worked), and to reach the Trade Mart from Main Street, the most direct route is the Stemmons Freeway. And contrary to the allegations by conspiracy theorists, the only practical way for westbound traffic on Main Street to reach the northbound lanes of the Stemmons Freeway is by way of Elm Street past the Book Depository Building. Continuing on Main past Houston (instead of turning right on Houston to Elm) does not enable one to get on the
Stemmons Freeway. An island separates Main from Elm at the Stemmons Freeway, and it extends beyond the freeway for the specific purpose of preventing drivers on Main Street from trying to get on the Stemmons Freeway by changing lanes across Elm Street (on the right) to do so. Dallas police officials were briefed on the parade route on November 15, and they agreed it was a proper one, not expressing a belief that any route might be better.9
But even if it could be shown that the Secret Service was responsible for the selection of the luncheon site and the motorcade route, the notion that the Secret Service was behind the assassination is, like virtually all the conspiracy theories, ridiculous on its face. What conceivable motive would the Secret Service have had? None. In fact, even if Secret Service agents got away with it, it would only hurt their individual careers in the Secret Service that the president had been killed on their watch.*
Why, indeed, would an agency (or any member thereof) whose agents are literally trained to take a bullet themselves to protect the president want to murder him? As former Secret Service agent Dennis McCarthy writes in his book, Protecting the President, “Every minute of every day, agents are on duty protecting the President, both as an individual and as a symbol of the government that he leads.” And part of their duty is to give their very life to save his, if necessary. All agents are trained, McCarthy says, “to put themselves between the President and the source of the shots,” making themselves “as large a target as possible.” A celebrated example was when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan just after Reagan had exited the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 1981. McCarthy writes, “The first shot was fired when Reagan was just three feet from the limousine door that Agent Tim McCarthy was holding open. Immediately, Tim turned in the direction of the shots, spread his arms and legs to protect the President, and took a bullet in the abdomen.”10
In response to a series of questions submitted to him by J. Lee Rankin, general counsel for the Warren Commission, the then chief of the Secret Service, James J. Rowley, wrote that one of the “two general principles in emergencies involving the President” that the Secret Service has “consistently followed” is for agents “to place themselves between the President and any source of danger.”11
Though it defies logic that the Secret Service was involved in the assassination, many conspiracy theorists don’t agree. For instance, although he responsibly concludes that the Service was not involved, Walt Brown, in his book Treachery in Dallas, can’t resist asking rhetorical questions like, “Why was a fifty-four year old Secret Service Agent the driver of the car? Why, since it was Dallas, did the head of the [Secret Service] White House Detail stay in Washington?”12 (Hmm. Maybe the Secret Service was behind the assassination after all.) Conspiracy theorist Harrison Edward Livingstone, in his book Killing the Truth, has it all figured out. He writes that “Secret Service Agents close to the President who knew of some of his feminine liaisons resented it, sat in judgment of him, and cooperated with the plotters to kill him.”13 Livingstone, of course, does not, cannot, cite any source for his speculation other than his own very fertile imagination. It should be noted that Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter, who conducted the questioning of the Secret Service agents before the Commission and interviewed them beforehand, said that only Roy Kellerman (who he did not say showed any dislike for the president, only appeared “blasé”) “did not seem to share the other agents’ attachment to Kennedy,” adding that William Greer “clearly felt deep affection for Kennedy, which I sensed had been reciprocal.”14 As Greer would later say, “He [the president] and I were pretty close friends. He treated me just wonderful.”15
Only one book I’m aware of, Vincent Palamara’s Third Alternative—Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the JFK Murder, is devoted solely to the Secret Service’s role in the case. From his exhaustive investigation, Palamara ends up finding the Secret Service guilty of incompetence, not complicity in the murder. Although Palamara seems honest and intelligent, and his 1993 book is reasonably well researched, I found it very difficult to read. It virtually has no discernible structure or organization, being a rambling and discursive, almost stream-of-consciousness exploration of the Secret Service’s protection—or lack thereof—of the president, with no index or even page numbers. Yes, you heard me right. No page numbers. Although Palamara is “suspicious” of the conduct of three agents (Bill Greer, Emory Roberts, and mostly Floyd Boring—“Boring is interesting,” Palamara writes), he seems to conclude, with no concrete evidence to support his conclusion, that his Third Alternative for the Secret Service’s role in the assassination is not the guilt or innocence of the Service, but an “innocent” but intentional “security stripping test” by the Service to “test the President’s security” that “unknowingly backfired into a full-blown assassination,” for which, apparently, the Secret Service was defenseless. Among the many examples, he says, of the deliberate “security stripping”: the railroad overpass was not cleared of people (Palamara does not say why the overpass should have been cleared of people as opposed to other areas, and ignores the fact that two Dallas police officers were assigned to be on top of the overpass); buildings along the motorcade route were not checked out;* there was no bubbletop on the limousine;† the Service went along with a route that necessitated a 120-degree turn at Houston and Elm that slowed the limousine down to a dangerous speed; and so on.16
Palamara, moving almost exclusively in the world of conspiracy theorists, resisted forfeiting his common sense for as long as he could as he proceeded reasonably well in his assassination research. But somewhere along the way he got off the bus and in 1997 declared, “It is now my strong belief, after shaking off years of equivocation, that several [Secret Service] agents had to have been involved in the actual assassination by getting wind of the impending threat and letting it happen.”17
Palamara, naturally, welcomes whatever company he can get. And in an interview with the HSCA in 1978, John Marshall, the retired former special agent in charge of the Miami Secret Service, told his interviewers that the Secret Service “could possibly have been involved in the assassination,” though he had nothing specific to support his speculation. The HSCA interviewer wrote that “it is the first time that an agent has acknowledged the possibility that the Secret Service could have been involved.”18 Of course, as they say, “could have, schmood have.”
And then, there’s the inimitable Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, whom you will meet later as an adviser to Oliver Stone on Stone’s movie JFK. In the December 1999 edition of the magazine Prevailing Winds, Prouty asserts nakedly that on the day of the assassination “what happened to the Secret Service was not that the Secret Service didn’t do their job. They were told: ‘Your unit isn’t needed, you can go home.’” But as conspiracy theorist Walt Brown responds, “Colonel Prouty, who are these Secret Service agents? Who was ‘sent home’ from Dallas before the motorcade? Are you suggesting that the White House detail was not there?”19
With respect to the argument made by Prouty and some other conspiracy theorists that the president’s protection was so bad it must have been intentional, I have a question. If that reasoning has merit, why don’t these same theorists allege that the Secret Service must have been complicit in the two attempted murders of Gerald Ford in 1975? In one of them, on September 5, 1975, former Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, attired in a bright red robe and matching turban, no less,* was able to walk up to within two feet of Ford in a public park in Sacramento and pull out and point her .45 caliber Army Colt pistol at him before being thrown to the ground.
What makes the Secret Service’s conduct even more egregiously incompetent in the Fromme-attempted assassination is that the Manson “Family” hated former president Nixon for declaring, in the middle of Manson’s trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders, that Manson was guilty. Also, for his continuation of the Vietnam War. And they had taken to calling President Ford, “the new face of Nixon.�
� After Manson was convicted of the murders he was incarcerated at San Quentin, but in October of 1974 was transferred to Folsom State Prison, fifteen miles west of Sacramento. Fromme moved to Sacramento to be near Manson and headed up the last remnants of the Family not behind bars. A few weeks before Ford came to Sacramento, Fromme and Sandra Good, a Family member, issued a communiqué to the media in Sacramento that “if Nixon’s reality wearing a new face [i.e, Ford] continues to run this country against the law, your homes will be bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca homes and My Lai put together.” I don’t know how many other potential likely assassins of Ford there could have possibly been in Sacramento, but even without the Manson Family’s feelings against him, I would think that Fromme and Good, being Manson Family members, would have been on the list of people in Sacramento that the Secret Service would be watching when Ford came to town, but they were not.20
Talk about being given a heads-up. On September 20, 1975, forty-five-year-old Sarah Jane Moore, a former FBI paid informant turned radical, called Inspector Jack O’Shea of the San Francisco Police Department and told him she was part of the protest movement in the city and was thinking of driving from San Francisco to Stanford University the following day to “test” the security system around President Ford when he spoke there. Moore implied, without expressly saying, that because of her state of mind, maybe O’Shea should put her in custody. O’Shea dispatched two officers to Moore’s residence, where they arrested her on a misdemeanor charge of being in possession of an unloaded .44 caliber revolver. (Moore had many bullets in her residence.) The police confiscated the revolver and released Moore from custody, but O’Shea called the local office of the Secret Service that night to alert them to Moore’s implied threat against President Ford and the fact she was found in possession of the revolver. The following day, September 21, the Secret Service interviewed Moore, ran a background check on her (which probably showed that she was, in fact, a former FBI informant) and, unbelievably, released her from custody, later saying that Moore was “not of sufficient protective interest to warrant surveillance during the President’s visit,” referring to Ford’s visit the next day in San Francisco. This gross negligence is magnified by the fact that Fromme’s attempt on Ford’s life had taken place just sixteen days earlier. The following morning at eleven, Moore bought a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver from a private seller, and four and a half hours later took a shot at Ford as he walked to his limousine after leaving the St. Francis Hotel. A former marine standing near her was able to push her arm down almost at the instant she pulled the trigger, causing the bullet to miss Ford.21
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