by Jerry Parr
PRAISE FOR IN THE SECRET SERVICE
Jerry put himself in harm’s way to protect Ronnie, and I am forever grateful.
NANCY REAGAN, former first lady of the United States of America
Jerry Parr saved President Reagan’s life following the assassination attempt. . . . [Parr] directed the limousine to George Washington University Hospital. The president had a serious injury that caused blood loss significant enough that he initially collapsed with no obtainable blood pressure. Immediate treatment was essential. Stopping at the White House would have delayed treatment, perhaps causing a fatal outcome. This story and others are part of an excellent read in the book In The Secret Service. . . . I strongly recommend it.
JOSEPH GIORDANO, MD, professor emeritus of surgery, former chairman of surgery at George Washington University Medical Center
On the day Ronald Reagan was shot, March 30, 1981, Secret Service agent Jerry Parr made a split-second decision that literally saved the president’s life, and that gripping story is told here in vivid detail. But the gift to the reader of In the Secret Service is much greater; it is an uplifting and exemplary American story of a man and wife dedicated to serving God by serving others.
RICHARD V. ALLEN, former National Security adviser to President Reagan and senior fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Jerry Parr is an American hero. . . . He is known for his prompt, intelligent, decisive actions on March 30, 1981, when President Reagan was shot as he left the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. Jerry Parr’s action that day saved the life of the president. He is highly respected by Secret Service personnel, active and retired. He continues to serve the people of this great country as a spiritual guide to the sick and bereaved. I was privileged to work with him throughout my own Secret Service career. This book . . . will give you an insight into the life of a Secret Service agent. It is not a life of glamour or recognition. It is a life of dedication and determination, loyalty and perseverance. Jerry Parr has set an example for future agents to follow.
CLINTON J. HILL, retired assistant director of the United States Secret Service
The Secret Service is the emblem of America at its best. Standing high above politics, it protects the lives of the leaders we elect and thereby guards our democracy itself. Jerry Parr is the Secret Service agent who personifies that trust. In March 1981, . . . Parr was the top Secret Service agent who made the real-time decision to get President Reagan to the hospital within that narrow window of time that separated life from death. . . . Only after he’d saved him did he tell Reagan his secret. It was the president himself, in his early Hollywood career, who had played the dashing Secret Service agent who inspired young Jerry Parr to join up so he could be there on the sidewalk next to him when the bullets flew.
CHRIS MATTHEWS, host of Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC
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In the Secret Service: The True Story of the Man Who Saved President Reagan’s Life
Copyright © 2013 by Jerry and Carolyn Parr. All rights reserved.
Cover and interior photograph of Reagan shooting copyright © RON EDMONDS/AP/Corbis. All rights reserved.
Unless noted, all interior images are from the personal collection of the author and are used with permission.
Photographs of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, President Jimmy Carter waving, President Carter on Air Force One, President Reagan waving, the Reagans leaving the hospital, President Reagan with the Parr family, Mrs. Reagan hugging the author, and Mr. Parr with four presidents are all White House staff photographs.
Designed by Dean H. Renninger
Edited by Jonathan Schindler
Published in association with the literary agency of WordServe Literary Group, Highlands Ranch, CO, www.wordserveliterary.com.
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version.
Scripture quotations marked REB are taken from The Revised English Bible. Copyright © 1989 by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parr, Jerry.
In the secret service : the true story of the man who saved President Reagan’s life / Jerry Parr, with Carolyn Parr.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4143-8748-2 (hc) — ISBN 978-1-4143-7871-8 (sc) 1. United States. Secret Service—History. 2. Parr, Jerry. 3. United States. Secret Service—Biography. 4. Presidents—Protection—United States. 5. Reagan, Ronald—Assassination attempt, 1981. I. Title.
HV8144.S43P37 2013
363.28'3092—dc23
[B] 2013021804
ISBN 978-1-4143-8891-5 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4143-8427-6 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4143-8892-2 (Apple)
Build: 2015-07-01 14:59:44
Tout est grâce.
GEORGES BERNANOS, The Diary of a Country Priest
CONTENTS
Prologue
Part 1: My Rendezvous with Death Chapter 1: Just Another Day at the Office
Chapter 2: Inauspicious Beginnings
Chapter 3: From New York to Dallas: “The President is Dead”
Chapter 4: Vietnam: Going From Bad to Worse
Chapter 5: 1968: The Year From Hell
Chapter 6: Two Deaths
Chapter 7: Sinners and Statesmen: Watergate and The World
Chapter 8: Up and Down the Ladder
Chapter 9: Shots Fired! Men Down!
Part 2: My Encounter with Grace Chapter 10: From the White House to the Potter’s House
Chapter 11: Descent Into Joy
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Timeline
Notes
Index
PROLOGUE
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
GRAHAM GREENE, The Power and the Glory[1]
FALL 1939
The sun was low in the sky, filtering through the banyan trees as my father walked me down the uneven sidewalks of my youth. The single-storied stucco houses we passed stood snugly on their lots, painted from a palette of pale colors. Green hoses lay in brown yards like snakes uncoiling to sun themselves. At their heads, sprinklers sprayed giggly kids chased by yappy dogs.
This was our neighborhood. Northwest 4th Street, Miami. A mile or so from the Tower.
The Tower Theater was where I went if I wanted to go to other neighborhoods, ones that were years away, like the Old West (if Stagecoach was showing), or light-years away (if it was a Buck Rogers serial). Who knew what adventures awaited me at the Tower? Would Beau Geste be off to fight in the French Foreign Legion? Would Mr. Smith go to Washington or Dorothy to Oz?
As we rounded the corner, taking a right on 17th, my father reached for my hand and placed it into the strength of his. At five foot eleven he was thin as a rail but just as strong, tempered by years of carrying bulky cash registers from businesses to his car, from his car into our house, then back again. Repair work was slow for the decade of the Great Depression, never steady, never certain.
But because he was often out of work, we were together a lot; this was not the case with my mom, who worked as a beautician, leaving me few leisurely days with her like the one I had today with my dad.
We turned left on 8t
h, my anticipation quickening with our pace. There on the right it stood—the Tower Theater, with its sleek, art-deco architecture, its forty-foot tower, its glittering marquee:
CODE OF THE SECRET SERVICE[2]
Starring Ronald Reagan and Rosella Towne
My father dug into his pocket, mincing out change. “One adult, one child,” he said, and with that, we were in. A ticket taker opened the door that led into the cool lobby and then into the cavernous dark of the theater. We had missed the newsreels, but we were just in time for the feature presentation. We settled into our cushioned seats.
A cone of light flickered from the projection room onto the screen. This time the “neighborhood” was Washington, DC. This time the buildings were not stucco but marble. The Capitol. The Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial. They all loomed on the screen, and my nine-year-old imagination took off.
The camera cut to words on an office door—“Secret Service Division.” Through that door bounded the dashing, clean-cut Brass Bancroft, a Secret Service agent played by the young, athletic Ronald Reagan. He flashed an all-American smile as his supervisor talked about a counterfeiting ring the Service had been tracking. He needed a stakeout south of the border. He assigned Brass to go undercover and check it out. It would be dangerous, but duty called.
The next minute Brass was on a plane that we saw dotting across a map of the United States, then landing in Mexico. Brass picked his way through uncertain streets and more uncertain alleys, into a shady-dealing casino, then a shadowy bar, and then a fight broke out. A flurry of fists. Bodies flying through the air, crashing onto tables.
I gripped my father’s arm on the armrest.
It was one cliff-hanging moment after another. One narrow escape after another. One plot twist after another. Until at last a beautiful girl, unimpressed by Brass, entered the story. The two were soon captured by the counterfeiters, and the girl was now even less impressed with Brass than she had been.
Before I knew it, the tables had turned. Brass had slipped out of the ropes that tied him to the chair, rescuing the girl and routing the counterfeiters. Suddenly the special agent had the girl’s admiration and her affection. The music swelled, the credits rolled, and the tail end of the reel threaded through the projector. A splash of white rinsed the screen, followed by the houselights.
When we left the theater, it was dark. My father asked if I liked the movie, and I said I did. With the marquee lights behind us and the streetlights ahead of us, we made our way home. He pulled out a small bottle of whiskey and took a swig, then another before pocketing it.
My father was not Brass Bancroft, not by a long shot. But I loved him. He was kind and good, at least to me. The Depression had taken away his dignity, his confidence, his manhood. But in return, it had given him to me.
I leaned into him while we walked, tired and hungry and quiet.
“How about a lift?” he asked. I nodded. He hefted me onto his shoulders, crossing his arms over my legs so I wouldn’t fall off. I took in a chestful of the heavy night air, mingled with the smell of his skin, his hair, his breath.
There was no place in the world I felt more secure, and no place in the world I would rather be.
We walked past neighbors’ houses and the suppertime smells that drifted out their open windows. By the time we were home, I was almost asleep.
Yet something was waking in me, drawing me. Was it the selfless service of the agent to his country? Was it the danger? The intrigue? The foreign travel?
Or was it the girl?
CHAPTER 1
JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade. . . .
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
ALAN SEEGER, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”
MARCH 30, 1981
It had been almost forty-two years since I saw that B movie at the Tower Theater, and I was a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the actor in that movie, who was now playing the role of a lifetime: the president of the United States. For the past eighteen years I’d worked my way through the ranks in the Service—investigating stolen checks, standing post, working shifts, doing advances—and now I was lead agent for the special detail that protected the president.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” by Alan Seeger. I had even memorized it decades ago and have returned to it often. The poem makes the encounter with Death seem as calm and natural as watching the trees return to life, “when Spring comes back with rustling shade and apple-blossoms fill the air.”
Death is talked about not in cold, impersonal descriptions but in warm terms such as “rendezvous” and in personal images of Death taking the poet’s hand. For the poet, death is not an encounter to be feared but an appointment to be kept. God is in it. Hope is in it. And so is courage.
There was another man enchanted by this poem.[3] When John F. Kennedy returned from his honeymoon in October 1953, he read “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” to his young wife, Jacqueline, telling her it was his favorite poem. After that, she memorized the poem, often reciting it to him privately. Her soft voice and unhurried accent seemed to calm him, giving him the resolve he needed to face the future he felt awaited him.
In 1963, Jacqueline taught the poem to Caroline, their five-year-old daughter. On October 5, 1963, when the now–President Kennedy was meeting with his National Security Council in the Rose Garden, his young daughter slipped into the meeting and sidled next to him. She tugged at him to get him to notice her. The president dismissed her, but in a way only a young daughter can, she kept trying to get his attention. The president turned to her, smiling. Caroline looked into his eyes and recited the poem. She recited it flawlessly, with perfect diction. When she finished, no one spoke. It seemed not simply a sweet moment but a sacred one. A sense of reverence permeated the silence, touching everyone.
Seven weeks later, this little girl’s father made his rendezvous with Death at the disputed barricade of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
A day that has haunted the memory of every American. And every Secret Service agent.
Now, almost eighteen years after that rendezvous, I was an agent, tasked with protecting the president. I was part of the barricade between him and Death. And my sole purpose was to make sure this was the one appointment he would not keep.
March 30, 1981, started for me in the predawn chill, where I jogged around our neighborhood in North Potomac, Maryland. A small, sequestered suburb northwest of DC, it had been carved out of a forest near the Potomac River. The subdivisions had bucolic names like Travilah Meadows, Quail Run, and Mills Farm, and they lived up to their names, forming a quiet respite from the bustling streets of the nation’s capital.
It was a spring day, not blue and fair but gray and overcast as I drove into DC. And although the first meadow flowers had appeared in some well-manicured parts of the city, the more than three thousand cherry trees there had not yet blossomed to fill the air with their delicate scent.
The first thing I did when I arrived for work that morning was to sign in for target practice at the gun range in the basement of the old post office building. I was dressed for work in a plain, blue-gray, blend-in-with-the-crowd suit and tie, my gun holstered beneath my unbuttoned coat. As I faced downrange, I spread my feet to square with my shoulders. I relaxed my arms, shaking my hands at my sides to loosen them.
As an agent, I’d had it drilled into me that the one thing I could never do was freeze. In a crisis, an agent doesn’t have time to think. Reactions need to be instinctive. So much as a blink or a balk, and I would be a dead man. Or worse—the president would be a dead man.
With a sudden, jarring sound, the target turned from being a thin piece of paper to a man with a pistol. Immediately I flipped open my coat with my right hand, grabbed the butt of my gun with my left, and fired two shots that drilled the paper assassin
.
My gun was a stubby Smith & Wesson Model 19, with a six-round chamber that could be changed out in three to four seconds. The impact on the hand was brutal, but the impact on the target was even more so. The .38-caliber bullets burst from the two-and-a-half-inch barrel at a speed of 1,110 feet per second. If the bullet didn’t kill you, the blow from the bullet would knock you off balance—if not off your feet. With the Service using hollow points, though, if the bullet did hit you, it would likely be lethal.
When you are protecting the most important leader in the world, lethal is what you want. You don’t want to give an assassin a chance to shoot once, let alone a second chance. You want to drop him the way I dropped that target in the shooting range.
After cleaning my gun, I left for “the office.” The office for me was known as W-16, located in the bowels of the White House, directly under the Oval Office. It was the Secret Service’s command center, the central nervous system for protecting the president and other key leaders and their families. Intelligence was routed to us there—field reports, surveillance feeds, wiretaps—up-to-date intel on people who were known threats. The Service receives threats every day on the lives of those they are assigned to protect—especially on the life of the president. The lower his approval rating is, the higher the number of threats. And since taking office, President Reagan’s approval rating had plummeted.
The president had been in office just seventy days. For the first week after his inauguration, every time the president left the safety of the White House, I stuck so close I could smell his aftershave. But for the next seven weeks after that, others in the management team had been with him while I attended the Federal Executive Institute. Now back at the White House, I felt today would be a good day to spend time with him and get to know him. Although an agent never wants to get on too-friendly terms with the president, you do want to be able to do the best job of protecting him, and that involves knowing him. Knowing how fast he walks or how slow. Knowing how often he stops along a rope line to greet the public and for how long. Knowing whether he is cautious or cavalier. Is he immediately compliant to an agent’s suggestions, is he momentarily hesitant, or is he resistant to the point that the agent has to persuade him? In scenarios where every second counts, knowledge like this can be lifesaving.