by Jerry Parr
Then they gave us the gun, a commission book (our identity and authority to make arrests), and handcuffs. That was it for the first day.
The second day we got a huge manual with scarcely any time to read it. A carbon copy list of dos and don’ts, mysteriously dated November 1, 1951 (eleven years before), was also handed out. Its advice included the following:
“Telephone office every two hours. This in addition to any radio calls.”
“Carry service revolver at all times when on duty. Do your practicing at range; don’t fool with guns in offices. Use only in self-defense.”
“Stay out of newspaper photos, give out no publicity.”
“Search prisoners first and thoroughly for weapons, then for evidence. Search includes person, auto, and premises under his control.”
“Don’t handle female prisoners without proper assistance.”
“Don’t drive alone in car with a prisoner; phone office and assistance will be sent.”
There was more, but the warning was clear: This job is not a tea party!
The third day was the driving test. Mr. Whitaker put on his gray felt hat, a well-blocked, elegant hat he wore proudly and with authority. Putting on his topcoat, he tossed me the keys to a 1961 Studebaker Lark and growled, “I want to see if you can drive. Take me for a ride.” I tried to exude confidence, but as I caught the keys, my hands were trembling. Driving in Nashville traffic was nothing compared to Manhattan. I wasn’t really sure how I’d measure up. I drove him along, and he didn’t talk. The silence magnified the tension.
“Do a broken U-turn,” he rasped. I didn’t know what a broken U-turn was, so he said, “Well, just stop and turn the car around and go the other way.” In Manhattan traffic.
So I did that, but I was nervous. I felt as if I were starring in a slow-motion scene from a movie: turning left across three lanes of traffic, jerking between fast and slow to avoid being hit by angry drivers. But I made the turn and let out a sigh of relief. We resumed at about 35 mph, when I hit a pothole. There were no seat belts in those days. Mr. Whitaker flew straight up. The force of his encounter with the headliner crushed his hat, pushing it down over his ears.
He didn’t say a word. Neither did I. But my thoughts were pounding in my head: This is the end. I’m ruined. I’m fired.
Then he said, very quietly, “Son, pull the car over. I want to get out.” I stopped the car. We were about two miles from the field office, blocking a lane of Manhattan traffic. Taxi drivers blasted their horns and gave me the finger. People on the sidewalk stared.
Mr. Whitaker stepped from the car and blocked his hat. He put it back on. He leaned in the passenger window. “Reb,” he said, “if they’d all been like you, we’d have lost the Civil War.” And he walked off. He never mentioned it again.
Being from the South, I took Whitaker’s “rebel” remark as a backhanded compliment, but I’m not sure that’s how he meant it. Carolyn and I quickly caught on that we were on the wrong side of a cultural divide between New Yorkers and the rest of the country. I took some ribbing about bringing my lunch every day to save money. My cheap, unlined overcoat seemed an object of levity, as well as the fact that I had only two suits. But I started locking up criminals so fast that I soon earned some grudging respect.
Whitaker judged agents not by the elegance of their clothes but by how many people they locked up. He had the “Two-Twenty Rule”: in light of the number of unresolved cases, he expected each of us to arrest at least two suspects a month and to close at least twenty cases. “Take ’em off the street!” was his motto. That impressed me so strongly that I didn’t even notice I was supposed to write a report on each case until the US Attorney started calling. “Where is the report on so and so?” he’d ask. It took a couple of inquiries for me to realize I’d missed a step. Eager to please Whitaker, I’d already locked up a lot of people, but I hadn’t thought to look at the manual.
The derision of New Yorkers was harder on Carolyn. For the first time in her life, she was looked down on. Her Southern accent was one reason; our joint refusal to go in hock for furniture was another. A third was we didn’t offer guests anything to drink stronger than beer. We couldn’t afford to!
Our neighbors were mostly young couples on their way up, biding time until they could buy a house in Levittown or a similar development on Long Island. The women stayed home with babies and preschoolers. One asked Carolyn, “When are you going to get some lamps and easy chairs? When are you going to get a carpet?”
Carolyn nodded toward her framed diploma on the wall. “There’s my carpet.” But she soon learned that a master’s degree from Vanderbilt carried little weight. Another neighbor actually told her, “You won’t be able to teach in New York because you couldn’t pass the test. Everyone knows the Southern schools are no good.” The saving grace for Carolyn was one new friend, a witty, well-read, red-haired former teacher named Rita Cohen, who had a baby about Kimberly’s age. While the kids played, Rita offered Carolyn borscht, matzo ball soup, and an assortment of colorful Yiddish phrases. The women studied piano together, and I bought Carolyn a used upright when I saw how happy it made her.
Less than three weeks after I arrived in New York, the Cold War with the Soviets got suddenly hot. On October 15, 1962, a United States U-2 spy plane photographed construction of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. This revelation, which precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, became public on October 22.[8] After days of frantic, top-secret discussions with his closest advisers, President Kennedy revealed the sites to the American people. He announced a naval blockade to stop Soviet ships bound for Cuba. The Soviets kept coming, and both nations prepared for nuclear war.
For three days Carolyn’s parents, who were in the Florida Keys, witnessed a steady, unending line of heavy military equipment flowing south on US-1 toward Key West. They told us that local residents were lining the highway to watch, unbelieving. None of this was reported on the news.
Nobody doubted New York would be a target.
George Jukes called us into a meeting and grimly read a notice to all agents. The title was “What to Do in Case of Nuclear Attack.” Jukes solemnly read, “You will see a flash of bright light. Get under your desk. Bend over. Put your head between your legs. And kiss your a— good-bye.”
We needed some gallows humor, because it was terrifying to contemplate.
For days both nations hung on the brink, gripped by terror. Then, on October 28, after the United States agreed not to invade Cuba and the Soviets agreed to dismantle their nuclear missile site, the Soviet ships turned back. It was the closest the world had ever come to nuclear destruction.
I started out with forty cases in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. It was dangerous territory for a guy in a suit. Agents always tried to go in pairs to make arrests. My criminal investigator career began during my first week when I accompanied Harry Gibbs, the office champion at locking people up, to a tenement in Bedford-Stuyvesant. On the way he warned, “Only three kinds of guys in suits come here: preachers, social workers, and insurance collectors. The locals know the preachers and social workers. If they think you’re an insurance collector, they may jump you, because those guys carry cash.”
He added, “So pull your jacket back so they can see your gun. Then nobody will mess with you.”
At our first stop of the day we threaded our way through a group of unemployed men loitering in front of the tenement. I pulled back my jacket. The urine stench near the stairs put me on edge. But then, as Gibbs and I climbed the stairs, I smelled something else, something familiar: frying fish and . . . something that reminded me of my grandmother. Then I recognized the scent of collard greens and relaxed a little.
Gibbs demonstrated how New York cops knock on a suspect’s door: with a billy club. This was clearly not the South! A man opened the door and peeked out through the chain on it—a chain just long enough for his rottweiler’s head to stick out. I talked him into unchaining the door and soon learned I had a gif
t for talking to people. I could usually coax them to come without a struggle. These were check forgers, after all, not murderers.
Since Mr. Whitaker liked his agents to lock people up, I did it with wild abandon. But even I had my limits. Once I tracked down Myrtle S., a woman with a long record of forging Social Security checks. When I knocked, she yelled, “Come in, the door’s unlocked!” I wondered if I was about to be ambushed. But there was Myrtle lying in bed . . . giving birth to her sixth child! I did not arrest Myrtle that day. Even Whitaker understood.
Will Rogers said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” It’s a funny thing, but I never arrested a person I didn’t like. How I felt about the people I arrested was similar to the way I’d felt about my stepfather Jack. Certainly I disliked what they had done, but after I talked with them awhile, I began to see their human faces and issues.
Finally, after several months, the Service sent me to a six-week course at Treasury school in Washington, DC. Kimberly was only eleven months old, and we’d just discovered Carolyn was pregnant again. To save a little per diem money, I was staying at a cheap boardinghouse called Ma Bouma’s. There was a pay phone in the hall, but—again, to save—I was trying to ration calls to one a week.
When I called home the second week, Carolyn sounded despondent. “Kimberly is so sad. I think she’s grieving for you. She won’t eat, won’t smile, just stares at the door.” Her voice broke. “I don’t know how to make her happy.” Then she really started to cry. “I miss you too!”
So I began hitchhiking from DC back to New York every weekend. Kimberly—and Carolyn—started to smile again. It was our first hint of the immense sacrifices we would make as a family for my work in the Service.
Not all my work involved stolen checks. As Albert Vaughn had promised when he interviewed me in Nashville, whenever the president or his family came to New York, our field office worked protection, supplementing the White House detail. A scant month after I was sworn in, I got my first protective assignment. On November 7, 1962, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt died of bone marrow tuberculosis. President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson were coming to the funeral in Hyde Park, New York. The Service needed some back-up agents, and I was chosen. George Sershen, a wizened, older agent, and I went to Stewart Air Force Base, where a helicopter was scheduled to land. Then the president would take a limousine to Hyde Park. As a brand-new agent I had the humblest of jobs: to guard the empty helicopter until the president returned.
I’ll never forget seeing Jack Kennedy walk off the chopper on that crisp autumn morning with Agent Roy Kellerman behind him. At six foot four Kellerman was an imposing figure, taller than the president. The agents who followed also appeared to be at least six feet tall, in their thirties, and in superb physical condition. They looked sharp and confident in their tailored suits and perfectly shined black shoes, some carrying London Fog trench coats.
I had no aspirations to get on the White House detail. I didn’t think I was sophisticated enough. I still ordered wine by the color, and all I knew was that the bottles with corks cost more than those with screw-off lids. Except for my Air Force experience, I’d hardly left Miami. These were really magnificent guys, I thought. You had to be special to be doing that.
Throughout 1963 Jack Kennedy came to New York often. He was more exciting than a movie star. He glowed with charisma. He glittered. He lit up the space. People would wait in ten- to fifteen-degree weather out at the airport just to glimpse him as he drove by. If he touched them, they wouldn’t wash their hands! Women especially went crazy when Jack Kennedy entered a room or worked a crowd.
One day I covered the president at the Waldorf, bringing up the rear of the phalanx surrounding him. But he saw a crowd behind a rope line and walked back to greet them, right where I was. For a minute or two I was the only agent close to the president, so I started working the line in front of him, telling the crowd, “Take your hands out of your pockets where I can see them,” as I’d seen the PPD agents do. The PPD agents rushed back and took over, but I had one moment of glory. And I was close enough to see a quality in President Kennedy that you don’t find in many political leaders—something like an electrical field of energy surrounded him. But I could also see something else, something I have a gift for seeing. I saw a lot of pain. I saw suffering in the way he held his body, leaning slightly forward and stiff when he wasn’t “on.”
Every time the president or Mrs. Kennedy came to New York during 1963, I was assigned to work them—either at the airport or the speech site or up at the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, where they maintained two suites. As a rookie agent, I got to know the Carlyle well, especially the hallway where I stood guard between their two enormous suites, 34A and 34B, which encompassed the entire thirty-fourth floor.
I’d never seen anything like the Carlyle. From the lobby to the roof, it combined the most luxurious appointments with understated elegance. Guests enjoyed fine art, furnishings, carpets, and linens accompanied by sweeping views of Central Park. Although I was too lowly to be invited into the presidential suite, I was told it came with private terraces and a grand piano.
Jacqueline Kennedy loved to come to New York, sometimes with her sister Lee Radziwill, to shop or attend the Metropolitan Opera. One of the agents would hold the door, while Clint Hill and other agents accompanied her. If she stayed in the Carlyle and wasn’t going out, they only needed one agent on post in the hall, and I was sometimes “it.”
One day Mrs. Kennedy decided to go shopping in Manhattan and found herself a little short of cash. “Oh, Agent,” she began, not knowing my name, “do you have $800 on you that you could lend me?”
“No, ma’am,” I gulped, trying not to look as stunned as I felt. It had been a long time since I’d seen $800 in one place, let alone in my pocket! But she didn’t hold it against me. She was very kind. I showed her a snapshot of Kimberly, and she autographed it for me.
Besides physical protection, we investigated an increasing number of threat cases: individuals who seemed to be focused on the president. Some were harmless. One woman told me she was Kennedy’s wife and her address was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We had a lot of that—many people passionately loved or hated Kennedy.
Of those who disliked Kennedy, some held him responsible for the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and the raising of the Berlin Wall in 1961.[9] In addition, the nuclear arms’ race was a nightmare waiting to happen. By 1962 both the United States and the Soviet Union had resumed nuclear testing in the atmosphere. The Cuban Missile Crisis had caused both Khrushchev and Kennedy to recognize the dangers inherent in a game of international “chicken.” So in June of 1963 Kennedy made a speech announcing ongoing talks with the USSR, together with Great Britain, to limit nuclear testing.[10] This announcement was popular in New York but not everywhere in the United States.
Also in June the president proposed civil rights legislation to ban discrimination in public accommodations, housing, and jobs. All these major changes in the status quo created enemies. It seemed as if every announcement brought increased threat activity. The Secret Service stayed on edge. And the threat level in New York continued to rise.
Most of Kennedy’s critics were law-abiding citizens. But others were more deadly. I had to pull a gun only once in my entire career, not while on protection or on a counterfeiting or check case; it was a threat investigation. And the gun I pulled was not my own.
A sixteen-year-old was spewing threats against the president, and Joe Gasquez and I decided to bring him in for an interview. He was very, very muscular for his age. We sat him down in the field office, when suddenly he jumped up, yelling, “Yes! I threatened the president, and I’m going to kill the s.o.b.!” Gasquez got one handcuff on him, but he flung Gasquez off. He ran into the hall, one handcuff dangling and Gasquez in full pursuit.
The suspect turned into a blind alley where the door was blocked. Gasquez had taken off his coat, so the gun in his holster was exposed. The kid turned to
confront Gasquez and grabbed for Gasquez’s gun. Gasquez was fighting him off. I came up behind and snatched the gun—Gasquez’s gun—and stuck it in the kid’s ear. That calmed him down.
Gasquez put the other cuff on him, and we took him back.
My rookie year in the service was a blur. I worked so hard to please Whitaker that I closed the third-most cases in the office (out of twenty-six agents), and that was with six weeks out for Treasury school in DC. I confess I was a little bit proud of myself. My teacher, Harry Gibbs, again won first prize: a bottle of whiskey.
Many years later, just before I retired from the Service in 1985, out of curiosity I looked up my personnel file. In my sixty-day evaluation, I discovered Whitaker had written, “An excellent, aggressive field agent but doesn’t appear to be White House detail material.” At the time I would have agreed.
In late September the Nashville field office had an opening, and the SAIC, Paul Doster, requested me. Our second child, Jennifer Lynn, had just been born the day after my thirty-third birthday, September 17, 1963. I loved the challenge of working in New York, but our living expenses were killing us. I later learned we’d been eligible for food stamps on my starting salary! We were eating pancakes and chicken wings to stay alive. The same money in Nashville would put us into a house of our own. I took the transfer, effective November 12, 1963.
Near the end of my time in New York I went out to Idlewild Airport to work President Kennedy’s arrival and departure for his visit to the United Nations. It was late September. When he climbed out of his limousine and walked to the plane, I had an ominous feeling. I thought, I’ll never see him again. Something about the way he walked to that airplane gave me a sense of foreboding.
Anyone who was five or older on November 22, 1963, remembers where they were and how they heard that President Kennedy had been shot. In the Nashville motel room where we’d been living since my transfer, Carolyn and I were munching on ham and cheese sandwiches and trying to keep the babies entertained, waiting to move into our new house. Our furniture was already there, and I’d taken the day off. But here it was lunchtime, and we were still stuck in the motel.