by Jerry Parr
We covered three outside posts including the boathouse—two in back on the lakeside and one in front. In winter the ice on the lake was so thick we drove a car out on it and used it for an extra post facing the opposite shore. If too many of our people were on advance, temporary details filled in from the Minneapolis field office or the White House Police Force (later called Executive Protective Service—EPS—and now known as the Secret Service Uniformed Division). Each post had a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun, which we handed off to our replacements. On winter nights the moon and stars shed light on the snow; we also used flashlights and our ears—the crunch of dead summer leaves underfoot warned if anyone approached. Normally we stood post for thirty minutes at a time. But as the temperature approached zero, we’d put on arctic gear—fur-lined parkas with big hoods—and limit our outside exposure to fifteen minutes at a site, rotating between an outside post, the boathouse, another outside post, and the command post to warm up with a cup of coffee.
There was a swimming pool in the side yard, enjoyed by the Humphrey children and grandchildren in the summer. I thought how my little Jenny, a fearless swimmer at age three, would love to play with them. And how Kim, a four-year-old climber like I was, would be scooting up a tree. For long stretches, I enjoyed family life only vicariously, through the Humphreys. Their daughter and son-in-law, Nancy and Bruce Solomonson, frequently stayed in a guesthouse on the property with their three children. Humphrey loved all three, but the vice president particularly doted on Vicky, a little blonde girl with Down syndrome. His face lit up when he saw her. She’d laugh out loud as he swung her around. “More, Papa! More!”
One Thanksgiving the snow was so deep that walls of it eight feet high lined the cleared paths between the house and posts, like a system of canyons. The family was together in the house, enjoying a feast. Just thinking about it made my stomach—and my spirit—growl. Carolyn and the kids were having their Thanksgiving back in Washington—without me, again—and I imagined the turkey and dressing, the mashed potatoes and gravy. The nearest food the agents might find was at the local delicatessen miles away, but it was closed for the holiday. Hungry and lonely, I fantasized someone from the house would come out and offer us turkey sandwiches. But nobody did. We stood vigilant and invisible.
Early in the 1960s John F. Kennedy had sent a few military advisers to help our ally South Vietnam combat a threat from the Communists in the north, and in August 1964 a US Navy ship clashed with North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin.[22] Johnson asked for and got a resolution from Congress, which he treated as permission to deploy troops. During the 1964 presidential campaign Johnson promised not to get us more deeply involved in Vietnam. He said, “We are not about to send American boys . . . to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” He defeated Senator Goldwater of Arizona with an ad showing a little girl picking petals off a daisy in a lovely meadow with a mushroom cloud looming in the distance, painting Goldwater as a dangerous warmonger. Johnson was elected as the peace guy.
But on April 7, 1965, President Johnson made a speech at Johns Hopkins University that changed everything. He said,
Viet-Nam is far away from this quiet campus. We have no territory there, nor do we seek any. The war is dirty and brutal and difficult. And some 400 young men, born into an America that is bursting with opportunity and promise, have ended their lives on Viet-Nam’s steaming soil.
Why must we take this painful road?
Why must this Nation hazard its ease, and its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away?
We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure.[23]
The message meant one thing: more American boys were indeed going to Vietnam, now as troops, not advisers. Who could have foreseen then that the names of more than fifty-eight thousand dead Americans would finally be engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall?
And Humphrey’s role would take an unexpected turn: he was to become the administration’s point man on Vietnam.
The East Room of the White House is full of history and ghosts.[24] A huge chandelier and a full-length portrait of George Washington, the oldest possessions in the White House, dominate the room. Dolley Madison saved that Gilbert Stuart portrait from a fire set by British troops in 1814, quickly removing it from the frame and fleeing as the British approached. In November 1963 President Kennedy was the seventh president to be officially mourned in the East Room, and the following year President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act there on live television.
Now it was 1965. Shortly after the Johns Hopkins announcement in April, the president summoned Humphrey to a briefing in the East Room, and I accompanied him. The room was packed with all the highest-ranking leaders of the House and Senate. They were there to get the inside story on the Vietnam War.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had starring roles. The president said, “I’ve given Dean Rusk one hundred days to finish this war on the diplomatic front and Robert McNamara ninety days to finish it militarily.”
I’ll never forget Secretary McNamara getting out his map of Vietnam. He showed the North and the South. He planned to put divisions in the Delta, in the highlands, on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at the DMZ, at Haiphong Harbor. It was a plan!
At the time I made no judgments about the viability of this plan. That wasn’t my job. But when I think about it now, I see what they were missing. No one in the room could imagine that a North Vietnamese guy who weighed less than a hundred pounds would be able to carry a hundred pounds of rice, ammunition, and guns . . . and be sick . . . and walk a thousand miles . . . and then, at the end of the trail, fight to the death. Nobody picked that up. Everybody in the room thought it would all be over in three months.
Humphrey began to travel incessantly. This was partly because President Johnson sent him everywhere he didn’t want to go and partly because Humphrey was an irrepressible extrovert who loved people and loved to talk. At the beginning, we had no idea how this would affect all of our lives for the next four years.
Because of so much travel, every agent on the detail learned to do advances. Roger Warner, Jimmy Taylor, Roger Counts, Jack Giuffre, and I did the most. Our leaders—Glenn Weaver, Bob Burke, and Walt Coughlin—stayed with the vice president all the time. They were the ones we had to please, because if we fouled something up, they’d be sure to notice.
Doing an advance is like eating a chicken gizzard: the more you chew it, the bigger it gets. It’s impossible to cover every hypothetical uncertainty, but agents try. The drumbeat of self-questioning can wear a person out. For four years the stress never lightened up. In fact, it got worse.
I started with domestic visits and graduated to leading foreign advances. I was good at it, and at first I loved the challenge. Each site was unique. Some were dangerous. It was edgy and kept me on my toes.
I scrutinized airports, ran routes, sanitized speech sites, and secured hotels where my protectee would spend the night. I learned where the closest hospitals were and how to work with local police and fire authorities. I liked going into a town and running meetings with the local folks. Making sure they got thanked, I’d line up the police officers who supported us so they could shake the vice president’s hand. They appreciated it and welcomed us back.
But there was a dark side nobody had warned me about. I soon came to understand that leading an advance was a wounding experience. Psychologically and emotionally. We were playing a deadly game. The stakes were very high, and no one could put a price on what agents had to do.
Every time I looked at Win Lawson, the advance agent for President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas on November 22, 1963, I thought, There but for the grace of God go I. He had done everything right, but it had all gone terribly wrong. Here’s the thing: there’s no advance that can be done, has been done, or will ever be done that can’t be defeated. B
ut we were determined that we would die trying.
When Johnson started sending Humphrey around the globe on trips he himself wanted to avoid, the VPPD had to carry more of the burden that normally would have gone to the president’s agents. The Presidential Protective Division (PPD) carried a force of nearly one hundred men, but we were only eighteen guys. We worked five to a shift plus three supervisors, the bare minimum needed.
Our days extended twelve to sixteen hours back-to-back. If we weren’t traveling, we were home in DC, working shifts. If we took whichever two days a week off we were supposed to get, that left maybe one person available for advances. Our overtime shot through the roof. From 1965 to 1968 it was common for agents, as I did, to log more than one thousand hours overtime each year. And—because of Public Law 763 then restricting overtime pay for federal workers—most of it was unpaid. Not only that, travel time that exceeded a normal shift didn’t count toward overtime unless you were actually accompanying the protectee! Walt Coughlin accumulated two and a half years’ worth of overtime in seven and a half years.
Every day I learned something new, often from a mess up, like a principal’s car that ran out of gas because the gas gauge was defective. I learned my own limits—and then went beyond them. I learned I was no longer an only child: I became part of a brotherhood bonded by shared adversity and mutual commitment to a larger goal. Although we carried guns, our goal was to save life, not take it.
I learned to trust my own instincts. We all had to improvise because we never had enough men, enough rest, enough time to plan ahead. We learned to make do with what we had.
We learned to forgive each other’s mistakes born of exhaustion; we had each other’s backs. Beyond that, the inner sense of safety I carried from my parents’ love helped me continue to feel safe, even in very unsafe circumstances.
And we all learned that the women we loved were stronger than we could have imagined—because, like us, they had to be.
Love is what kept us going.
When I was transferred permanently to the VPPD detail in December 1964, Kim and Jenny were toddlers. For the next few years, Santa arrived whenever I could be with them—sometimes before, sometimes after, but almost never on December 25. Carolyn kept the kids inside, monitoring the TV so they wouldn’t know that other children had not received presents yet or had gotten them the previous week.
The agents’ wives formed a sort of village, pitching in to help one another. Older women mentored the younger ones. They babysat for one another. They attended (and in one case coached) one another’s children’s Little League games. Several gave birth while husbands were on the road. A Secret Service wife would fill in for the labor, holding the mother-to-be’s hand and coaching, “Breathe! Push!”
Missing such moments was a terrible loss for the men, too. We all felt torn—and guilty.
Carolyn would drive me to National or Dulles Airport. She and the kids would kiss me good-bye and not see me for a week or two. One day Carolyn overheard our three-year-old tell a neighbor, “My daddy works at the airport.”
My travel vouchers and daily reports tell the story. Here’s January 1966, a typical month:
On January 1, 1966, my day began at 6:00 a.m. in Manila, Philippines, where I finished an advance and worked the vice president when he arrived. I had not been home since December 23 at 8:00 a.m., when I left Washington for Chicago, then Anchorage, then Tokyo, then Manila, where I arrived at 2:30 p.m., December 25, 1965. Merry Christmas. (That year Santa had come on December 22.)
After seeing the vice president off to the next stop on January 1, I was homeward bound. I flew to Tokyo, arriving at 11:40 p.m., and spent the night. (Fifteen hours)
January 2—9:00 a.m. at the airport, standing by to fly home. Got an 8:00 p.m. flight to the United States. After crossing the international date line, stopping in Seattle and New York City, I arrived at Dulles at 1:40 a.m., January 3. (Seventeen hours) When I left home, I had lived in Virginia; I returned to a house in Maryland. We’d bought a house, and to save state taxes, Carolyn moved the family into it on New Year’s Eve, by herself.
After one day off, I started working midnights until January 11, when I unexpectedly flew to New Delhi with the vice president. Got home January 15 at noon. (Forty-six hours overtime plus thirty-two regular—seventy-eight hours total) After regular days off I started working midnights, made a quick trip to Lincoln Center in New York City, then to Chicago for five days doing an advance plus a day of working protection when the vice president arrived.
Total time for January: 109 hours in DC, 182 hours away. A regular forty-hour week would be 173 hours per month. I’d worked 291 hours! Not counting travel time! I was a walking zombie. We all were.
Where two or three were gathered together, Humphrey could be found in the midst of them, making a speech or telling a joke at the Republicans’ expense. One of his favorites went like this: “A man needed a heart transplant, and three hearts became available. One was from a twenty-six-year-old Olympic marathon runner; one was from a thirty-year-old Jesuit priest; and one was from a fifty-year-old Republican. The man said, ‘Oh, I’ll take the fifty-year-old Republican heart. I want a heart that’s never been used.’” The Democratic crowds loved it.
When Humphrey got going, he couldn’t stop. On a speech circuit, we typically ran later and later as the day progressed. Once on an advance in Nashville, we arranged to close down a major highway that went to the airport, telling the local sheriff we’d notify him when the precise moment came. I knew Humphrey was going to shake hands and talk to people after his speech for at least fifteen minutes, so I advised, “Sheriff, you’d better not close the highway down until we really leave.”
He replied, “Son, I run this county, and I’ll do it the way I want to do it.”
The sheriff closed the highway when he heard that the speech was done, without waiting for word from us. And sure enough, we didn’t leave for another fifteen minutes. As we made a right turn onto that highway, I saw four lanes of headlights into infinity. There was no telling how far that traffic went. The sheriff had stopped an interstate at seven thirty at night! People were standing on their cars, waving fists, shouting obscenities. It reminded me of Manhattan. You could have landed a 747 on our side of the police blockade. There was nothing in front of us.
Humphrey was so busy talking, he never turned around to look, and he never found out about it. But I thought, That’s how you lose votes.
Sometimes emergencies came up when there was no time for an advance. Then we improvised as we went. This was the case on the January 11, 1966, trip to New Delhi.
On that day Prime Minister Shastri of India died of a heart attack in Tashkent, where he was meeting with Soviet Premier Kosygin. The funeral would be in New Delhi twenty-four hours later. Of course, Humphrey would represent President Johnson.
I came to work on the midnight shift and found myself at one o’clock on an airplane—with no extra underwear, no toothbrush, no razor. I’d barely had time to call home. “Honey, I won’t be coming home in the morning,” I had to say. “I’ll be gone three or four days. I can’t tell you where I’ll be.” (I couldn’t tell her because the trip was unplanned and there would be no advance security.) All that came from the other end of the phone was a deep, resigned sigh.
My shift got on the plane with nothing but what we had on our backs and in our pockets. We flew all the way to India, along with the day shift and the four-to-midnight shift, who brought in extra things. I ended up with Rufus Youngblood’s underwear and somebody else’s toothbrush.
On landing at the airport in New Delhi, we found about fifty cars already lined up in the motorcade for the funeral. Our follow-up car, critical for protection, was twelve cars back from the vice president’s limo! We coaxed the Indian drivers—this was not easy—to let us drive that car up into proper position behind the vice president.
Ten million people lined the funeral route. We couldn’t do a thing to improve security except pray. We saw I
ndian police with long, thick sticks mercilessly beating people who were trying to climb a fence. I thought, I’m glad I live in America. Our cops never act like that.
As we rode along, I noticed people waving and smiling. They were calling out something I couldn’t quite catch. Humphrey was waving back, surprised and pleased to be recognized. Then we all heard the words. They were chanting, “Bob Hope! Bob Hope!” The agents were all laughing, but Humphrey’s face fell and he stopped waving. After all, he was the vice president of the United States! But they didn’t know him from Adam.
The travel got even more intense. I worked 305 hours in February, when Humphrey went to Southeast Asia. My stops were Honolulu, Saigon, Bangkok, Manila, and Seoul.
That was my first of six visits to Vietnam, three with Humphrey and three with Vice President Agnew, never on advance. Saigon was still a beautiful place in February 1966, when we first arrived with Humphrey. We dined elegantly on the top floor of a French hotel, the Caravelle. But behind the string quartet’s dinner music I recognized the sound of firefights: American-made artillery trying to interdict Vietcong in the Delta, not far away. I thought about the total dedication of the troops, the Green Berets—and tried not to think of the reality that human beings on both sides were dying as I savored my boeuf bourguignon.
We used to joke that when Humphrey arrived in Vietnam, there’d be a forty-two-gun salute: twenty-one from the South to honor him and twenty-one from the North trying to kill him! At Tan Son Nhut, the US Air Force base at Saigon, stood a huge sign you couldn’t miss: “Pilots . . . climb to five thousand feet as rapidly as possible.” Planes needed to avoid small-arms fire coming out of the jungle nearby. The battle was coming closer to the city.
In 1967 Humphrey flew into Vietnam to attend the inauguration of South Vietnam’s President Thieu. That evening, as cars lined up in a circular driveway in front of the presidential residence, Glenn Weaver got a queasy intuition that they had been sitting there too long. He ordered the driver, Rick Barbuto, to pull out and go the other way around the circle.