In the Secret Service

by Jerry Parr

  Furious and embarrassed, Humphrey cursed at Weaver, shouting, “We can’t act like that! That’s very arrogant!”

  A minute after Barbuto obeyed the order, two cars right in front of where the limo had been were hit by a mortar, and a driver was killed. It was clearly intended for the vice president. Humphrey apologized to Weaver.[25]

  Clark Air Force Base, near Manila, was the closest military hospital for Americans wounded in Vietnam. Medics stabilized the wounds as best they could in field hospitals, then flew the wounded soldiers directly by C-141s to Clark. Humphrey wanted to visit the base after our first Vietnam visit in 1966. We went in the aftermath of Operation Double Eagle, a joint Army and Marine Corps effort that culminated in a ferocious battle between one of the big airborne units or cavalry units and, for the first time, a North Vietnamese regular infantry division. Our side killed about 2,300 North Vietnamese that one battle, but we lost more than 200 of our own troops, and hundreds were wounded. They poured into Clark, week after week.

  I watched the choppers land and unload their cargo: shattered men, just hours from the battlefield, many still in uniform. Humphrey and I saw them arrive with missing legs, missing genitals, missing arms, missing eyes, brain damaged. The pain on Humphrey’s face was reflected in my own. They were my age, or younger. What will their lives be like when they get home? I wondered. Will they be able to work? Will their wives still love them?

  We walked room to room, speaking to the men. At the door of a darkened room, Humphrey asked a male nurse, “May I come in?”

  The nurse said, “I’ll have to ask him,” and nodded toward his young patient lying in bed. In a minute the nurse returned, apologetic but firm. He said, “I’m sorry. He just lost both eyes in a concussion grenade blast and can’t bear to talk about it yet.”[26]

  We saw some of the most terrible wounds, including one marine who had caught a machine-gun round right through his throat. He saved his own life by using his bayonet to perform a tracheotomy on himself. He lived because he opened an airway in his own throat.

  The Clark Air Force Base hospital reminded me of a scene in Gone with the Wind, the one with a huge panoramic view of all the wounded from the Battle of Atlanta in the US Civil War.

  Right there I witnessed a change in Hubert Humphrey, a dramatic change. He and I had talked about Vietnam before, intellectually. It was always head stuff. But that hospital tour got the war out of his head and into his gut. Mine, too.

  I observed from then on that Humphrey did what he could to change the course of the war, but he only succeeded in alienating President Johnson, who punished him by cutting him out altogether. We agents heard him say, in the car, “I detest this war! I detest it!” Then he’d add, “But I have to support my president.”

  Tom Wells tells this story:[27]

  In 1967, I was a shift leader at a meeting in the vice president’s office to go over with staff some appearances he was scheduled to make that day. As we were speaking, he got a call to come to the Cabinet Room, and as the senior supervisor on duty that day I accompanied him. Johnson was meeting there with several cabinet members. I’m pretty sure Secretary of Defense McNamara was there; not sure who else. I did not go in but waited outside the door.

  I kept getting phone calls from Humphrey’s staff: “Any movement yet? When will he be leaving? He’s way behind schedule!”

  No movement. The meeting lasted at least two hours. Then people started to come out. Everybody but Humphrey. He was in there alone with the president.

  After a while he bounded out, clearly uptight. He and I took the small elevator in the west basement lobby. We were alone. He looked at me, red faced. “If that man gets another bite out of my a—, there won’t be anything left but bones!” I couldn’t say anything, of course. He glared at me. “I mean it!” And then he repeated himself to be sure I understood.

  While most of the public protests we ran into involved Vietnam, racial protests were also getting more intense and were no longer relegated to the South. In the Watts section of south central Los Angeles, a riot began on August 11, 1965, when a white policeman stopped an African American man suspected of drunk driving. It’s unclear whether the police officer behaved inappropriately or not, but a crowd gathered and began to heckle him. Alarmed, he called for backup. When more police arrived, a riot erupted and raged for six days, resulting in thirty-four deaths, more than one thousand reported injuries, almost four thousand arrests, and property damage estimated at more than forty million dollars. It took fourteen thousand California National Guard troops to quell the riot.[28]

  The civil rights alliance between liberal whites and blacks forged by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was shredding.

  Black anger was not directed toward Humphrey—he was known to be friendly to the cause of civil rights. But as Tom Wells reminded me, the immediate aftermath of fires and riots is not comfortable to be in.[29] Humphrey visited areas like Detroit right after control was reestablished. He met with city and civil rights leaders, trying to mediate calm and peace. But peace was fragile. It seemed as if we agents could never relax our vigilance, even for a moment. As Wells put it, “The fires were out, but the heat was still there.”

  When Humphrey left the United States on a multinational trip in March 1967, Europe had not yet seen any violent antiwar demonstrations. The first one happened in Rome, and it was on my watch.

  Jack Giuffre, Rick Barbuto, and I had arrived in Rome on March 22, 1967, to do the advance for a three-day Humphrey visit with Italy’s prime minister and the pope. The vice president arrived on Thursday, March 30. As a member of the advance team, my piece was the first event: a performance of Verdi’s Ernani at the Rome Opera House. I expected this to be a routine event.

  The first hint of trouble was when I saw someone trying to rip the American flag off the vice president’s car. Then, driving past Rome’s ancient Colosseum, I noticed a huge Vietcong flag flying from a pole in front. As we approached the elegant columns of the opera house, a small group of long-haired young people in jeans stood in front, handing out anti-American leaflets. There was some heckling. Still, I didn’t expect a real problem.

  The vice president’s car pulled up in front of the Teatro dell’Opera, where the manager waited to greet him. I opened the door for Mr. Humphrey. He got out smiling, as usual, and I said, “Mr. Vice President, this is your host for the evening, Mr. Angelo Carlucci.” Angelo Carlucci was elegant in his perfectly tailored suit and a full head of perfectly coiffed gray hair. Both men smiled, and just as they were shaking hands, a bag of bright yellow paint arched out of the evening sky and struck Mr. Carlucci a glancing blow on the top of his head. I wondered if it was Sherwin-Williams paint, said to “cover the earth” in my favorite boyhood neon sign.

  Yellow paint spattered everywhere—on Carlucci, on the vice president, on me. Never at a loss for words, Humphrey spat out paint and asked pleasantly, “Does this happen to you often, sir?”

  We agents shoved both men into the lobby. Then I heard a scream. Other agents and the carabinieri (Italian police) had captured a young Communist named Gianni Buzzan.[30] I read in the paper that he and seven others, including an American, were held overnight, charged with something minor, and released. I was told but never confirmed that the district chief was relieved of duty.

  After his meeting with the pope, Humphrey took a train to Florence, and I rode in a NATO helicopter with an AR-15 rifle to cover the route. Chickens scattered as we flew low over the farms along the way. I understand this affected egg production for weeks.

  In Florence the “Flying Carabinieri” went into action. These were police on motorcycles and jeeps brandishing long sticks. They drove up onto the sidewalk where they thought the crowd was getting too big or too rowdy, flailing their sticks in every direction. It was pretty effective crowd control.

  My assignment was the vice president’s arrival in Florence. We were surrounded by what seemed like four thousand police—who in turn were surrounded by about thirty
thousand hostile demonstrators. The smell of pot hung in the air. Some hippies were strung out on drugs. Hal Thomas saw a guy take a bite out of a live chicken, just to gross people out.[31]

  We got the vice president in and out—alive. I didn’t see much art. But I knew without a doubt that Vietnam had come to Europe.

  In November 1967 Humphrey again visited Southeast Asia, spending time in Saigon before a visit to Indonesia. In Vietnam the vice president had an up close experience of the enemy’s spirit. Hal Thomas took Humphrey to a field hospital where wounded Vietcong were being treated along with Americans. As the vice president passed one Vietcong soldier’s cot, the soldier, who had just lost a leg, raised himself on one arm and spat on Humphrey.

  The vice president’s next stop was Indonesia. Some of us fanned out to do advances: Roger Warner went to Jakarta and Tom Behl to Bali. My responsibility was a place called Semarang.

  Semarang, in central Java, was then very primitive. A wall of burning humidity hit us as we climbed out of the Navy DC-9. I couldn’t wait to take a shower.

  I quickly discovered that this was a bad idea. Local US State Department employees warned us that not only was it dangerous to drink the water, it was dangerous even to shower or shave. After a day, we began to dehydrate and to worry. We got permission to drink a beer on duty and ate canned meat—Spam—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for five days.

  Bill Skiles, my colleague, gave his suit to the hotel for cleaning. I was outside and heard a slapping noise. Bare-breasted women were beating Bill’s suit on a rock beside a stream where we had observed people defecating in the water and water buffalo lumbering and drinking.

  The minute the vice president arrived, we guzzled the water his staff brought.

  I overheard one of the vice president’s aides tell him as he was leaving the plane, “Don’t forget to thank the agents.” But he was off to another adventure. I shrugged to myself and thought, Sic transit gloria mundi. “Thus passes the glory of the world!”

  However, to my surprise, I received copies of three letters shortly after we returned home. One was from Rufus Youngblood, assistant director of the Secret Service, addressed to the VPPD detail boss, Glenn Weaver, thanking each of us for our work on the Vietnam visit. Next was a letter to James J. Rowley, Secret Service director (the big boss), commending the entire detail for the trip to Southeast Asia. In the final paragraph, the writer said,

  An additional mission that deserves special attention is that of Special Agent Jerry S. Parr and Special Agent Jerry [sic] Skiles, who prepared my visit to Semarang, Indonesia, and lived under extremely adverse and difficult conditions and yet were able to prepare a flawless visit to that economically backward area.

  It was signed, “Sincerely, Hubert H. Humphrey.”

  Finally, the third letter was from Director Rowley, commending me and saying, “A copy of this letter is being placed in your personnel file as a permanent record of your achievement.”

  So I felt more than adequately thanked after all.

  As the war in Vietnam was going downhill on the battlefield and in public esteem, we were heckled or attacked with flying debris almost everywhere the vice president went. Protesters were getting meaner, and so were police. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, despite his sympathy for the protesters, would become their prime target.

  CHAPTER 5

  1968: THE YEAR FROM HELL

  No one in human history has ever set out to do something evil. Instead they believed what they were doing was right and proper. . . . But in truth more often than not they have only taken the evil into themselves.

  LAWRENCE KUSHNER, Eyes Remade for Wonder[32]

  1968

  From the twenty-sixth floor of Chicago’s Conrad Hilton hotel, Hubert Humphrey and I looked down on a scene from Dante’s Inferno. A chaotic mix of police, horses, and National Guard struggled to prevent a crowd of demonstrators from bursting out of Grant Park onto Michigan Avenue and entering our hotel. The twin scents of marijuana and tear gas invaded the lobby and wafted up through our open window. It was August 28, 1968. Both demonstrators and police were exhausted and very angry. When a demonstrator tore down an American flag, furious police, who had been holding back for days, finally broke under the stress.

  I’m still haunted by the crisp rat-a-tat sound, like galloping horses’ hooves striking pavement, horses that did not slow down, horses that kept coming without a pause. This was the sound of police clubs hitting demonstrators’ heads. A sound rising up twenty-six floors and spilling into Americans’ living rooms through their television sets on the nightly news.

  Humphrey turned pale. No one could have plumbed the depth of dismay that showed in his face. He looked heartbroken at what was happening to those young people. And he must have known the scenes of violence would be played and replayed, over and over, on national television. I think he intuited that what was happening below—what he was helpless to prevent—had already doomed his candidacy.

  I asked myself, How did we ever get to this place?

  Antiwar activity had begun in earnest with passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, 1964, which President Johnson took as a blank check to use military force in Southeast Asia, and the subsequent deployment to South Vietnam of major American ground, air, and naval forces in the first months of 1965. With Johnson’s speech at Johns Hopkins in the spring of 1965 announcing that we would make a stand in Vietnam, the antiwar movement gathered strength.

  The early protests were dominated by peaceful idealists making speeches, marching, or kneeling to pray at the White House, Congress, and draft centers around the country. They sang “We Shall Overcome” or “Give Peace a Chance.” Sometimes they picketed sites where Humphrey was speaking. My only worry about them was that a violent person might hide in their midst, using them for cover.

  Churches and clergy were divided. Conservatives such as Baptists and Mormons generally supported the war; they saw the United States helping a weaker ally repel an invasion. Liberals such as Unitarians and some mainline Protestant leaders opposed it; they thought we were intervening in a civil war that had nothing to do with us and that was killing innocent civilians. Catholics were split: because South Vietnam was heavily Catholic and Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, America’s Cardinal Spellman described Vietnam as a “war for civilization” and “Christ’s war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.” But Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, as well as Pax Christi, were pacifists. For the first time Pope John XXIII decreed that pacifism was a Christian stance but also that “just war” in self-defense was permitted. (He did not say Vietnam was a just war.) Yale’s William Sloan Coffin and other college chaplains, along with many black clergy including Martin Luther King Jr., opposed it. Muslims refused to serve. To punish heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (renamed Muhammad Ali) for resisting the draft, the Boxing Commission stripped him of his title.

  Young men over age eighteen were vulnerable to be drafted, and college campuses became centers of resistance. Some counseling focused on how to postpone or avoid the draft legally: by entering certain exempt careers (such as teaching special education) or by attending a religious seminary. Conscientious objector status was limited to Quakers, Mennonites, and a few others, and then only to longtime members. In some states joining the National Guard was safer than gambling on the draft lottery. Some young people chose imprisonment for refusing to serve. Others spoke with their feet: they fled to Canada or Mexico.

  In the years preceding 1968, prominent baby doctor Benjamin Spock and celebrities such as Joan Baez and Jane Fonda were actively encouraging draft-age youth to resist.[33] Civil disobedience became progressively more provocative: blocking traffic, burning draft cards, invading draft centers and pouring blood on records, burning flags, heckling or harassing anyone in uniform, calling policemen “pigs.” Protesters chanted in front of the White House: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Some carried the flags of the Vietcong.

  Pol
ice and students, nuns and military leaders—all thought they were the ones who were right. And righteous. Many behaved much worse than they ordinarily would have because they were part of a crowd and because they were convinced that the people on the other side of the barricade were evil. The biblical command to “love your enemies”[34] seemed to have vanished from American consciousness—and mine. Though by now I thought of myself as a committed Christian, I stashed the part about enemies into a separate compartment.

  As opposition to the war grew and Vice President Humphrey carried more water for Johnson, we agents were increasingly thrown into the teeth of demonstrators. In every city Humphrey visited, back-to-back, day after day, it never let up. The most active area was the Upper Northwest: Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.

  Protesters came up with clever ways to make the police look bad. Agent Tom Wells recalls trying to leave an airport in a car with Humphrey and being blocked by people in wheelchairs. Police in the lead car had to move them out of the road. Cameras rolled, of course.

  Not every agent supported the war, but as fellow law enforcement officers we all sympathized with the police. For one thing, we needed their help—and always got it. Initially some police chiefs were naive about demonstrators. Hal Thomas had a formal-looking folder, which he solemnly placed on the desk of police chiefs the first time they met.[35] On the cover it said, “Introducing . . .” and inside was Hal’s card and the words, “The smart a— from Washington who knows it all.” Everyone would laugh, and any defensiveness vanished. A little mood lightening was needed. When we showed up, officers had to work twelve-hour shifts, give up their days off, and even be called back from vacation. We owed them some loyalty.