by Jerry Parr
Another bond we shared with police was our ages. Most of us grew up during World War II. We’d been taught to respect the president and the military—and police officers. Who did these kids think they were, giving the finger to authority figures? When our country needed us, we had been ready to serve. It was hard for us to understand these angry, flag-burning kids with long hair.
Long hair. That was the feature that most clearly distinguished protestors from guys like me. Long hair symbolized rebellion, antiwar protests, drugs, sex. It was also a class symbol. Cops didn’t have it. Military guys didn’t have it. Union members didn’t have it. College students had it. Agents were college graduates, but most of us were first-generation graduates. We grew up working class and went to school on scholarships or the GI Bill. We respected working-class people and their values.
I remember a bumper sticker that made me smile: “Next time you get mugged, call a hippie.”
I developed a visceral reaction to guys with long hair.
Humphrey’s traditional supporters had been labor, blacks, liberals, and youth. Labor stuck with Humphrey, but the Watts riots in 1965 and those that followed in several urban areas had destroyed the positive racial alliances that prevailed in the early 1960s. Humphrey had been a college professor, and he loved young people. Until the war they had loved him back. Hoping to regain their support, during his tenure the vice president visited seventy-six colleges and universities. It was a quixotic effort. Humphrey was heckled in all but the military academies and two church-related schools: Baptist Wake Forest College, in North Carolina, and Mormon Brigham Young University, in Utah.
As more American soldiers rendezvoused with death in the jungle, protests at home became fiercer. Agents’ advances grew more critical and tense. Berkeley and Harvard were two of the worst places. Those folks were not holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” To try to predict what a crowd might be planning, young-looking agents infiltrated student planning meetings and fed us information. At each school we met with the head of campus security, faculty leaders, and the dean to try to take the temperature of the campus. And we coordinated with local police, the FBI (to learn if any of the leaders had a record), and our own Intelligence Division.
In Oakland, California, word came to us that a woman was planning to lay her baby in front of Humphrey’s car to force us to stop. Her cohorts intended to rush us and turn the car over. This may have been nothing more than an inflated rumor, but as the lead advance agent I took it seriously. I came up with a strategy to thwart this and similar behavior.
Agent Hal Thomas used to say, “The secret is not to fight ’em but to fool ’em.” Using a dummy motorcade or some other subterfuge, we would sneak Humphrey in. Whenever we got close to a speech site, normally a hotel, demonstrators crowded together, waiting to rush us as we got out of the car. Armed with paint, urine, nail-studded foam balls—whatever they could think of—they posed a very real physical threat. We kept as much distance as possible, with police lined up to hold them at bay.
One of the tricks we devised to avoid the threatening crowd involved the vice president’s press corps, which traveled in four big Greyhound buses. Dennis Lacey, agent in charge of the press, sat in the lead bus with a radio. About a minute before our arrival, I would radio him: “Okay, make your move.”
The motorcade would move slightly to the right, and the press corps buses would drive up bumper to bumper, stopping right in front of the demonstrators waiting across the street from the site. We would pull in beside the buses, which blocked the crowd’s view and allowed us to rush Humphrey in.
When the crowd realized what was happening, their rage would increase. They would furiously attempt to rock the buses, which didn’t budge. Sometimes they broke windows. It was a pretty fine technique for getting Humphrey in and out safely. For some reason, the reporters on the bus were never amused.
Nineteen-sixty-eight was arguably the most turbulent year in American history, other than the years of the Civil War. It was certainly the worst year of my life as an agent, and every man I know who was in the Secret Service in 1968 will say it was the year from hell. Some guys left their families and didn’t come back home to stay for eight months.
As the year began, I found myself on advance in Nairobi, Kenya. Humphrey’s last foreign trip as vice president took us to thirteen cities in nine African countries. In Europe and everywhere we went, we were pummeled verbally and sometimes otherwise. In Kinshasa, Congo, a Peace Corps worker hurled a rock at Walt Coughlin.[36] The layers of irony were not lost on us.
Seventy thousand North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive on January 31, surprising the South Vietnamese and US forces. The offensive lasted several weeks and, although our side eventually prevailed, we paid a heavy price in American lives and public support. In a single week in February 543 Americans perished in the steamy jungles of Vietnam; 2,547 were wounded. Walter Cronkite, America’s most respected journalist, broke his neutrality on February 27 in a report from Vietnam, where he’d gone to see for himself the aftermath of Tet. He criticized American leaders for deceiving the public, predicted the war could not be won, and advocated negotiation “not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”[37]
Only one politician was willing to challenge the sitting president: Senator Eugene McCarthy. Toward the end of 1967 McCarthy announced he would enter primaries as an antiwar candidate. He did not think he could possibly win but just wanted to keep the issue before the public. On March 12 the New Hampshire primary shocked the political scene when McCarthy came within 230 votes of defeating President Johnson. McCarthy had little money and no campaign workers except students who had shaved and gotten haircuts to be “clean for Gene” so as not to scare off independents. The near loss in a primary for a sitting president’s reelection revealed Johnson’s surprising vulnerability. Less than a week later Senator Robert Kennedy entered the presidential race. McCarthy reportedly felt Kennedy had betrayed him and was furious.
Later that month, on March 31, President Johnson announced the United States would stop bombing 90 percent of North Vietnam, including all populated and food-producing areas. He urged Ho Chi Minh to join in peace talks. And he closed with these surprising words: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”[38]
For the rest of his term, except for trips to the ranch, Johnson basically stayed in the White House. It fell to Vice President Humphrey to speak for the president as well as for himself. And even more than in the busy prior years it fell on twenty-seven men to carry the travel and security burdens that the presidential detail, with many more resources, would normally have borne.
Walt Coughlin, our assistant SAIC, was riding in the right front seat of the vice president’s car headed to the Washington Hilton when he heard on his earpiece that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed.[39] He had to turn around and tell Humphrey the terrible news. Humphrey was distraught. All his life Humphrey had fought for equal rights for all, and Martin Luther King was a strong symbol of hope. It was April 4. A white man, James Earl Ray, had murdered the civil rights leader in Memphis. As Americans expressed their grief and rage, some sixty cities burst out in flames and riots. Among them were Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, and Washington, DC, where the vice president and his wife, Muriel, now lived on the Maine Avenue waterfront.
Along with the entire VPPD detail, my days off were canceled, and I went on emergency duty. For a couple of days no one was allowed into the city without identification and a very good reason to be there. Driving in from Maryland, where I lived, I was stopped at Chevy Chase Circle by the National Guard. I showed my commission book and was allowed to proceed. Forty-six deaths across the country were blamed on the riots.
Then a university campus erupted. Beginning April 23, angry students occupied five buildings at Columbia, including Hamilton Hall, where they kept the dean from
leaving his office. They also invaded President Grayson Kirk’s office. The siege lasted six days while faculty tried unsuccessfully to mediate issues involving race and war. Demands included an end to the university’s relationship with the Institute for Defense Analysis, for which Columbia did weapons research; prohibition of draft recruitment on campus; and cessation of plans to build a gym on land used by kids in Harlem but that would now offer limited access to them. Other students wiped out a construction fence at the gym site and struggled with the cops who tried to stop them. On the seventh day President Kirk called in New York City police. The police came on campus, beat demonstrators (as well as bystanders and faculty), and made more than seven hundred arrests. For all practical purposes, the anger that followed closed the university for the rest of the semester.[40]
While all this was happening, Humphrey announced his candidacy for president on April 27. He shot to the top as the leading Democratic contender, with Robert Kennedy a strong second and gaining.
The protest activities in the streets and on campuses flowed into every area of American life, including the arts. The resulting increase in public sympathy made our job harder. A prime example occurred in April 1968. Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical opened on Broadway and ran for 1,750 performances. Simultaneous productions in cities across the United States and Europe followed. A London production ran for 1,997 shows. The actors looked like the wild-eyed, long-haired folks we were meeting on the barricades. It painted them as harmless kids being victimized by brutal police.
Two months after the musical opened, on June 5, after winning the California Democratic primary, Senator Robert (Bobby) Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan. The motive was Kennedy’s support for Israel. Had Kennedy survived, that victory might have put him in the lead. He died the next day.
It fell to Walt Coughlin, who had passed the terrible word of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, to pass the word again. He and Hal Thomas were staying in guest quarters at the Air Force Academy, where Humphrey was to make a speech the next morning. At two o’clock in the morning Coughlin got the call. He and Thomas went together to wake up Humphrey. Thomas recalls, “When Coughlin told the vice president, he visibly aged ten years in front of us. He turned the color of ash.”
As Coughlin remembers, the next morning a general showed up to take the vice president to the speech site. Humphrey told him, “Robert Kennedy has been shot. I have to go back to Washington.”
The general misunderstood and said, “Oh, you can stay here and give your speech. You don’t have to be afraid.”
Humphrey recoiled in fury. “I’m not afraid of anything!” he spat. “You give the speech. I’m going back to Washington!” He immediately returned to DC and suspended his campaign for two weeks. Humphrey said, “I wanted to win, but I didn’t want to do it this way.”
Bobby Kennedy did not have Secret Service protection. That was rectified overnight. Now we had agents on every candidate, including Senator McCarthy; “Dixiecrat” Governor George Wallace of Alabama; and Republican contenders Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, and Harold Stassen. In 1968 the Secret Service had a total of only 575 agents to cover physical protection and advances for all these candidates, plus counterfeiting, forged checks, and threats throughout the country. It was impossible.
All the murder and mayhem and hatred loosed in the country spewed onto the Secret Service. It had to. Death was in the air we breathed.
Not only the vice presidential detail but all agents in the country were lacerated by the anger and hostility and disorder we saw on the nightly news. We felt it in our guts as well as in our heads. This was only five years after John F. Kennedy’s death, and we were still shaken from that. We were still not healed. And in 1968 we had to work till we dropped. It was like a war.
What I remember most are the eyes of the demonstrators glistening with hatred and rage at us, the police, and the political leaders we were trying to protect. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was my colleagues and me they were calling “pigs.” Down deep I began to hate them and secretly hoped they’d attack us physically so we could respond with nightsticks and fists.
I know now I’d have been sorry the rest of my life if I’d really hurt someone.
Though I secretly fantasized revenge, Agent Don Bendickson actually got it.[41] An incident happened not on the West Coast but at the Illinois state fair in the summer of 1968. Hal Thomas was running along the right side of the vice president’s car, and Don Bendickson was jogging on the left. The crowd lining the street seemed friendly, and the car was moving slowly so Humphrey could wave and be seen. Suddenly a man from the crowd leaned forward and put something in Bendickson’s hand. Don looked down to discover a handful of human dung. The car was already a block past the perpetrator, but Don heaved it at a long-haired guy in that direction. Then, shouting, “Get back!” he wiped his hand on the T-shirts of hippies crowding in beside the car as it passed.
The Republicans nominated Richard Nixon and Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew in an uneventful convention in Miami. As street violence grew, Democrats considered moving their convention site from Chicago to Miami also. A meeting on Key Biscayne could have been easily isolated by a checkpoint on the Rickenbacker Causeway, the only way to enter or leave the key other than by boat. But President Johnson didn’t want to offend Mayor Richard Daley, who swore to maintain law and order. Daley was a powerhouse in the Democratic Party, and Humphrey would need Illinois votes. So the Democrats stayed in Chicago.
We flew in on Sunday, August 25. Along with Senator McCarthy, the vice president, and their entourages, we stayed at the Conrad Hilton, the favorite hotel of Democratic bigwigs when they came to town. The Hilton entrance was on Michigan Avenue, facing Grant Park.
A story Walt Coughlin tells illustrates Mayor Daley’s power:[42] The day before Humphrey arrived, Coughlin met with the mayor’s can-do guy, Colonel Riley, a man in his seventies who wore an eye patch. Coughlin noticed that all hotel exits led to the street where crowds were gathering. He said, half to himself, “It would be a lot easier to get him in and out through the alley, but there’s no hotel door there.” The next day, there was a door to the alley.
The weather was near perfect: highs in the low seventies, lows in the fifties. Though protests started building in Lincoln Park before we arrived, police seemed to have the situation under control. But by Wednesday, August 28, chaos reigned, both inside and outside the convention. Crowds trying to get to the convention site had been forced back and were filling an already-crammed Grant Park. Humphrey wanted to go down into the park to speak to the crowd, but SAIC Glenn Weaver wouldn’t let him.
Coughlin did go into the park. The crowd was unarmed except for rocks and sticks, and perhaps the majority were nonviolent. But many members were clearly trying to provoke police. Some carried North Vietnam flags. Walt saw a young woman walk up to a policeman, take a puff from her boyfriend’s joint, and blow marijuana smoke in the officer’s face. Then she spat on him.
The air was filled with the acrid smell of tear gas thrown by police and stink bombs thrown by the crowd. When word came from the convention hall that the peace plank had been defeated, a demonstrator tore down the American flag and replaced it with a bloody shirt. That act seemed to be the match that lit the tinder. Police charged into the crowd, swinging billy clubs. By then, the fifth day of demonstrations, they didn’t care who they hit. A cacophony of screams and grunts and epithets rose twenty-six floors to the open windows where the vice president and I stood and watched.
A few floors below us was Senator McCarthy’s headquarters. In McCarthy’s absence the “clean for Gene” kids tried to help the demonstrators. They threw ashtrays, lamps, and trash baskets on the cops below. I saw a policeman look up to the source of the improvised weapons. I saw his lips move and realized he was counting floors. Then he and his brother cops rushed up sixteen flights of stairs to McCarthy’s suite—and beat everyone in there, guilty or not.
As Humphrey
and I watched the melee below, all he could say was, “Oh my. Oh my. Oh my.” His eyes welled with tears. Both of us stood rooted to the spot, looking out, horrified and helpless. I flashed back to the scene in India of police beating the fence climbers, and suddenly I understood the Indian police better. A secret part of me felt the satisfaction of revenge. The police officers’ anger had invaded me, too. What I most deeply wanted at that moment was to be home, holding my girls and knowing Carolyn would understand my conflicted emotions, even the ugly ones.
The head knocking below went on and on—seventeen minutes according to some reports—until most of the demonstrators had fled or had been arrested and thrown into paddy wagons. Walt Coughlin saw people pushed through the plate glass windows of hotel shops on the Michigan Avenue sidewalk. Bloody McCarthy workers and young people injured in the street staggered into the Hilton lobby and huddled together, weeping and hugging one another. As dusk fell, exhausted police were replaced with National Guard troops. By midnight the fury on both sides was spent.
Around two o’clock in the morning we deemed it safe enough for Humphrey to speak to the injured young people, who once had followed him. He would be the Democratic nominee—but his candidacy was mortally wounded.
Miraculously, no one died. Numbers are not exact, but according to the South Loop Historical Society, the police department reported 192 officers injured. The Medical Committee for Human Rights estimated medics treated more than 1,000 demonstrators in the streets. Hospitals reported 111 demonstrators and 49 police officers went to emergency rooms. Approximately 668 protesters were arrested.[43]
I’d seen a lot of demonstrations in the previous four years, but nothing approached the violence in Grant Park. The police overreacted, but I understood. I did. Just as love is contagious, so is hatred. I knew in my heart I could have done what they did in a moment of exhaustion and rage. The thought made me tremble.
Blessedly, the violence on August 28 and 29 seemed to be a catharsis. A boil had been lanced. Never again were we confronted with the hostility and anger that had dogged us earlier. In September Humphrey called for a Vietnam cease-fire, and McCarthy endorsed him. On October 31 President Johnson brought the bombing to a complete halt. But it was too little, too late to save Humphrey against Nixon’s law-and-order platform.