In the Secret Service

by Jerry Parr

  I began as “acting” SAIC on July 1; the promotion was official August 26, 1979. But my work with President Carter actually began before both dates.

  From June 14 to June 18 I accompanied the president to Vienna, where he participated in the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT II) negotiations with Leonid Brezhnev.[67] They reached agreement and signed the treaty on June 18. Although it was never ratified by the US Senate—at least partly because in December the Soviets invaded Afghanistan—both sides honored the treaty until Reagan withdrew, accusing the Soviets of violations.

  While I was still in acting SAIC status, President Carter decided to cruise down the upper Mississippi River on the Delta Queen, an American stern-wheel steamboat that is a national historic monument.[68] Built in 1927, it is 285 feet long, 58 feet wide, and draws 11.5 feet. It can carry 176 passengers. Carter’s route would take him from St. Paul, Minnesota, to St. Louis, Missouri, a distance of about fifteen hundred miles. He would stop along the route to meet and greet folks from Middle America.

  The logistics required were enough to give me a second hernia. I thought perhaps the tour with Emperor Hirohito had been a practice run for this. Sometimes God’s gifts are only recognized in looking back.

  Since Carter was the first protectee in the twentieth century to take a riverboat cruise, the security planning was unprecedented. Between St. Paul and St. Louis lay the towns of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin; Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington, Iowa; Hannibal, Missouri (birthplace of Mark Twain); and numerous others. The Mississippi runs downhill. Beyond St. Louis the country is flat, but the president’s chosen route took the Delta Queen through twenty-six locks and dams. In each we would be temporarily immobilized and helpless.

  What we had was a nineteenth-century conveyance with a twentieth-century president aboard, moving seven miles an hour down a river with banks within shooting distance on both sides. This chicken gizzard was impossible to chew! We had to cover both sides of the river: three thousand miles of shoreline. We put human beings on every bridge. We advanced each stop and each lock. Two countersniper teams rode on board, continuously scanning the banks through binoculars for potential danger.

  As commander in chief, the president required instant capacity to leave in case of an attack or nuclear war. This meant we had to be accompanied by a Coast Guard river ship big enough to carry a presidential helicopter.

  During the daytime a second helicopter circled above us for surveillance ahead and behind. Following along the shoreline would be a skeletal motorcade: an armored car, a backup vehicle, and an SUV to carry agents and critical staff in case at any point we had to abort the cruise.

  All the way, day and night, we needed fast watercraft escorts for two purposes: to prevent other boats from approaching and to outrun an aggressor in case of attack. A lot of Coast Guard auxiliary members volunteered. But after the first night—when they realized this was going to be a 24-7 operation—they peeled off and left it to the Coast Guard regulars.

  Everyone—police, Coast Guard, Secret Service, helicopter pilots—had to be connected by a radio matrix set up and monitored by the White House Communications Agency.

  Steve Garmon and I shared supervision for the whole spectacle. From the time we started on August 17 until we disembarked on August 24, I never got more than four hours’ sleep a night.

  We constantly made creative adjustments. Often President Carter left the boat to run. We radioed ahead for the location of a high school track. He really could run: at Burlington, Iowa, he ran four miles flat in twenty-eight minutes—four seven-minute miles—at the age of nearly fifty-five! He liked to compete with the younger agents I assigned to run with him: Larry Cunningham, Jack Smith, and Doug Laird. He loved the challenge. Once he asked me, “Jerry, why don’t you run with me?”

  “Mr. President,” I said, “I only have so many heartbeats, and I don’t want to waste any.” I wasn’t about to let him prove he could outrun me!

  One night on the river a huge thunderstorm engulfed us. Lightning struck all around, and the radar went white with hail and rain. Carter, a former naval officer, went up and stood in the pilot’s cabin. Our pilot was the best riverboat man on the Mississippi, brought out of retirement for this assignment. He seemed a little worried. He said, “I don’t want this wind to get behind us.”

  An eighty-mile-an-hour wind buffeted the ship; I thought the glass was going to break. I told the president, “We ought to get downstairs. This is really getting serious.”

  “I’ll just stay for a few more minutes,” he said. And he did. More accurately, we did.

  The captain said, “If that wind gets off to the side, we’ll be pushed around. I don’t want it to push us back toward a lock.” The smaller escort boats were already being blown all over the river, calling, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” With a lot of effort they managed to get to shore and tie off.

  We couldn’t do that—the wind could have broken the ship, pounding us against whatever we were tied to. Instead, the captain drove that riverboat right into the bank, headfirst! He kept the steam engine at full blast and the paddle wheel going the whole time, positioning the curved bow on the bank so that it could slide off if necessary. When the wind passed, he just reversed the paddle wheel and backed off into the river. It was brilliant.

  Carter took a lot of chances. Once, impatient with the two minutes it took to lay down the gangplank, he climbed up on the ship’s rail and leaped from the boat to the dock. Had he slipped, he’d have fallen maybe thirty feet into the space between. And had he survived the fall, he could have been crushed by the movement of the ship.

  The trip was well publicized, and crowds gathered along the shore to watch the Delta Queen and its retinue pass by. One evening in the dark we could see that a large crowd had gathered. No event was planned there, but Carter ordered the boat to stop. Standing on the deck, he held a spotlight and shined it on himself while he spoke to the crowd. I died a thousand deaths. The crowd was in the dark with only a handful of security people; the president of the United States was a lit target. There was absolutely no way any agent could have spotted an assassin with a weapon. I just prayed the first shot would miss and I’d be able to push the president down fast enough. God was good.

  When I first came to the PPD, the president; his wife, Rosalynn; and his young daughter, Amy, often went home to Plains.[69] It was a hot and humid little farming town where he and Rosalynn grew up. The president loved to walk in the freshly plowed fields. I enjoyed walking with him. The musky scent of rich, damp soil awakened my sleeping farmer genes.

  Carter would walk slowly, contemplatively, eyes downcast. One day I asked him why he always looked down. He said, “I’m looking for arrowheads. Our old plows dug twelve inches down and turned up many Cherokee relics. But the new plows have eighteen-inch blades. So older artifacts are showing up.” From time to time he actually found some.

  Carter took Jesus’ saying “Blessed are the peacemakers”[70] to heart. To that end, he had instituted a number of changes in US foreign policy, some before I came aboard and some after. He signed a controversial treaty returning the Panama Canal to Panama. He negotiated the arms limitation treaty with the Soviets. He established diplomatic ties with mainland China. And he organized and led the Camp David Accords.

  The international community admired these initiatives, but they were not always welcomed by the American public, especially conservatives.

  One day as Carter was delivering a White House briefing on SALT II, an invited guest stood up, approached the president, pulled out a glass container, and started dumping ashes on the carpet and all the furniture in arm’s reach. I was standing in the back of the room; other agents were near the president, but they seemed paralyzed. As the protester headed toward the president, I rushed to the front, firmly grasped the gentleman’s arm, and not so gently escorted him out. After the event was over, I gave the agents a little refresher course about why they were drawing a paycheck.

  In June 1980 we
went to Rome, Venice, Belgrade, and Lisbon and finished up in Madrid. The king of Spain shook hands with President Carter and then greeted me with a big smile. He said, “Jerry! How are you doing?” The president was puzzled: how would I know the king? The answer was I had protected him at foreign digs when he was Prince Juan Carlos, and he remembered me. In fact, one day the White House phone at my home rang, and he was on the other end. “Hi, Jerry. This is Juan Carlos. I’m in town and just called to say hello.” If Juan Carlos had been a regular guy instead of a king, I think we’d have been good friends.

  Despite the president’s other foreign policy successes, on November 4, 1979, the framework for peace he was trying to build fell apart. Two weeks after the United States admitted the exiled and dying shah of Iran for cancer treatments in late October, militant Iranian students stormed our embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six United States citizens hostage.[71]

  This was a gross violation of international diplomatic protocol, which recognizes foreign embassies as the inviolable territory of another country. Henry Kissinger once said that diplomacy is the art of restraining power. A country can withdraw diplomatic relations, close its embassy, and leave, or it can declare an individual diplomat “persona non grata” (an unwelcome person) and send him or her home. But invading another country’s embassy and capturing its citizens is almost tantamount to an act of war.

  In spite of universal international condemnation, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, praised the students’ action. After a few days he did release thirteen hostages: five white women and eight African American men. One other hostage was released much later, suffering from MS. The remaining fifty-two prisoners were held 444 days.

  The hostage takers demanded we return the shah for trial in Iran, plus give them billions of dollars they claimed he had stolen. The money was negotiable, but turning over a dying man who trusted us was not.

  Historian Gaddis Smith said of the hostage taking that from its beginning “the crisis absorbed more concentrated effort by American officials and had more extensive coverage on television and in the press than any other event since World War II.”[72] It certainly absorbed President Carter. As a compassionate man and a peacemaker, he seemed torn about the right course of action.

  Carter declared he would not go home to Plains until the hostages could come home. So he and Mrs. Carter and their daughter, Amy, celebrated Christmas at Camp David in 1979. The president invited three men to bring their families: his helicopter pilot, his personal physician, and me.

  Carolyn, Kim, Jennifer, and Trish arrived by car on Christmas Eve. They were greeted with Christmas cookies, hot chocolate, and a warm fire in the Aspen lodge. Each family had a comfortably furnished, fully equipped log cabin to themselves. While I was on duty, Carolyn and the kids walked the forest paths in the crisp, cold air and drank in the star-filled night sky. We shared a traditional family-style Christmas dinner with the Carters in Aspen. Eleven-year-old Amy was so excited about her Christmas roller skates she wore them to the table. I appreciated the president’s thoughtfulness in providing this opportunity to spend Christmas with my family in such a lovely setting.

  Two days after Christmas the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. On January 20, 1980, Carter announced that the United States would boycott the summer Olympic Games in Moscow if the USSR did not withdraw. They didn’t, and we did. We also stopped selling the Soviets our wheat, an act that hurt US farmers.

  None of Carter’s diplomatic attempts to get the hostages freed had any effect. Not unanimous international condemnation nor a freeze on Iranian assets nor expelling Iranian diplomats from the United States.

  Not even secret, backdoor negotiations helped. For a few days in February things looked hopeful when the newly elected president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, said he believed the hostage crisis could be solved quickly. He ordered the militants to turn over the hostages to the Revolutionary Council that he headed. They refused. He called them “dictators who have created a government within a government.” But Khomeini supported the kidnappers, and the stalemate continued.

  While President Carter sometimes took chances with his personal safety, he never wanted to risk harming others. But in desperation he approved a highly dangerous secret commando mission to free the hostages by force. In the predawn darkness of April 25, 1980, eight helicopters rendezvoused in the desert. A fierce sandstorm struck, forcing three choppers to return to their ship. Since at least six helicopters would be required to carry everyone out, and only five remained, the mission was aborted.

  Then things got even worse. Preparing to leave the desert, but before taking off, eight men were killed and at least one survivor was horribly burned when a helicopter collided with a C-130 support aircraft in a refueling area at the site.[73]

  The United States was humiliated. With the element of surprise now blown, another rescue attempt would be impossible. The militants immediately dispersed the hostages to different parts of Tehran.

  After that, Carter almost never smiled. I saw him losing weight. His grief for the hostages was now magnified by losing the rescuers. And, I imagined, he grieved for his own helplessness. A week after the failed rescue, he said, “Jerry, I want to fly to Texas. Keep this as quiet as you can. I don’t want any publicity.”

  The president and I flew to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where I had done my basic training thirty years before. No press knew of the trip. Our destination was Brooke Army Medical Center, where a surviving pilot was being treated for severe burns.[74]

  As we walked into the hospital, I flashed back to Clark Air Force Base in Manila with Humphrey thirteen years before, where I’d witnessed firsthand the horrors of war. But this was my first time with burn victims; the Vietnam burns were sent to Japan.

  At the burn center, a doctor led us to a huge window through which we could see a large room with several beds. Since this was peacetime, only one was filled. The lone patient was swathed from head to toe in bandages. Only his eyes, mouth, and nostrils were exposed. A nurse attended him. The only sound was the hiss of oxygen tanks and the musical ping, ping of machines connected to tubes that ran into different parts of the patient’s body.

  “He’s conscious,” the doctor said, “but we don’t expect him to live.”

  President Carter said, “I’d like to go in and speak to him. May I?”

  The doctor hesitated. He was, after all, in the US Army—and his commander in chief stood before him. But he wanted to protect his patient. After an awkward minute he explained his dilemma. “He’s totally vulnerable to infection. We have to maintain a sterile field. If you go in, you’ll have to dress in surgical greens and cover your nose and mouth.”

  Carter readily agreed. We both changed our clothes, covered our hair and shoes, and put on facial masks. But then Carter looked at me, and I thought, He wants to go by himself. He wants private time with a man he sent into a situation that may have killed him or ruined his future.

  I recalled Jesus’ words: “All who humble themselves will be exalted,” and I thought, This president is humbling himself. That takes a different kind of courage.

  The patient was physically vulnerable, but the president was making himself emotionally vulnerable. I said, “Mr. President, I don’t have to go in. I’ll just watch through the window.”

  Carter entered and stood beside the soldier’s bed. Like the patient, only the president’s eyes were visible. He said something, and the soldier turned his head very slowly toward the sound of the voice. Then this man, wrapped from head to toe in bandages and in unspeakable pain, raised one hand and saluted! Carter returned the salute.

  Watching through the window, gratitude filled my heart and spilled down my cheeks. I knew I was witnessing a supreme act of compassion, a holy moment born of mutual pain and forgiveness.

  When the president came out, neither of us said a word. There are times when silence is more profound than words could ever be.

  The soldier lived.

  The hos
tage crisis dominated the president’s thoughts. It also dominated the consciousness of the press and public. But Americans were enduring serious economic and other domestic problems as well. During the Carter years, home mortgage rates climbed above 15 percent; the prime rate hit 21 percent. Consumer prices rose 18 percent in one year. Draft registration—which had ended after Vietnam—resumed. Gasoline prices skyrocketed in the face of an OPEC cartel, and long lines formed at the pumps. Four out of ten Americans stopped buying large American cars, and Japan led the auto industry.

  The shah of Iran died in Egypt on July 27. But still the hostages did not come home.

  Nineteen eighty found me once again in the midst of a presidential election. Ted Kennedy mounted a challenge, but President Carter (and Mondale) won easy renomination at the Democratic Convention in August. In a hard-fought contest, Ronald Reagan defeated Tennessee’s Howard Baker, John Connally of Texas, Bob Dole, and George H. W. Bush for the GOP nomination. Reagan chose Bush as his running mate, and Baker later became his chief of staff.

  After that, Carter’s travel got a little crazy as he campaigned across the United States. We were in the air so much that I forgot my own birthday until the president’s staff and flight crew emerged midflight from the galley with a birthday cake. On September 16, 1980, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday on Air Force One.

  We hit about sixty towns in September and October, ranging from huge cities like New York to small towns like Beaumont, Texas, and Bristol, Tennessee. In the first four days of November, we shot through eight more, including Springfield, Portland, and Seattle.

  One night on the campaign trail in New Orleans, I got a report that a couple of guys were seen with guns. I told the president, “You can’t work this rope line.” He agreed, but as soon as we got to the speech site at the end of the rope line, he got out of the car, jumped up on the trunk, and then stood up on the roof of the car. I learned to pray with my eyes open.

  Sometimes we had to improvise as we went along. One hot day in Kentucky, the president again was on top of a car. I sat up there with him, my left hand holding him by the back of his belt, my right hand free if I had to shoot. An agent inside the car opened a door to push back the crowd lining the street, and I steadied myself by jamming my foot into the crevice between the open door and the car frame. This technique was not in any training manual.