Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President

by Dan Emmett

  My father and mother were born in 1919 and 1920, respectively, and were products of the Great Depression. Both had grown up in families with little money, but through hard work and good financial planning, they accomplished amazing things together in their fifty-nine years of marriage. That partnership ended only after Dad passed away in 1999, with Mother following him in 2013.

  My father was a very serious, self-made man who never really had a childhood. The son of a cotton mill worker who was also a Baptist minister, Dad was forced to drop out of high school at the age of sixteen in order to help support his family of two brothers and four sisters by working in the mill.

  Partial to dark suits with white shirts and dark, thin ties, he greatly resembled former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, complete with wire-rimmed glasses and swept-back dark hair. A World War II veteran of the Pacific theater of operations, he was extremely patriotic and was an active member of both the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Dad loved God first, his family second, and baseball third, although the order could vary at times depending on what teams were in the World Series.

  After marrying my mother in 1940, Dad discovered, largely as the result of her promptings, that he possessed a talent for business, and he escaped his dead-end career as a millworker by becoming a furniture salesman. In 1950, Dad started his own furniture business, appropriately named Emmett Furniture Company, which he owned for over sixteen years prior to moving on to other successful business ventures.

  My mother was the quintessential mom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Always perfectly attired, she vacuumed and cleaned our immaculate home while dressed somewhat like June Cleaver. In spite of her hectic schedule, she always had dinner on the table each evening promptly at six o’clock when my father arrived home from work.

  As a child, I spent a lot of time at Dad’s furniture store—“the store,” as we referred to it. Most days during the school year, Dad dispatched one of his two deliverymen, Robert or Reeves, to pick me up from school and transport me to the store, where I would do homework, play in the large area of the rug department, or watch the newest Philco black-and-white TVs until it was time to go home. I remember one of the best parts of being at the store was the drink machine, which, for a dime, provided to me by Dad from the cash drawer, would produce the coldest Cokes and 7Ups in the world in wonderful glass bottles.

  The old building that housed Emmett Furniture was built in the 1920s and smelled of new furniture and fresh floor wax. There were always a lot of interesting people coming and going, including policemen, local politicians, businessmen, and just about anyone you could think of. Dad was a friend of Congressman Phil Landrum from our Ninth Congressional District, and one day as I sat watching cartoons, he appeared. This was during the early 1960s. Unlike today, constituents generally held congressmen in high esteem, and I recall feeling very special as this important man sat and talked with me for a few minutes.

  Other days one of Dad’s deliverymen would drop me off after school at the public library, where my mother worked part-time. There I would do homework and immerse myself in books about World War II or anything else I could find related to the military or guns. Considered cute at the time, I was fussed over by Mom’s coworkers, who loved to give me dinner-spoiling treats and seemed to delight in patting me on my blond crew-cut head.

  I attended Enota Elementary School within the Gainesville, Georgia, city school system. The quality education found within this system has over the years produced two astronauts and many doctors, lawyers, and engineers, as well as a couple of Secret Service agents. It was a time in America when, due to lack of government interference, many public schools provided a quality education found only today in private schools. Corporal punishment was still alive and well within the public schools, and disciplinary transgressions were met with a ruler impacting the palm of the hand or the principal’s pledge paddle across the backside.

  Each day we diligently studied reading, writing, arithmetic, and American history as it actually occurred, with no one lecturing, for example, that Pearl Harbor was the fault of the United States. The Supreme Court had yet to order religion removed from public schools, so we recited the Lord’s Prayer during morning devotional, along with Bible verses and the Pledge of Allegiance. No one refused to join in any of these activities, and there were no complaints from any parent about the curriculum of hard academics, God, and patriotism.

  At recess, we cultivated healthy competitive spirit by playing a variety of violent and sometimes injury-causing games, including tackle football with no pads and dodge ball, now banned in many schools. While almost everyone received a bloody nose and got scraped up from time to time, not everyone received trophies for every sporting activity. Those who lost in dodge ball or other sports did not seem to suffer permanent physical injury from the bloody noses or a lack of self-esteem.

  Political correctness and a phobia of anything gun-related had yet to seize the country, and I recall one very interesting show-and-tell day in the sixth grade. One of my classmates brought to school a fully automatic .30-caliber M2 carbine provided to him by his father, a police captain. The captain had procured the weapon from the armory of the Gainesville Police Department for his son’s show-and-tell. The school was not put on lockdown, and everyone, including the teacher, enjoyed the presentation on the history and functioning of the weapon. At the end of the day many pedestrians and people in vehicles watched unconcerned as my eleven-year-old friend walked across the school grounds with his carbine slung over his shoulder on his way home.

  In addition to the challenging academic curriculum, we also trained for the likelihood of nuclear war.

  During the early 1960s, especially after the Cuban missile crisis, everyone, including the school systems of America, was concerned about a seemingly inevitable thermonuclear war with Russia. Unlike many schools in the early 1960s, my grammar school did not practice the insane act of “duck and cover,” which had students hiding from thermonuclear destruction under their desks. Desks provided no more cover from a nuclear explosion than they would a falling light fixture. Instead we practiced evacuation drills.

  The idea was that if we were all to be vaporized, maybe some of us could at least make it home and die with our families or in our own homes and yards. Traveling the great circle route, it would take an ICBM about twenty minutes to travel from the Soviet Union to its designated detonation area over the United States. That at least gave us some time. Better to be on the move and die rather than huddled like rats under a desk. I vividly recall that on at least one occasion, upon the given signal, all students formed up into groups and walked home. It was a useless exercise but a lot more exciting than duck and cover, and we got most of the day off from school.

  Guns played a large role in my upbringing, and I always seemed to have an affinity for understanding their function as well as a natural talent for using them. My father advised me very early in life to “never point a gun at anything you do not intend to shoot.” Later the marines would modify that lesson to “never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to kill or destroy.” At the age of eight, with my Daisy BB gun in hand, I roamed our neighborhood with other gunslingers for hours on end. We tested our skills by pushing our Daisys’ maximum effective range to their utmost limits. It was not unusual to see a group of boys walking down the street in our neighborhood with their BB guns, and on some days we sported actual firearms, usually .22 rifles. Other than the bird population being thinned a bit, no damage was done as a result of our possessing these weapons, and no one shot out an eye. It was during this time that I learned about adjusting sights for windage and elevation, as well as the basic fundamentals of shooting. By the time I entered the Marine Corps some years later, I was already self-trained to the point that firing expertly with the M16 rifle and M1911 pistol came easily.

  Many of my relatives were military veterans from World War II or Korea. Dad’s World War II service had included helping to liberate
the Philippines from the Japanese. Like many World War II veterans, he spoke little of his military exploits, but when he did, I listened, completely fascinated. Uncle Olan had been an army tank platoon commander who was captured by Rommel’s forces in North Africa, and he spent the remainder of the war confined to a POW camp in Eastern Germany. The Germans were brutal hosts, and he nearly froze and starved to death on several occasions, emerging from captivity a broken man. He received a medical discharge. Uncles Fletcher and Bud had served in the European theater of operations and barely survived the experience. As far as the new generation, one of my cousins had just received his commission in the air force and would one day fly missions over Hanoi in an F-4E Phantom. His brother became a naval officer on board a nuclear attack submarine while another cousin was living in Germany, married to an army infantry officer.

  Due to the constant exposure of being around military veterans, combined with a sense of adventure and patriotism that seemed built-in at birth, I always felt it was my duty, my destiny, in fact, to serve America, as had my father, cousins, and uncles. It was simply assumed by most of my relatives that, when my time came, I, too, would contribute. At the time, my future contribution was naturally assumed to be military service, and one day that would come to pass—I became a Marine Corps officer. But my contribution also turned out to include a great deal more.

  A DEFINING MOMENT

  On Friday, November 22, 1963, I had just emerged from school looking very Opie Taylor–like after another brutal week of third grade. I was walking down the sidewalk when someone said that President Kennedy had been shot and was dead. I was puzzled but discounted it as a hoax, as such a thing could not possibly happen.

  On that day, Robert, one of Dad’s deliverymen, was designated to pick me up from school and deliver me to the store for another afternoon of homework and playtime. I approached the green pickup truck with “Emmett Furniture” on the side and climbed up into the cab, laboring under the weight of my books, which I carried in an official military haversack. Inside the truck, I found Robert wearing, as usual, his aviator sunglasses and smoking his usual Phillies cheroot.

  Normally reserved in a confident way, today Robert’s demeanor was different. He was obviously disturbed about something. “What’s wrong, Robert?” I asked. With some degree of difficulty, he answered, “President Kennedy has been assassinated.” I was not familiar with the word assassinated and asked for further explanation, which he provided. So it was true: President Kennedy was dead. Not only had the world just changed, but without my realizing it, so, too, had my future.

  Robert drove the 1962 Ford pickup to the store, a five-minute trip. We rode in silence, listening to the news on WDUN-AM radio. Upon arriving, I joined many of Dad’s customers gathered around the three or four televisions in the TV department and watched Walter Cronkite go over what details were known about the assassination, which had occurred in Dallas, Texas.

  Oblivious of my presence, Dad’s customers talked about possible Russian or Cuban involvement. They probably did not think such a young boy could comprehend any of it. The mention of Russians concerned me, as I remembered the year before, when America and the world came to the brink of nuclear annihilation during the Cuban missile crisis, prompting our school evacuation drills. If the Russians had killed our president, there would certainly be war, according to those gathered around the television sets.

  Over the weekend I watched live TV as Kennedy’s coffin arrived at Andrews Air Force Base (AAFB) in Maryland. It was a place I would come to know intimately twenty-seven years later. I recall seeing the president’s blood still on the First Lady’s legs and dress. I also recall with great clarity Lyndon B. Johnson’s first address to the nation and how I did not like him, as he was completely different from John F. Kennedy, whom I liked a great deal.

  Later, on Sunday, November 24, my family and I watched as the accused presidential assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was gunned down in Dallas police headquarters, also on live television. Having yet to learn about the concepts of due process and guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, I remember feeling that justice had been done now that the man everyone seemed to believe had killed the president was also dead.

  Up until that point in the weekend, I—along with everyone else in America—was in shock over the assassination, attempting to grasp the fact that John Kennedy was no longer the president of the United States. Since I had no memory of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, it seemed Kennedy had been president my entire life. Now he was gone. As depressing as the entire situation was, a moment was about to occur that would ultimately change my life forever.

  Somewhere during the confusing and emotional events of that weekend, I viewed a photo made moments after the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head. The photo depicted Secret Service agent Clint Hill on the back of the presidential limousine attempting to protect Mrs. Kennedy and the president by shielding them with his own body. I asked my father who the man was and why he was on the president’s car. My father explained that the man was a Secret Service agent and that he was trying to protect the president by blocking the assassin’s bullets. He explained that it was his job to take the bullet meant for the president. I remember not quite comprehending the concept that a man’s job was to place himself in front of a bullet meant for the president. While I knew nothing much about anything at the age of eight, I knew enough to know that being a Secret Service agent sounded incredibly important and dangerous.

  This dramatic image, which personified not only Agent Hill’s unquestionable courage and devotion to duty but also the importance of the Secret Service as an organization, was without doubt the chief factor in my decision to become a Secret Service agent. Children are indeed impressionable.

  CHAPTER 2

  College, the Marine Corps, and Ronald Reagan

  As the years passed, so did many career ambitions, everything from astronaut to surgeon. In the end, however, two always returned. In addition to one day pursuing a career in the Secret Service, I had to no one’s surprise set the intermediate goal of becoming a commissioned officer in the US military. I viewed the military not only as my patriotic duty but also as a place where I could exercise my spirit of adventure.

  I had been an extremely adventurous child, prone to risk taking, and I liked things that were just dangerous enough to produce some adrenaline. I could be seen many afternoons riding my homemade skateboard down our street, going as fast as possible with no helmet or protective pads of any kind. As I grew older the machines became more dangerous and my love for them more intense. That love was somewhat dampened on a summer day in 1971 when I crashed my Mustang Mach 1 into a tree. In two weeks the Mustang was repaired, with a new front end, and I continued on my way, delighted to once again be in control of a 351-cubic-inch V8 engine, albeit more cautious.

  I graduated from high school in 1973 and enrolled at North Georgia College, in Dahlonega, Georgia, twenty miles from my hometown. A military college known for its academic excellence, North Georgia seemed like a good college for me to attend, since my first goal upon graduating was to serve my country in the military. All males living on campus were required to participate in ROTC, which meant wearing uniforms and learning the customs of the US Army.

  The commandant of cadets was a West Point graduate who had served in the Korean War. He was one of the finest men I have ever known. Most of the army officer cadre on campus wore their hair long, even by army standards, and most sported sideburns. Some were a bit portly, although no one was hugely out of shape; but it was apparent that physical training was not a priority for most of them. Their appearance was in a sense a representation of the army itself during the early 1970s. Enrollment at North Georgia College was down due to the unpopularity of the yet to be ended Vietnam War, and the laid-back attitude of the cadre was probably meant to attract and retain more cadets.

  With the end of the conscript army and the beginning of the all-volunteer army, recruiting commercials invited young men and women to “join t
he people who joined the army” and offered, “Today’s army wants to join you.” Conversely, I had seen marine recruiting commercials and posters with men sporting very little hair that boasted of keeping its standards high and its ranks small, wanting a few good men and not promising a rose garden. The hard-nosed Marine Corps approach to recruitment designed to attract unique, extreme individuals intrigued me, but I had never met a marine officer and there were none at North Georgia College.

  After some discussion with other like-minded cadets I was informed that recruiters from the marines were allowed to search for suitable applicants for their officer programs on campus. They would usually set up a place in the student center one or two days out of each quarter for interested students to come by and talk; they would also set up a time and place for students to take the Marine Corps officers’ written exam. One day a marine recruiting team led by Captain Kenneth L. Christy was on campus, I decided to see what the marines had to offer. As it turned out, what they offered was an attitude and a challenge.

  My first meeting with Captain Christy occurred at a motel just outside the campus where he and his recruiting team were staying. As I pulled into the motel parking lot on a beautiful autumn afternoon, Captain Christy stepped out of his vehicle, and I immediately realized that I was looking at what a military officer was supposed to look like. He was a little over six feet tall, with large biceps, resembling a shorter version of actor Clint Walker. With a large chest created by thousands of bench press repetitions and a small waist honed from thousands of miles of running combined with hundreds of thousands of sit-ups, he looked more like a model wearing a marine uniform than an actual marine. In addition to his imposing physique, he wore aviator-style prescription glasses and intentionally sported extremely short hair. His perfectly tailored uniform was made complete with the addition of silver parachute wings and three rows of combat ribbons, which included a bronze star and two purple hearts from his tour in Vietnam during 1967. His highest award was the Bronze Star, with combat V for valor. Years later, at no request of his own, it was upgraded to the Navy Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor after the Congressional Medal of Honor.