by Hill, Clint
Later that same day, after taking Mrs. Kennedy to the White House for a tour of the private family quarters with outgoing First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, we were off to Palm Beach, where the Kennedys would remain until after New Year’s. Already, in just a month, my new assignment with the first lady had been far from what I had expected, and surprisingly, I realized that although I wasn’t going to be on JFK’s detail, it was clear to me that my role was important—I was responsible for protecting the people in his life that mattered most to him: his wife and his children.
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Palm Beach
The home at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach that would be known as the Winter White House was actually owned by the president’s father, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. The 8,500-square-foot Mediterranean-style house sat on two acres of well-manicured, palm-tree-lined lawns and gardens that contained a tennis court and a swimming pool with pumped-in salt water, all with a breathtaking view of the Atlantic Ocean. I had never seen such a luxurious private home before, but to the Kennedys, this was just another place for the family to gather: their warm-weather getaway.
Meanwhile, all of the agents on the White House Detail required accommodation as well, so one of the supervisors had negotiated good rates at a place in West Palm Beach, about twenty minutes away, called Woody’s Motel. Woody’s wasn’t fancy, but it had a small swimming pool in the center of the U-shaped structure, the rooms were air-conditioned, and it fit our meager budgets. At that time, our per diem allowance was $12, out of which we had to pay for our room, meals, dry cleaning, laundry, and miscellaneous expenses. To save money, many of us shared rooms.
I would arrive at the ambassador’s residence at around eight o’clock each morning to be there before Mrs. Kennedy arose, but because she was still quite weak, she spent most of the days resting—often sunbathing by the swimming pool—and rarely leaving the grounds, so I spent a good deal of time standing by in the command post. I had missed the camaraderie of being on the larger detail with the president—especially after two weeks on duty at Georgetown Hospital—so it was enjoyable for me to be back with the other agents in the central hive of activity.
One of the things I learned was that President-elect Kennedy had been receiving a lot of hate mail—much of it due to the fact that he was Catholic—and for that reason all letters and packages sent to the Kennedys were diverted to Washington for examination. The previous week, several letters had come to our attention—letters written by a man in New Hampshire in which he threatened to kill President-elect Kennedy by turning himself into a “human bomb.” The man had sold all his possessions in New Hampshire and had gone missing, and now an intensive search was under way, but no one knew where or when he might show up.
The first Sunday after our arrival in Palm Beach, President-elect Kennedy had informed the supervising agent that he was planning to attend ten o’clock Mass at St. Edward’s Roman Catholic Church, the parish church in Palm Beach, and that Mrs. Kennedy would not be going along. When the president-elect emerged from the house, however, Mrs. Kennedy and their three-year-old daughter, Caroline, walked out with him and, at his urging, walked with him to the front gate to wave to the small group of people that were waiting outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of the family. Mrs. Kennedy obliged, and the people were thrilled to see the president-elect’s wife and daughter even for just a moment. The people waved and hollered out to President-elect Kennedy as he rode off in a white convertible with a Secret Service agent at the wheel and several others in a car following closely behind, while Mrs. Kennedy and Caroline retreated back to the house, behind the high walls that surrounded the property.
Four days later, Palm Beach police found the person behind the threatening letters—a seventy-three-year-old mentally ill man named Richard Pavlick, who was staying in a West Palm Beach motel. He was arrested when the cops found dynamite, detonating caps, and battery wiring in his car and still more bomb-making material in his motel room. It turned out that Pavlick had been sitting in his car down the street from the Kennedy residence the previous Sunday as President-elect Kennedy was leaving for church, and had planned to ram his car into the president’s vehicle—setting off the bombs to kill them both. But when Mrs. Kennedy and Caroline came out with JFK, Pavlick couldn’t do it—and he decided to wait for another opportunity when the president-elect was alone.
Knowing how close we had come to an assassination attempt even before Kennedy was inaugurated was a strong reminder that an attack could come anytime, anywhere. It wasn’t just in motorcades or on official trips that you had to be cautious. Anytime we left the confines of a secured residence, there was the possibility that something could happen. And it was someone like Richard Pavlick that worried us most: someone acting alone, either mentally unstable or simply a delusional loner hoping to make a name for himself—or herself—by killing a president.
EVEN THOUGH THE homes in Palm Beach and West Palm Beach were decorated with lights and store windows were filled with Santa displays, being in that tropical climate didn’t feel like Christmas to me. It was tough on all the agents being away from our families, but we made the best of it.
Shortly after New Year’s, SAIC Jerry Behn came to me and said, “Clint, the president-elect and Mrs. Kennedy have decided they won’t bring Caroline and John back to Washington for the Inauguration. They will be staying here with Miss Shaw, and we have decided to have you stay here in Palm Beach to supervise their security.”
I hadn’t seen this coming, and I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. While all the other agents were witnessing history, playing an important role in the transfer of power, I was relegated to the Kiddie Detail.
On Inauguration Day, I joined the children’s nanny, Maud Shaw, and Caroline inside Ambassador Kennedy’s residence to watch the live coverage on television. Caroline was more interested in finger painting than watching her father take the oath of office, so she didn’t pay much attention, but I watched the ceremony from start to finish, all the while wishing I were there.
I could see U. E. Baughman, the outgoing chief of the Secret Service, seated just behind the president on one side, and SAIC Jim Rowley—who would soon become chief—on the other as President Kennedy made an impassioned plea for our nation’s citizens to ask not what the country could do for them but what they could do for their country. As the president stepped away from the podium, the audience rose to its feet and burst into thunderous applause. The torch had been passed.
I STAYED IN Palm Beach for two more weeks while the children’s rooms were being redecorated in the White House, and finally, on Saturday, February 4, 1961, we brought John and Caroline back to Washington on the Caroline. Three agents were assigned to the children full-time, and I returned to Mrs. Kennedy’s detail with Agent Jeffries.
During her stay in the hospital, Mrs. Kennedy had informed me that she had rented a home in Middleburg, Virginia—an eighteenth-century colonial with a swimming pool and riding stables on four hundred acres of rolling hills in hunting country—which she intended for the family to use as a weekend getaway from Washington. The estate was called “Glen Ora” and the Kennedy family’s use of it resulted in some major expenses on the part of the Secret Service as well as other government agencies: the Secret Service had to call in agents from around the country on a temporary basis to help maintain perimeter security, while the White House Police provided civilian-clothed personnel to man the checkpoints; assistance was required from the General Services Administration and the military services for guard booths placed strategically around the property; emergency fire suppression equipment had to be available when helicopters arrived and departed; communication equipment had to be installed for both the Secret Service and the president so that he would have ready access as if he were in the Oval Office; and finally, additional electrical lines had to be installed to provide adequate power and lighting for all these services.
Beginning in early February 1961, Mrs. Kennedy spent
almost every weekend in Glen Ora with the children. Often, she would stretch the time from Thursday to Monday, depending on her obligations in Washington, while the president—who wasn’t as enamored with the place—would fly in by helicopter on Saturday and leave Sunday after attending Mass at the Middleburg Community Center. It started off that I would drive the fifty miles back home each evening, but when the trips became a weekly occurrence and the weekends stretched into three or four days, I ended up renting a room in a private home nearby on a semipermanent basis.
As a matter of security, code names were used for all radio communication. Each group of people had names beginning with the same letter to make them easier to remember, and each location was given a code name as well. The White House was “Crown,” Camp David was “Cactus,” and Glen Ora became “Chateau.”
The code names given to the Kennedys all began with the letter “L.” JFK was “Lancer,” Mrs. Kennedy was “Lace,” Caroline was “Lyric,” and John was “Lark.”
Not every Secret Service agent had a code name—the shift agents didn’t really need them—only the supervisors who would be using radios did, and they all began with the letter “D.” When I started on Mrs. Kennedy’s detail, they gave me the name “Dazzle.” I don’t know who came up with it or why, but it stuck, and I had it for the rest of my career.
THE FIRST WEEKEND of April 1961 was Easter, and I had learned that, as with Christmas and New Year’s, tradition was for the Kennedy family to spend Easter weekend in Palm Beach, so that’s where we headed. With tensions rising in Laos and Cuba, President Kennedy spent much of the weekend meeting with advisors. News photographers were invited to the ambassador’s residence for an update, and I was one of the agents on duty at the time. I stood off to the side of President Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk where they were seated on the patio and kept a watchful eye on the reporters as they asked questions and snapped a few photos.
The next morning I was dismayed to see that I figured prominently in the Associated Press wire photo that was sent to newspapers across the country. As a Secret Service agent, the whole idea is to remain as anonymous as possible, but there I was, standing with my arms folded, dressed in a loud, short-sleeved floral print shirt; and while my eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses, there was no mistaking it was me. My mother was thrilled to see her boy “Clinton” in the Bismarck Tribune with the president, but I sure got a ribbing from the other agents about it.
President Kennedy found it amusing too. “You’ll have to find a better disguise from now on, Clint,” he teased. “Back to the suit and tie, I suppose.”
The weekend of April 15 and 16 seemed like any other, with Mrs. Kennedy going to Middleburg on Friday and the president arriving by helicopter Saturday afternoon, accompanied by his sister Jean Kennedy Smith and her husband, Stephen Smith. The president seemed relaxed—even joining his wife at the Middleburg Hunt races—and while there were lots of phone calls from Washington, which he took privately, nothing in his demeanor gave hint to the disaster that was unfolding in Cuba and the heavy decisions he was forced to make.
Two years earlier, Fidel Castro’s guerrilla fighters had taken over the Cuban government, overthrowing dictator Fulgencio Batista. Initial enthusiasm for Castro faded quickly, however, as Castro embraced Communism and aligned himself with the USSR, which led thousands of Cubans to flee to southern Florida. Tensions escalated between the U.S. government and Cuba to such a degree that in January 1961, just weeks before Kennedy’s inauguration, President Eisenhower had severed diplomatic ties with Cuba and closed the U.S. Embassy in Havana.
Now, three months into John F. Kennedy’s presidency, there were reports that low-flying aircraft had bombed Cuba’s three major airports, and Fidel Castro was accusing the United States of being behind the attacks. In an emergency session of the United Nations Political Committee, U.S. ambassador Adlai Stevenson denied U.S. involvement and claimed that, “to the best of our knowledge,” the B-26 planes “were Castro’s own air force planes.”
In fact, the raid was part of a CIA operation that had been hatched under Eisenhower, and to which President Kennedy—after wrestling with the moral and political decision—had given the green light. For months Cuban exiles had been secretly training under American supervision in Guatemala for a planned attack on Cuba, with the intention of overthrowing Castro and inserting a new government headed by politically active—and U.S.-friendly—Cuban exiles. To make the raid appear like an internal Cuban uprising, obsolete World War II B-26 bombers were painted to look like Cuban air force planes, but one had been shot down, and the evidence pointed to U.S. involvement.
Meanwhile, 1,400 American-trained Cuban exiles—known as Brigade 2506—had moved from Guatemala to Nicaragua and were headed for Cuba by boat. A second round of air strikes was planned to occur simultaneously with the brigade’s landing on beaches in the Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs—but when the link to the United States was discovered after the first air assault, President Kennedy canceled the second round of strikes. So when the brigade landed on the beaches, Castro was ready for them with an army of twenty thousand, and with no further air strikes to assist the exiles on the ground, more than one hundred of the rebels were killed and the rest were captured.
On Monday morning, April 17, President and Mrs. Kennedy departed Glen Ora by helicopter and returned to the White House. I did not know it at the time, but President Kennedy was receiving reports throughout the day of the disaster that was unfolding as the ill-prepared Cuban rebels confronted Castro’s army. President Kennedy, knowing he had sent all those brave men either to their deaths or to certain imprisonment, managed to hide his anguish behind a mask of diplomacy and composure as he kept to previously scheduled engagements, which included hosting the visiting prime minister of Greece, Konstantinos Karamanlis, and his wife at a luncheon and formal state dinner that evening.
Over the next couple of days, the botched Bay of Pigs invasion had reverberations that threatened to turn into a world war. Russia’s Premier Khrushchev was pledging to provide Cuba with whatever military or economic support it needed to defend against what appeared to be a U.S. invasion. Still, President Kennedy vehemently denied involvement, and in a terse message to Khrushchev, he wrote, “I have previously stated, and I repeat now, that the United States intends no military intervention in Cuba.”
On Thursday, April 20, President Kennedy used a speech at the American Society of Newspaper Editors to make a statement about the Cuba situation, discussing it in context of general U.S. policy. He again reiterated that he had not committed U.S. troops—and would not involve our military—because unilateral intervention would violate international obligations. For this reason, his administration was following a “policy of restraint” out of concern that any move against Cuba would likely incite Khrushchev to act against West Berlin. Not wanting to appear weak, however, he stated, with a tone of defiance, “Let the record show that our restraint is not inexhaustible. . . . I want it clearly understood that this government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations, which are to the security of our nation.”
The following day, President Kennedy held a press conference to discuss a number of issues but declined to answer questions on Cuba, citing national security. This did not satisfy NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur, who pressed the president to provide more information. In what appeared to be an admission of involvement and indeed of failure, President Kennedy responded, “There’s an old saying that victory has one hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” Choosing his words carefully, he added, “I will say to you, Mr. Vanocur, that I have said as much as I feel can be usefully said by me in regard to the events of the past few days. Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility because I’m the responsible officer of the government—and that is quite obvious—but merely because I do not believe that such a discussion would benefit us during the present difficult situation.”
Without admitting the in
vasion was indeed a U.S.-backed operation, President Kennedy took full responsibility, and while he maintained his composure in public, privately you could see that this fiasco—the first major decision of his presidency—had shaken his confidence. On April 22, he invited President Eisenhower to join him at Camp David. The two met alone in one of the guest cabins for nearly an hour and a half, and when they emerged, they spoke briefly with a group of reporters and photographers. Neither the current nor former president revealed the nature of what was discussed, but when reporters asked Eisenhower whether he approved of President Kennedy’s stand on Communist-oriented Cuba, Ike—undoubtedly remembering all too vividly a similarly difficult position he himself had been in a year earlier—replied, “I say I am all in favor of the United States supporting the man who has to carry the responsibility for our foreign affairs.”
Clearly, the new, young president realized the former general had many more years of wisdom, and although he represented the opposing political party, was truly the one person in the world who could offer substantive advice and in whom Kennedy could confide. There was no further military escalation, but President Kennedy had to live with the knowledge that one hundred lives had been lost, and the surviving members of Brigade 2506 were suffering in captivity.