At the beginning and end of President Eisenhower’s two terms, he became stubborn and brash when it came to foreign travel, leading to several near misses. In secrecy, SSD agreed to President-elect Eisenhower’s campaign promise: a hair-raising trip to the front lines during the Korean War, where, according to agent Rufus Youngblood, “more than once the areas he visited were overrun and taken hours later by the enemy.”
Eisenhower nearly died when his heart couldn’t handle the altitude of Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1959, only to be saved by a quick-thinking Secret Service agent who’d brought a spare oxygen tank. In India, his open convertible was nearly crushed when local police became unable to control the enormous torrent of onlookers.
But it was Vice President Richard Nixon who had the closest brush with death during the Eisenhower administration. On a trip to Caracas, Venezuela—another trip that the Secret Service had argued against from the start due to safety concerns—Nixon insisted that his car lead the motorcade. He led it into an ambush. However, the SSD had succeeded in one change; using closed cars instead of convertibles.
Two large trucks rushed in front of the motorcade, cutting it off. Crowds, seemingly unarmed, surrounded the vehicle. Nixon’s change in that arrangement of the cars in the motorcade nearly doomed everyone as the crowd’s weapons materialized. All of the layers of protection were cut through in seconds. Stones, mud, and wooden bats pulverized the vehicles’ windows. Members of the crowd communicated to one another, identifying Nixon’s location in the motorcade; then they focused on breaching the window closest to the vice president. Had the Venezuelan military not come to the SSD’s rescue at the last minute, the crowd could have killed Nixon there—or when he reached his destination, where it was later learned that four hundred Molotov cocktails had been stockpiled for an even larger assault. For that, Chief Baughman called the vice president and later candidate Nixon “an assassin’s dream boat” and urged the public not to elect him.
Nixon survived the trip and went on to run for president in 1960. He was defeated by a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. The Kennedy administration brought the promise of a new, youthful era in US politics. In practice, it also brought fresh new problems for the Secret Service and would end with one of the most tragic episodes in the agency’s—and the nation’s—history.
FOUR.
BULLETS FROM DALLAS TO WASHINGTON
The trip to Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, and the Secret Service’s protection of President John F. Kennedy were not unique. All that was unique was the number of negative factors that came together in this instance: an assassin had finally recognized the systemic security gaps, identified the right time and place, and committed completely to “violence of action.”
But the story and its hard lessons have been completely lost in the nuances of what preceded that day and the petty arguments and excuses that followed. Its lessons are universal, whether you’re in the Secret Service or not.
As the famed military strategist Sun Tzu pointed out two and a half millennia ago, battles are won before they’re ever fought. The Secret Service had failed years before they lost their protectee and our nation’s president.
When President John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, the SSD security gaps that had long existed began to open wider almost immediately. Before JFK was even inaugurated, an elderly stalker-type assassin, Richard Paul Pavlick, loaded his Buick 8 sedan with enough dynamite to level the Kennedys’ vacation home in Palm Beach, Florida. The assassin headed there. At least three times in December 1960, Pavlick was about to make an attempt, but as he clutched his makeshift detonator in his hand, he spotted the president’s wife and infant children. “Had he not had a change of heart, there was little we could have done,” said Agent Gerald Blaine of the president’s detail. After Pavlick shied away, the agents became suspicious of his car, but he concealed the explosives on his chest under his clothing and hid in the president’s church. After a tip was called in by a mail clerk in Pavlick’s hometown who had seen threatening postcards that Pavlick was sending to the president, the Secret Service nabbed him at a traffic stop. One unsuspecting advance agent led him away by the arm, never realizing that the elderly man was, as the papers called him, “a human bomb.”
The near miss should have served as a moment of clarity, a spur for the Secret Service to reevaluate and institute a strategic pause to determine if they were on the right course Instead, it pressured the press to downplay the story, appealing to the media’s morals by insisting that the story could inspire copycats. In truth, the agency was more concerned about its reputation than about facing the increasingly more sophisticated and more frequent threats that were knocking ever more loudly on its door.
Then came November 22, 1963, and just as in all previous cases, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was extremely simple: the Secret Service did everything wrong; the assassin(s) did everything right. And although many, including numerous agencies of the federal government, have devolved into focusing on theories of the “who” and “why,” for the sake of keeping future U.S. presidents alive, only two questions are important: How did the gap arise, and how can we make sure this never happens again?
For every crime, there are four primary factors: means, motive, opportunity, and intent. To understand how protection succeeds or fails, only the “opportunity” for an assassin to make an attempt and the “intent,” the psychological commitment to extreme violence, are relevant.
Richard Pavlick, for example, could have killed the president, but his conscience had kept him from committing to the violence that would have overpowered the Secret Service—and that would have been as simple as a press on the accelerator and a flick of the detonator. As the Secret Service chose not to adapt, it was only a matter of time before another assassin would recognize that the same opportunity existed and fully commit to “violence of action,” no matter the proximity of First Lady Kennedy or any other innocents.
Though the Secret Service has nabbed thousands of potential and extremely dangerous assassins, including as suicide bombers, the work of the Protective Research Section is only a helpful aid, a useful tool, and, at best, one layer of concentric and comprehensive protection, no matter how advanced profiling and forensic efforts become. The existence of the security gap, the “opportunity,” is everything. Real protection is based on concentric circles that stand between an assassin and a protectee. For an assassin to reach the president, all layers must fail—or, as in this case, be nonexistent. The only barriers between President Kennedy and a sniper’s bullet were air and the Secret Service’s prayers.
When President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, the Secret Service’s main problem was still fatigue, which had been exacerbated by the demands of World War II and the Cold War. Secret Service chief Baughman retired suddenly in 1961 after visiting his doctor for tension and fatigue.
Chief Baughman had taken over in 1948 from James Maloney, who only served 2 years after taking over from Chief Frank Wilson who, citing fatigue, had made enough requests to retire to eventually have one accepted. Special Agent In Charge of Presidential Protection James J. Rowley took over from James Drescher, who said he lived “a gypsy life” for too long. The sense of exhaustion had carried over through all the ranks of the Secret Service into the Kennedy years. The pace the new president set only made matters worse.
Drinking, partying, and finding rest and relaxation in all the wrong places often happen when workers hardly see their families, the grounding wires of their souls. Plummeting morale, arrogance, bullheadedness, and tunnel vision ensued. Every agent had to ask himself: Were the sacrifices he was making to create the last line of defense or just an elaborate presidential decoration?
Numerous agents on President Kennedy’s detail revealed years after his assassination that despite being in the throes of the Cold War, when Soviet operatives assassinated targets with sophisticated nerve agents and radioactive poisons, President Kennedy refused to wind
back on his frequent affairs with unscreened mistresses, extreme sports, and high-society social life.
President Kennedy had a fascination with the poem “Rendezvous with Death” and was even known to casually remark, “If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All a man needs is a willingness to trade his life for mine.” He expected the Secret Service to adapt with little regard for resources, human or otherwise—again, a trait not unique to himself.
The National Park Service agents were trained to ride horseback, ski, swim, and sail and how to make rescues in each sport, yet numerous agents admitted they hadn’t even received basic training in the use of, let alone held, the submachine guns or rifles put into their hands the first time they were assigned to the president. That practice of “faking it,” as one agent put it, had been going on for years, as revealed in the memoirs and exposés of other agents.
The agents knew that any one of President Kennedy’s frivolous actions could make it easier for an assassin to kill him. The only precedent for agents’ overriding the president had been Agent Reilly preventing President Roosevelt from visiting a World War II frontline near Naples. Lead agents and SSD chiefs after that time never answered the question that remains unanswered today: Where is the threshold for agents to override the president and his staff?
Every agent knew then, as every agent still knows, that if he countermands the president, the president has both the motivation and the ability to replace the head of the Secret Service until he or she is assured that the security detail will be most agreeable.
A culture shift ensued. In accordance with a theory known as the Peter Principle, most of the agents who stayed on and rose to higher ranks were the only ones who could stomach the capitulations. Agents who tried to buck the system, such as Agent Abraham Bolden, the first black Secret Service agent to officially be part of the president’s detail, were rebuked and crushed by the agency to secure their silence. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, Bolden, who had been personally picked by Kennedy for his detail, was ready to testify about agents’ drinking in Dallas and other Secret Service secrets, only to end up in jail on trumped-up bribery charges.
By many agents’ admissions, they simply prayed not to be the one without a chair when the music stopped, if and when it happened. They knew that if an attack were made, much in the same style as had killed presidents before—let alone a highly trained sniper’s ambush—they would be little more than witnesses to the attack.
And so a fait accompli was established, in which everyone hoped, carried on, and gambled on an incredibly expensive, elaborate, and demanding protection plan—which, in practice, quickly devolved into theatrics.
November 21, 1963. The advance agents of the president’s detail had stayed out well into the night before, some as late as 5 a.m. They had drunk and socialized in spite of the demands of their work. The following day, they were mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted, and their reaction time was a casualty. The president’s experienced driver, Agent Thomas Shipman, had died six weeks earlier during a temporary assignment at Camp David, of a heart attack most likely caused by stress. His replacement was less than capable, due to lack of experience, training, extreme fatigue, or a mixture of all three. It was not common practice to cross-train and make each agent readily replaceable.
President Kennedy’s motorcade of open convertibles rolled at speeds of 10 to 12 miles per hour, slower than parents picking up their kids in a school zone. The president’s limo had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but little had been spent on its protection capabilities, only to extend the president’s exposure to the cheering public—and any potential assassin. The seats lifted the president even higher above the car so more onlookers could see him wave back. Even “the bubble,” the transparent but not bulletproof rain cover, shielded Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy from rain only after Eisenhower complained of being drenched by rain in similar slow-moving motorcade parades through crowded streets.
The security advance team knew the futility of any of their observations. The crowds were so massive and excited that often in Dallas they caused the motorcade to come to a complete halt as unscreened masses pushed local police officers into the street to get a few feet closer to the celebrity president. That was exactly the purpose of the trip: to increase his exposure and galvanize voters into a frenzy before the 1964 election.
The president’s protection was so compromised by the Secret Service’s culture that, as the crowds enveloped the motorcade, any assassin could have leapt into the president’s lap and repeated history and the agents wouldn’t have had the positioning or reaction time to make a difference.
As who is to blame: it is only the killer. But it was the Secret Service that had the final responsibility to protect the president against a threat it knew was out there and had known about for decades. It had been concerned about snipers’ having a clear shot at President Eisenhower on the golf course. President Truman’s protectors had been terrified that a sniper would take a shot at him on his frequent walks. Even Lincoln had been shot at on at least two occasions. It was hardly a new threat.
There is a rumor that deep within the Secret Service archives is a letter signed by President Kennedy to Chief James J. Rowley in which he acknowledges having been told that on the route set by the president’s staff—such as passing through Dealey Plaza—the Secret Service could simply not guarantee protection. Numerous protectees had signed such letters or made such verbal agreements, including First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who publicly and often refused any protection for herself or her children. That was how much the situation had been allowed to deteriorate.
As the motorcade emerged from the crowded narrow streets, it approached Dealey Plaza. In the Dallas motorcade, numerous agents from different details rode in following vehicles. Per their training, they scanned for threats that might be tucked in among the thousands of onlookers packing the streets from the airport to the Dallas Trade Mart, where the president was scheduled to deliver a speech. Unlike the president’s detail, the first lady’s and vice president’s details had been disciplined enough to be as well rested as their schedules allowed. Agent Clint Hill of the first lady’s detail rode in a car directly behind that of the president’s. His reaction time and athleticism were honed and ready. Agent Rufus Youngblood, the head of the vice president’s detail, rode with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and Mrs. Johnson. He too was ready.
But they were sitting ducks for a trained sniper. When they reached Dealey Plaza, they slowed to a near stop to execute two ninety-degree turns; there were no alternate roads or cover; crowds were on all sides; the vehicles headed toward an overpass at the plaza’s far end—which was supposed to have been closed to the public by Dallas authorities but had not. And still the Secret Service held its course.
As the motorcade made the last hard turn at low speed, the car passed right into Lee Harvey Oswald’s field of fire, and luck ran out—for the president, the Secret Service, and the country. The first shot likely missed everything, depending on which account you believe, and ricocheted off the ground hitting a civilian. The second shot hit President Kennedy in the upper back, exiting from his throat. The president lurched in his seat. Just behind the limousine was Agent Clint Hill. Seeing that the president was in distress, Hill sprinted toward the president’s car. In a car behind the president’s, Agent Rufus Youngblood leaped onto Vice President and Mrs. Johnson. President Kennedy’s driver, a replacement new to the job, hesitated, unsure of what was happening and what to do. He turned around to look, slowing to a near stop as he did so.
The president’s detail was bewildered, wondering if the sound had been a car backfiring or a firecracker. The final shot did horrific damage, splitting the president’s head in a shocking way that was immortalized in a motion picture shot by Abraham Zapruder. One agent on the president’s detail grabbed a brand-new Secret Service–issued Colt M-16 but could not identify the source of t
he fire. Jacqueline Kennedy climbed onto the trunk of the accelerating car on all fours, panicked by what she had just witnessed. To some, she appeared to be reaching for a section of the president’s skull that had landed on the trunk. That she did not tumble off into the street seemed a miracle. At nearly the same moment, Agent Hill leaped up onto the rear step, pulled himself atop the trunk, and pushed Mrs. Kennedy down to cover her with his body—a measure that might actually have been ineffective, as high-caliber shots are capable of tearing through several bodies. But his act was selfless and courageous. By the time Hill arrived on the trunk, the shooting had stopped. The motorcade accelerated toward the overpass and out of Dealey Plaza.
The bullets might have stopped flying, but the detail was hardly out of the woods.
In the first car, accompanying the Dallas chief of police and Dallas police driver, was Agent Winston Lawson, who had been in charge of the security arrangements for the Dallas trip. In the third car, Agent Emory Roberts radioed, “The president’s been hit! Get us to a hospital, fast but safe!” Even as Agent Hill was shielding the first lady as President Kennedy lay slumped in his seat, he still wasn’t sure the president was beyond saving. He yelled for the driver to get them to the hospital. The Secret Service agents had spent their careers readying for this one moment and had failed in an instant when it had come. Immediately afterward, they were faced with what they’d never fully prepared or trained for: what to do after an assassination.
The motorcade had three possible destinations in its southwest direction of travel: five minutes away was the original destination, the Dallas Trade Mart, where the president had intended to speak and which was therefore secured by Secret Service and local law enforcement; Parkland Hospital was only a mile past the Trade Mart; the third option was to drive past both locations to reach Love Field airport, ten minutes later, where Air Force One was secured and waiting to take off.
Secrets of the Secret Service Page 11