The location they chose, Parkland Hospital, was unsecured. The emergency room had not been prepped. But they sped toward the hospital in the hope of saving the president’s life, attending to Texas governor John Connally, who had also been shot, and making sure nobody else was injured.
It was still unknown whether the attack had been perpetrated by a single shooter or a team, whether it was a lone madman or a highly sophisticated state-sponsored plot. At that point, the details should have split up. Agent Youngblood informed his protectee, Lyndon Johnson, that he might need to take over as acting president for the time being. Yet with both Johnson and Kennedy kept in the same place—at the hospital—the continuity of government was in jeopardy. Once it was confirmed that Kennedy was dead, that became even more clear.
Acting President Johnson, however, wouldn’t leave without former first lady Kennedy, and she wouldn’t leave without the former president’s body, which couldn’t be moved without the dignity of a casket, which would have to be ordered and delivered. Youngblood did finally manage to convince Johnson and his wife to slip off to Air Force One in two unmarked police cars, where they could be secured as they waited for Kennedy’s body.
Youngblood’s clear thinking and adaptive style were the standout performance among the Secret Service that day. Though the acting president was safe on Air Force One, nobody was sure who should be joining him there—or whether assassins were still after him.
Youngblood ordered Secret Service agents and air force guards to secure the runway as, in his words, “a stream of cars began converging on Love Field, some carrying people who would be indispensable to Lyndon Johnson in the crucial hours to come, some who came because everyone else seemed headed in that direction.” The vice president’s detail had to decide whom to allow on the plane and whom to keep away. Worse still, as they waited, nobody was sure how to formalize the passing of the torch from Kennedy to Johnson.
Agent Youngblood wanted to get the hell out of Dallas for security reasons and pleaded that “there were people aboard the plane who were empowered to administer [the oath]—among them, every Secret Service agent.” But the Constitution clearly states that a judge must administer the oath of office. Through the White House operators and the secure communications system made possible by the White House Communications Agency, Acting President Johnson got President Kennedy’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, the US attorney general, on the phone and made his condolences before asking him the appropriate course of action. Kennedy pointed out that “any judicial officer of the United States can officiate.”
So before Air Force One could leave, everyone aboard had to wait for a judge to be found and brought to the plane, along with the first lady and the late president’s body. Meanwhile, they were still unsure whether the attack was still on or off, and the world panicked. Stock traders panicked, and the stock exchange market dropped nearly 3 percent, in the hours after shooting as the country wondered if it had a president or not.
Finally an emergency inauguration was held in the crowded plane’s cabin when Texas judge Sarah Hughes administered the oath of office to President Johnson, with former first lady Kennedy, still covered in blood, standing at his side.
November 22 was one of the nation’s darkest days, a day of grief and fear. The Secret Service had lost a president, and it could only wonder what changes would result to their agency in the hours and days to come.
The psychological answer to explain the failure of protection in Dallas is groupthink, in which an organization’s culture disincentivizes dissenting opinions. Most every honest Secret Service officer or agent can attest to one of the Secret Service’s unofficial mottos: “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Under President Eisenhower, the Secret Service had abdicated its responsibility for the initial coordination of the president’s itinerary for foreign trips. But under President Kennedy, the Secret Service had handed over coordination of the president’s domestic travel itinerary to the president’s overzealous staff. As Chief Baughman noted at the Kennedy administration’s dawn, far too often many people who surround the president are willing to overlook security to achieve shortsighted political objectives. The reason for all the travel that political season had been to boost the president’s ratings for the 1964 election. The White House staff’s priority was to maximize his positive political exposure. But his exposure to danger was maximized instead.
Weeks into his unexpected presidency, Lyndon Johnson was furious with everyone in the Secret Service, save for Agent Youngblood. In his commendation of Agent Youngblood for his actions during the assassination, he wrote, “In that awful moment of confusion when all about him were losing their heads, Rufus Youngblood never lost his. Without hesitation, he volunteered his life to save mine.” Now that Youngblood had taken over the presidential detail, the young agent had to restore the faith in the detail that had failed his predecessor. Now that Johnson was in the top spot himself, the target was on his back.
Agent Youngblood noted that at that point “the awards notwithstanding, the Secret Service was on shaky ground, and the FBI, the CIA, and the Defense Department were all reportedly looking into the business of presidential protection as a possible addition to their own jobs… the Secret Service was fighting for its very existence as a protective unit.”
The service’s internal problems were bubbling up to the top. One anonymous agent wrote a memo to the president alleging that “morale in the Secret Service is at an all-time low,” and another “bellyached” to a major newspaper about Johnson not letting agents close enough to protect him at his Texas ranch.
Johnson turned to Youngblood, the agent to whom he was closest. “You know I can’t have disloyalty,” he railed, “and I can’t talk in front of your people and have them repeat it. I told Chief Rowley that, to call ’em in and take their resignations of anybody who wanted out, and I’ll be glad to have his or yours or anybody else’s. If they don’t want to handle it we can get the FBI to do it.”
But J. Edgar Hoover, perhaps fearful of the gravity that came with protecting the president, stood down and dialed back his attempts to move in on Secret Service territory. For perhaps the only time in his long career, he blinked.
Several investigations took place in the months after President Kennedy’s assassination. Americans and the world wanted to know what had gone so terribly wrong with the supposedly elite Secret Service and how one of the most important men in the world had been killed by a simple attack: a man with a cheap rifle shooting from an elevated position. Numerous details bewildered the public: the lack of motorcycle agents and agents on the rear bumper of the president’s car, why the transparent bubble roof on the president’s car hadn’t been used, why the motorcade had passed through a sniper’s paradise such as Dealey Plaza in the first place, why the area hadn’t been secured, how the suspect had also been so unprotected while he was under police custody that he, too, had been assassinated—and the list went on. But despite the heroic efforts of Clint Hill and Rufus Youngblood, even those measures wouldn’t have stopped most any high-caliber rifle bullet. Maybe they would have deflected its trajectory, but again, hoping a bullet’s trajectory will be deflected enough to stop a kill is preposterous. As the next Secret Service systematic failure would prove again, deviated and ricocheting bullets are still just as deadly, and they should not be the focus of a plan to save the president’s life.
As each investigation into the circumstances of the assassination failed to restore confidence in the official report and focused far too much on the shooter, many solutions eluded the Secret Service. Agents who had been present that day filed written reports that were passed up the chain of command, screened, and then passedf along to Congress. After that, they testified directly in front of Congress. Though the investigations found no fault on the part of the individual agents, they broadly found fault in the Secret Service and recommended improvements in reaction timing, positioning, and using armored vehicles. But the “sol
utions” were merely recommendations; the funding to carry them out was not contingent on their execution and achievement. Therefore the funds were used, but many of the changes were never implemented.
The Secret Service took its licks and then took the initiative to make changes. It became an agency within the Treasury, the US Secret Service (USSS) and was no longer the Secret Service Division (SSD) of the Treasury. Chief James J. Rowley was now Director James J. Rowley, and he had his work cut out for him. He implemented the changes he had always wanted but ignored most of the Warren Commission’s findings—an error that continues to plague the agency today.
First of all, he standardized firearms training across the organization. Previously, firearms training for Secret Service agents had been held at the Treasury’s training center, or agents had been brought into the Secret Service via a probationary period based on their previous employment. The Secret Service would blindly trust that new recruits had satisfactory firearms training from their previous employers—but if they hadn’t, they could join the Secret Service without it. That’s almost unthinkable by today’s standards. Finally, the Secret Service adapted and created its own program and its own standard of firearms training. To lead this, it brought in some of the world champion marksmen from the old White House Police.
Despite the new funding and training program, the service still ignored the strategic failure that had left President Kennedy open to assassination. In 1964, the late president’s brother Robert Kennedy was campaigning for a New York Senate seat accompanied by President Johnson. Just a year after the tragedy in Dallas, the two protectees stood on their seats in the back of their open limousine. They smiled and waved at the seemingly unarmed crowds cheering for them. The feverishly excited crowd yelled, cheered, and pushed the New York police officers and Secret Service agents against the limousine. The motorcade came to a near halt. The rooftops and windows were unsecure. How could the Secret Service have allowed this—the former president’s brother? What lessons, if any, had really been learned?
The year 1968 was a year of tragedies that, although they did not involve the Secret Service directly, showed the great risks still faced by American public figures.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was not a government official or presidential candidate, but as the nation’s most prominent civil rights leader, one wonders why he was not provided with some form of official protection. Perhaps that could have prevented his assassination by a sniper on April 4, 1968.
After his assassination, the country erupted in riots. Cities burned. National Guardsmen and armored troop carriers moved about the White House and surrounding areas in case the riots turned toward the White House. A haze of smoke from nearby fires floated over the White House lawns. The Secret Service canceled all scheduled leaves, and off-duty agents and officers were put on high alert to be ready to return to work at a moment’s notice. The president’s helicopter was kept at the White House as an alternative means of escape in case the entire complex was surrounded. Gas masks, helmets, and long guns were readied for all officers.
When Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for president in 1968, he was initially protected by friends of the family who were paid to be bodyguards—or at least act like ones. Those individuals were certainly accomplished—they included a minister, an actor, and an Olympic gold medalist, but none of them had any formal training in law enforcement or protection.
The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was swarmed with fans, reporters, hotel guests—all unscreened—and they surrounded and hounded the candidate. Senator Kennedy was in a rush, behind schedule, and had just finished his speech; he waded through the overcrowded hotel, trying to figure out the ideal route to get to the pressroom, to which his campaign was trying to move his press conference. After some confusion about how to get there, the candidate and his detail followed the maître d’hôtel through the narrow hotel kitchen, despite his detail wanting to go through the more open hotel ballroom. The Secret Service has used and continues to use kitchens as possible throughways for protectees, but they are screened and locked down in advance, and nonessential personnel are cleared out. All employees are screened and told in no uncertain terms to keep their hands out and open, not to make any sudden movements, and the consequences if those rules aren’t followed.
None of that happened for Robert Kennedy. As soon as the candidate entered the kitchen, a man named Sirhan Sirhan approached, drew the handgun he had hidden in a campaign poster, and fired at the candidate from a foot away. Kennedy’s bodyguards punched, grabbed, and tackled the murderer, who kept firing and hit five other bystanders.
After Robert Kennedy’s death, President Johnson immediately assigned specially formed details of Secret Service agents to the other candidates, including two former vice presidents, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey—which prompts the question: If a security measure can be added in an instant following a catastrophe, why can’t it be added beforehand, when the need becomes clear?
Nixon won the 1968 election and took office as a less headstrong protectee than he had been as Eisenhower’s vice president. He was friendly and amiable toward the Secret Service. One story that will always be famous to the men and women of the agency is that when one agent accidentally honked his car horn, Nixon humbly responded, “Okay, boys, I’ll be out in just a minute.”
But Nixon embroiled the Secret Service in other problems. One famous piece of Uniformed Division lore tells of a safe discovered in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building during the Nixon years. Though the officer responsible for securing the area did not know what the safe was for, he was responsible for checking that it was locked. It always was—until one day it wasn’t. That day, the officer noted multiple passports and aliases inside, as well as a large amount of money that nearly filled the safe. He did as he had been trained and made a report about his find but was told by his superiors to forget what he had seen.
What he had stumbled upon was the bribe money from the Jimmy Hoffa pardon scandal, used to fund the president’s left-hand men. The men were connected with the Committee to Re-elect the President (nicknamed “CREEP”), which would later perpetrate the Watergate scandal. Nixon came close to dragging the Secret Service into an impeachment proceeding—but that would have to wait until the forty-second president.
During the 1972 election, a third-party candidate, George Wallace, received Secret Service protection, as had been the practice since Robert Kennedy’s assassination. But the protection was a complete joke, a bodyguard unit based on hope. It consisted of a few agents hovering in close proximity and one “whizbang”—Secret Service slang for “gadget”—a bulletproof podium that covered more than half of Wallace’s body as he delivered a speech in Laurel, Maryland, on May 15, 1972.
During his appearance at a shopping center, the Secret Service relied on creating a buffer zone between the candidate making his speech and the unsecured crowd. What ensued was caught on film by ABC affiliate cameraman Stephen Geer. The unsecured crowd is shown engulfing candidate Wallace.
“Hey, George! Hey, George!” called out a young blond man from behind another man who was shaking Wallace’s hand. The man, Arthur Bremer, was a would-be assassin who had been stalking President Nixon for weeks across many states and even into Canada. He had made one attempt on Nixon’s motorcade but it had driven by too fast, and he had shied away from drawing his handgun and pulling the trigger. So he waited and observed and realized the disparity in candidate Wallace’s protection.
The Secret Service detail protecting Wallace was little more than a feel-good measure. It was ad hoc, a knee-jerk response to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the previous election. The detail was all that separated the protectee from the crowd. But as candidate Wallace descended the stage after his speech and deviated from the path, choosing instead to shake hands with the unscreened crowd, he was totally surrounded. There was nothing separating the candidate from any one of the dozens of strangers shouting his name. The agents
accompanying Wallace didn’t react quickly enough and simply watched the frenzy of dozens of people reaching for the candidate. It was hopeless. There was zero chance that any of the agents could do anything if something should go wrong. But they were hoping, like so many agents before, that this wouldn’t be the day their theatrics aligned with the right assassin, at the right place, at the right time. But it was.
As the agents huddled around the protectee being squeezed by the frenzied crowd, a man approached Wallace, drew a pistol from concealment, and fired three shots directly into Wallace’s stomach. The crowd and the agents pulled the assassin down, and it was over. Wallace would forever be paralyzed from the waist down, and the backing for his candidacy would fade in the coming weeks. Because he lived, his lack of protection is often not tallied among the agency’s failures. But in the years since Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley had been killed in almost exactly the same manner—by an approacher—attempts on numerous presidents had been so nearly successful, and there had been such a short time since the similar (but successful) attempt on Robert Kennedy, what had changed? What was the difference? The answer was clear: nothing, except that the Secret Service had spent a great deal of time and money simply to be little more than trained witnesses.
President Nixon was reelected in 1972, and the Secret Service was not spared the chaos of his abortive second term. The agency was caught up in the Nixon administration’s scandals after Congress and the public learned of the president’s eavesdropping and recording device he had installed in the White House. It was clear that two possibilities existed: that the Secret Service had been unaware of the listening device and was therefore incompetent or that it had known everything about the listening device, among other things. It was quickly revealed that the Secret Service Technical Services Division had installed and maintained the elaborate recording device per the president’s request, even swapping out the old tapes for new ones and maintaining possession of them. When Congress and the investigation wanted to learn how a secretary could delete nearly twenty minutes of tape that coincidentally would supposedly have been the key evidence in Congress’s investigation, Technical Services Division head Louis Sims and agent Alfred Wong were dragged in to testify before the judge.
Secrets of the Secret Service Page 12