The Kennedy Half-Century (46 page)

In combination, the Secret Service’s errors were fatal to John Kennedy. The Service did not have Lee Harvey Oswald on any of its watch lists. When agent Win Lawson found out about the trip to Dallas, he instructed the Protective Research Section (PRS) of the Secret Service to investigate people in the area that might potentially pose a threat to JFK—individuals who had demonstrated hostility toward the president as well as groups that might back a political assassination. A great deal of this information came directly from threatening letters or telephone calls to the White House. Other names were sent along by the FBI, CIA, and state and local police departments, mainly because individuals or organizations had been forthright about their possible intentions. In the early 1960s a person such as Oswald—despite being a defector and having demonstrated hostility toward the United States and its leadership—could easily escape notice, since he had not telegraphed his intentions about the president in palpable ways. In practice, the Secret Service depended heavily on regional law enforcement to provide them with the names of dangerous local residents. This was barely a safety net at all, and the Secret Service knew it, which is one of the reasons agents were always nervous during presidential trips.
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As is too often the case, a monumental tragedy was needed to produce commonsense reforms in presidential safety. After November 22, the Secret Service tightened protection in ways that should have been evident well before President Kennedy’s murder.
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Much like the FBI and CIA, the Secret Service tried hard to exonerate itself. A month after the assassination, Gerald Behn, who had been the special agent in charge during JFK’s Dallas visit, issued several statements designed to deflect criticism away from his agency. “The United States Secret Service never releases the exact route of any presidential motorcade,” read one such statement. “The route, after it has been decided upon by the Secret Service advance agent, the local police and the local committee, is released either by the White House Press Secretary or by the local committee, usually after they have checked with the White House Press Secretary.” This misses the point entirely. When the route is released and publicized by any individual or group, it is then the responsibility of the Secret Service to make safe the path. Kennedy’s motorcade track had been published in the Dallas newspapers and aired on television for three days, as was inevitable.
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The purpose of a motorcade is to enable a president to be seen. Why hadn’t the agency provided in Dallas what in modern times would be considered a minimal level of security? Behn said that it was “almost impossible” to inspect buildings during presidential visits “because of the shortage of time and manpower”—which argued for more time and manpower, not a suspension of precautions. This is
not a modern discovery. Fifty years ago, the Secret Service had precise procedures for inspecting buildings in Washington during inaugural parades and events for visiting dignitaries. Under these circumstances, the Secret Service required building managers to:

1. [K]now the occupants of each room in their building.

2. Keep people off the ledges of their buildings.

3. Know who is on the roof or lock the door(s) to the roof.

4. [C]ontact the highest official in each office which has windows facing on the parade route and request them not to allow any strangers or any persons they cannot vouch for into the room.

5. [C]ontact the top official in each office with windows facing on the parade route and request them to make certain that nothing is thrown out of the windows.

6. [C]heck each unoccupied room or office and then lock it.
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Why were these requirements in effect only for special D.C. events? Weren’t they even more essential for road trips where the locales and threats might be less well defined and known in advance—especially when a president is sitting in an open car with nothing to stop bullets fired from any direction? If the Secret Service’s standards used in the nation’s capital (and sometimes elsewhere) for important presidential appearances had been followed in Dallas, John Kennedy might have survived the trip. Just four days earlier, during JFK’s visit to Tampa, Florida, where serious threats against Kennedy’s life had been made, the sheriff’s office had secured the rooftops of major buildings along the president’s motorcade route.
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Surely the Dallas of 1963 was anti-Kennedy enough to have justified similar measures. It is obvious in hindsight that the Secret Service should have asked the Dallas police department and sheriff’s office to post guards on top of the government buildings overlooking Dealey Plaza, such as the Criminal Courts Building and the Post Office. There was a decent chance that police sharpshooters on the roof with binoculars could have spotted the barrel of a rifle extended from the sixth floor window of the Depository.

In 2010 some Secret Service agents who were assigned to protect JFK published a book,
The Kennedy Detail
, that contains what some say is a blame-the-victim charge. The agents claim that during a trip to Tampa just days before the assassination, Kennedy called the agents “Ivy League charlatans” and ordered them off the back of his limousine. “Tell them to stay on the follow-up car,” the president allegedly remarked. “We’ve got an election coming up. The whole point is for me to be accessible to the people.” JFK supposedly issued similar orders during the Dallas trip.
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After so much time it is not
possible to know for sure whether these words were uttered, and no contemporaneous paperwork records such instructions. At the same time, the agents are a reliable lot who have been loyal to the Secret Service and mainly kind in their reminiscences about the Kennedys.
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(Still, some assassination researchers adamantly refute the ex-agents’ claim.)
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Even if the report about Kennedy’s instructions is true, the director of the Secret Service could have approached Bobby Kennedy or JFK’s close aides to insist that tight security was essential. Such intervention might well have worked, and if it did not, resignation in protest is an honorable way to bring attention to a potential calamity. (Sadly, this is a rare practice in American government.)

Gerald Blaine, a member of JFK’s security team and author of
The Kennedy Detail
, told me that he and fellow agents “had to diplomatically beg for resources to handle the motorcade routes and the venues.” “In Dallas, they … did not have enough resources to man all of the rooftops,” Blaine notes. “In 1963 there was little air conditioning and [therefore an] office building window could be raised and lowered.” The former agent also says that the modern-day Secret Service does a much better job of protecting the president in part because of lessons learned in Dealey Plaza: “If we would have had the 4,000 agents they have today—some of which are trained in counter sniping—and we had the armored vehicle used by President Obama, Dallas might not have happened. Instead, JFK’s assassination is the reason they have those resources [and] new technologies.”
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Blaine’s comments suggest that the Dallas trip provided a perfect opportunity for the Secret Service to press its case. As mentioned, JFK and many of his supporters were apprehensive about the visit due to Dallas’s reputation as a right-wing mecca.
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There had been warnings of possible trouble. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson had been accosted in Dallas during the 1960 campaign. While traveling to an event at the Adolphus Hotel, the Johnsons were swarmed by a group of demonstrators who shouted insults and waved signs with slogans such as LET’S BEAT JUDAS and TEXAS TURNCOAT. “It makes me sad to know that people could be so bitter and so frustrated and so discourteous and desperate,” LBJ said after one protestor screamed in his wife’s face. As mentioned earlier, a Dallas mob had also attacked United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson when he was visiting Dallas just weeks before Kennedy was scheduled to come.
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The protestors spat on Stevenson and hit him in the head with a placard.
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The pre-Dallas Secret Service had inadequately studied the sad history of assassinations, and not just in the United States. Around the globe, a chastened Secret Service noted in 1964, “There has been an assassination or a serious attempt at one in every nation during every generation.” In France, assassins tried to kill Napoleon III eight times. In England, Queen Victoria
survived an equal number of attempts on her life. In China, T. V. Soong and Chiang Kai-shek cheated death a total of nine times. The rulers of Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia have been targeted dozens of times.
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In 1962, in a disturbing incident that President Kennedy himself had noted, French president Charles de Gaulle only narrowly escaped death when a would-be assassin using a submachine gun sprayed de Gaulle’s car with bullets as it drove through a Paris suburb. One bullet shattered the car’s rear window, while another came within two inches of de Gaulle’s head. Police found hand grenades and plastic explosives at the scene and connected the attack to a group protesting France’s withdrawal from Algeria. Afterward, Kennedy sent a message to de Gaulle “expressing gratitude that the French president escaped unhurt.”
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To be a head of state is to invite attacks from mentally disturbed or politically motivated persons. The threat cannot be eliminated; the only antidote is unrelenting security. The modern Secret Service is much more adept at doing so, thanks to greatly increased manpower and a heightened sense of the dangers after so many actual and attempted presidential assassinations. In 1996, for example, President Bill Clinton was visiting the Philippines for an Asia-Pacific Economic summit when his Secret Service agents “picked up radio chatter mentioning the words wedding and bridge.” Aware that the word “wedding” has often been used by terrorists as a code word for “assassination,” agents decided to change the motorcade route, which had previously included traversing a bridge. It was a smart decision. Authorities later found explosives on the bridge, which could have killed Clinton and many in his entourage.

Secret Service agents have occasionally gone to extreme measures to protect the president. For example, President George H. W. Bush’s security team once changed a motorcade route in Oklahoma after a psychic told them that a sniper would be waiting at a certain location along the route. But even the most gifted soothsayer or Secret Service agent cannot foresee every threat. During a 2005 event at Tbilisi’s Freedom Square in Georgia, a would-be assassin threw a grenade at President George W. Bush. Fortunately, the grenade landed more than thirty yards away from the president and did not explode. Presidential aides have privately admitted that a more competent assassin would have found his mark, unimpeded by the security arrangements on stage.
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What few realize is that, in every presidency, there are many potential dangers that are never uncovered by security personnel, despite procedures that are many times better than those existing in 1963. Most who have worked on presidential events or in presidential protection can cite examples, though they do so only on an off-the-record basis (preventing authors like me from recounting them). At my college, the University of Virginia, we still recall the
lengthy visit of President George H. W. Bush for his “education summit” in 1989. One major event, a breakfast for the nation’s governors and spouses, was held out in the open air, on the terraces of Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda, at the head of his architectural masterpiece, an “academical village” consisting of ten large faculty pavilions and dozens of student rooms on “the Lawn.” Towering right above the terrace on one side is Pavilion II, which the Secret Service tried to secure because of the obvious danger of a sharpshooter’s perch just a few feet away from the president and his summit cohost, at the time a little-known governor by the name of Bill Clinton. But the Secret Service never checked the pavilion’s attic, where there is a window with a direct view of the terrace. A couple of days after the summit, hunting rifles and ammunition were discovered there. As one university official put it, “So much for bomb-sniffing dogs and Secret Service thoroughness.”
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Circumstances only became tenser with the election of the nation’s first African American chief executive. The journalist and author Ronald Kessler reported that “threats against [Barack] Obama [have risen] by as much as 400 percent compared with when President [George W.] Bush was in office.” In November 2011, a disturbed twenty-one-year-old man from Idaho opened fire on the White House, striking a pane of protective glass on the south side of the mansion. Fortunately, no one was injured during the incident. In 2012, police arrested another twenty-one-year-old who posted threats against the president on his Twitter page and compared himself to Lee Harvey Oswald.
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Looking back, it is mind-boggling how naïve—some would say lax—the Secret Service was about presidential security in 1963. Contrary to some published accounts, the limousine was not armored, and even the bubbletop was just a glassy plastic called Plexiglas.
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Even more surprising is the fact that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed greater protection than the president of the United States. In 1964, Hoover lent his government-owned bulletproof car to President Johnson while the presidential limousine received long-overdue security upgrades.
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There was also little crowd control in many instances. Presidents were permitted to ride in long motorcades past tall buildings with hundreds of open windows, any one of which could have hidden an assassin. This was a disaster waiting to happen, and just about everyone in authority at the time knew it.