America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  She instructed Rowley to establish firm guidelines for the agents. She wanted them to be with the children only during the day, “from the time they leave home in the morning until the time they return home for supper around 5:30 P.M.” She maintained that she did not want agents in her apartment. “The children are secure in the apartment in New York at night.” She was especially concerned about the level of protection in New Jersey on weekends. “Agents tramp outside the children’s windows all night, talking into their walkie-talkies,” she complained. “Cars of each agent pile up in the driveway so that our little country house looks like a used car lot.”

  Jackie claimed further that despite their aggressive and intrusive methods, the agents still managed to lose track of John and Caroline. She requested that the Secret Service place a trailer at the limit of her New Jersey property, where the agents could stay when they were not driving the children. She did not want them coming by the house unless specifically asked to by a member of the household. She directed them to park their cars on a road outside the property so that the children would “never see any cars but their station wagon and my own car.” Finally, she requested that only one agent drive them and that protection in the evening be provided by local police, not the Secret Service.

  In Greece, she saw little need for Secret Service protection. “Between the personnel on the island and the sailors on the ship, there is a force of about 75 men to enforce security,” she wrote. Jackie asked that just one agent accompany the children to Greece, assisting only when they were traveling. She pointed out that they would be flying on Olympic Airways, which was owned by her husband and where “security measures will be taken.” Furthermore, the one agent in Greece would have to live in a village about a twelve-minute speedboat ride away from Scorpios. “The children will never be safer than they will be on Scorpios or the Christina,” she wrote. She asked for similar arrangements when they traveled through Europe. “The children are growing up. They must see new things and travel as their father would’ve wished them to do. They must be as free as possible, not encumbered by a group of men who will be lost in foreign countries, so that one ends up protecting them rather than vice-versa.”

  Rowley responded immediately, reassuring Jackie that he was “more than interested in satisfying your concerns and will strive to do so without compromising the security of your children.” He made clear, however, that he would be the one to decide how the agents protected her children, clarifying that he would review the procedures but “will most certainly consider your suggestions in my decision.”

  The review resulted in a six-page point-by-point draft rebutting all of Jackie’s complaints. The memo began by spelling out some basic differences. She wanted a total of four agents; they wanted eight. She called for eliminating late-afternoon and evening shifts; the Secret Service contended that “part-time protection cannot be considered acceptable.” The law, it pointed out, “charges the Secret Service with responsibility for protecting the children 24 hours a day.” Mrs. Kennedy was mistaken in believing that the children were safe in the apartment with her in the evening and night hours. “Anyone with serious intent to harm the children can learn at what time our security is withdrawn and act accordingly.” She had requested that agents not remain at school, but the review responded that the school might appear safe, “but the function of a security precaution is to guard against more than only the obvious and the foreseeable threat.” Besides, Rowley pointed out, “I would be remiss in my duties if I were to assume that security responsibility vested in the Secret Service by statute could be left to the good offices of others or omitted because of an appearance of safety.”

  The review went on to describe her proposed arrangements for Far Hills as “inadequate.” Local zoning laws prevented them from placing a trailer at the end of her property, and her request that “agents never appear in the vicinity of the house except when summoned” represented “an impossible condition under which to operate while attempting to ensure that no one gains unauthorized entry to the house.”

  Mrs. Onassis never saw this point-by-point rebuttal of her complaints. Rowley likely feared that she would get defensive if they sent such a detailed response, so instead he sent a succinct seven-paragraph letter in March 1969. In it, the Secret Service director warned her that they were still “receiving communications from mentally ill persons who represent a potential threat to your children,” and that “there is the ever-present threat of the kidnapper.” He also told her that the possibility of an aircraft hijacking remained “a great concern.” These reasons, Rowley argued, “we must consider in planning security for your children, and at this time these factors do not indicate that we can safely reduce security.” The tactic seemed to work, because the conversations with Mrs. Onassis culminated in a meeting in her apartment on April 18, 1969, during which she assured Rowley “that she was most pleased with the detail and appreciative of the manner in which it has been functioning.”

  It turned out that the fears of hijacking were quite real. On July 15, 1972, the Greek government announced that security forces had arrested eight Greeks who had been planning to kidnap John. One of the suspects told police, “We could have blackmailed her for as much money as we wanted.” The government claimed the kidnappers belonged to a larger plot to capture ambassadors, bankers, and other prominent people who vacationed in Greece. The goal of such hostage taking was to overthrow Greece’s military regime. A Greek military tribunal sentenced two men to prison and gave six others suspended sentences. They ranged in age from twenty-three to forty-five.

  “We were aware of the Greek plot, and we worked closely with the FBI and authorities in Greece, as well as authorities in New York,” Clint Hill recalled. The kidnapping attempt did not, however, lead to changes in the way the service protected John. It was only the most dramatic of the many threats that the agency received. “There were many other kidnapping plots against John,” he stated, “but this one was taken more seriously.” Most of the threats against John consisted of people writing letters and making menacing phone calls. The agents then assessed how realistic the threat seemed. “Do they have the capability and the means to carry out the threat?” Based on the answers to those questions, the agents would then investigate and decide whether this case should go to court so that the individual could be arrested and charged. “These things happened periodically throughout the lifetime that we were responsible for John,” Hill reflected.

  Over the next two years, more minor incidents occurred that aggravated the relationship between Jackie and the Secret Service. In December 1972 John participated in the filming of a new monthly television show starring former Tonight Show host Jack Paar, who was playing with a tiger cub at a New Jersey zoo. At the time, John was accompanied by family friend Lem Billings. Agent John List insisted that John not be allowed into the area with the cub, but Billings overruled him. List then requested three animal trainers “armed with tranquilizer rifles” to accompany him and John into the cage. List also had his firearm drawn. During filming, when one of the tiger cubs attacked Paar, Agent List grabbed John and removed him from the area. John, he wrote, “was in no way alarmed or injured during this incident.” But the agents felt that Mrs. Kennedy was angry with them for allowing the situation to get as far as it did, even though she had given them specific instructions to let Billings decide which activities John could participate in.

  The issue of security came up again dramatically in May 1974 when John was robbed in Central Park of his $145 ten-speed, Italian-made bike and a tennis racquet while on his way to a lesson. John told the police that a boy, roughly eighteen years old, grabbed his bike and rode off into the park. The incident, which made headlines in the New York tabloids and received coverage around the country, forged a near-permanent rupture in Mrs. Onassis’s relationship with the Secret Service.

  That evening, with John safe at home, she sat down with Jack Walsh and explained her reaction.
On the one hand, she told him she was “pleased that this happened to John in that he must be allowed to experience life.” She repeated her complaint that he was “overprotected” and that “unless he is allowed freedom, he will be a vegetable at the age of sixteen” when he lost protection. “She does not want us on his heels,” Walsh wrote his superiors. On the other hand, Jackie could not understand how John had escaped their protection. Her son, she felt, had the worst of two worlds: the agents swarmed around him, making it difficult for him to experience normal life, but still they could not prevent him from being robbed in Central Park. “The Secret Service is supposed to be able to follow counterfeiters all over the place without them knowing they are being followed. Why can’t we do it with John?” she asked. Walsh noted that she was especially worried about all the publicity that the incident had generated. “Although she is glad John had this experience, she is displeased about all the publicity and attention it is receiving because people will think he isn’t being accompanied by anyone, and there is a danger in that.”

  A few days later, Walsh asked Mrs. Onassis if the Secret Service could tighten protection of John. But instead of asking for more security, she rattled off instructions on how the agents needed to protect him. She concluded with an ominous warning: “If anything happens to John, I will not be as easy with the Secret Service as I was the first time.”

  Two weeks later, Mrs. Onassis codified her rules into a formal affidavit to the Secret Service that established the procedures for protecting John.

  No Secret Service agents are to walk alongside John when he is traveling on foot but are to walk across the street from him or are to follow him in such a manner that their presence will not be evident to John.

  While John is in school, Secret Service agents are to remain in their office at school and are not to enter the classroom area or school grounds.

  No Secret Service agents are to accompany John on private aircraft or helicopter.

  No Secret Service agents are to be present or provide protection for John while he is on the yacht Christina or on the island of Scorpios.

  No Secret Service agents are to ride in taxis with John but should use a follow-up car.

  No Secret Service agent shall ride with John in a public bus unless such agents are unknown to him. If no agent accompanies him on the public bus, the regular agents should follow the bus by car.

  No Secret Service agents are to ride with John in the private limousine on his trips from New York City and Far Hills, New Jersey.

  She concluded by acknowledging that these points were “special” and represented “a departure from the Secret Service standard operating procedures.” She did not want to give up Secret Service protection but felt the agents could observe her rules while still protecting John by employing “unobtrusive surveillance traditionally employed in detective work.”

  Her declaration appeared to alarm the Secret Service, which no longer believed it could fulfill its mission while abiding by her demands. David R. Macdonald, assistant secretary of the Secret Service, expressed empathy for her “deep concern that your son grow up in a normal environment,” but he felt that the agency had made “every effort to be as unobtrusive as possible and still carry out its function.” He warned her that their mission to protect John “cannot effectively be accomplished and still comport with your perhaps higher mission of raising your children in a manner that carries on the highest traditions of a great family. The two objectives simply are incompatible.” He made her aware that the restrictions she wished to place on the agents represented “a partial declination of protection.”

  “In other words,” he concluded, “there is no way to provide the level of protection to John that the statute requires under the restrictive circumstances determined by you.”

  Mrs. Onassis rejected Macdonald’s argument that it was her restrictions that had led to the incident in Central Park. Instead, she blamed the agency. She wrote that although the agents knew that John enjoyed riding a bike, “they have not had a bicycle of their own to follow him.” She even accused the agents of being lazy and incompetent, claiming that they “simply drove to the courts and waited for him to appear. They did not attempt to follow him by car or on foot.” Although they knew when he left, they were not in place and prepared to follow him. “They knew his departure time, but they were not out front; they were in the back room calling the governess,” she responded. Finally, she blamed the service for not thinking of installing a bell that would allow the doorman to signal when John was exiting the apartment. “They finally did so at my suggestion,” she wrote, and requested that they now “install a similar bell in the elevator.”

  She concluded her letter with a blistering critique of the Secret Service in general. “What I have always asked of the Secret Service, which seems a not unreasonable request of men trained in police work who should know how to ‘tail’ a suspect without being observed, is that they employ that technique with my children in daily events of childrens’ [sic] lives when accompanying protection is unnecessary.” But she charged that many of the agents were “more comfortable marching side-by-side with the child, calling ‘ETA’ into their walkie-talkies.” This was, she concluded, “their great failing.” She claimed that they made John’s life “a nightmare” and prevented him “from developing the self-reliance he will need when they are gone.”

  In addition to writing letters, Jackie personally called Clint Hill, who was now in a senior position with the agency and with whom she maintained a close relationship. “Most of it was just the usual stuff,” he recalled. “The agents are too close. They’re not allowing John to be like the rest of the kids. He feels different.” Hill reflected that the situation was tough partly because “the agents were frustrated.” Their job was to protect John, which was quite different from running surveillance on a criminal. “In this case, you want to be close enough so that nothing can happen.” In order to fulfill their duties, they needed to stick to John, but then Jackie would call complaining that they were too close. “You can’t satisfy her, and you can’t protect them at the same time.” Hill tried to explain to Jackie that she could not have it both ways, but she refused to listen. She was, Hill admitted, “very difficult.”

  Macdonald asked the exasperated agents involved in the Central Park incident to respond to her letter. The agents stopped just short of calling her a liar. They had a bicycle, they pointed out, but did not use it because the governess had told them that John “would be leaving momentarily for his tennis lesson,” and, since he was running late, she “requested that the agents transport him in a Secret Service vehicle.” The agent then went to the car and waited for John, but he and his cousin William Smith emerged from the building on bicycles and pedaled into Central Park. The agent did not want to leave the car unattended while he went into the building to retrieve a bicycle, so he decided to follow as best he could by car.

  As for her other complaints, they pointed out that they had installed alarms with both the doorman and elevator operator, but neither had proven reliable. “Unfortunately, the doorman, although being instructed to use it to notify the agents of John’s imminent departure, does not always do so,” they wrote. They faced the same problem with the elevator operator, who had been instructed to press a buzzer twice if John or Caroline was leaving the building. But the building had recently installed a self-operated elevator, making a buzzer system obsolete.

  All the frustration that had been building for years now spilled over into their memorandum. The agents pointed out that Mrs. Onassis had “overruled” many of their efforts to improve security for John and Caroline. Once when she was out of town, the agents installed a sprinkler system in the apartment. Hill recalled that they thought “she would appreciate their efforts to protect her family from fire.” Instead, the former first lady demanded that it be removed. Furthermore, to accommodate her, the Secr
et Service was using an additional team of agents from its New York City field office to provide “undercover surveillance” of John. But nothing seemed to please her. Eventually they convinced her to allow them to give the children “small portable emergency alarm systems which they could activate in the event of trouble.” Clint Hill recalled that giving John the buzzer was a compromise with Mrs. Onassis: the agents would feel safer giving him more latitude if they knew he could contact them if in danger.

  John once told me a story about a time when he and friends were playing in Central Park and threw rocks at an older group of teens, who then started pursuing him. John hid under a bush while they combed the area, taunting him, “We know you’re in here. We are going to kick your ass!” John decided it was a good time to test his buzzer. He pressed the button and remembered sirens going off and agents rushing toward him, weapons drawn. The agents forced the teens on the ground while John stood up, dusted himself off, and strolled off toward a waiting car.

  The frustration within the agency was palpable. Once again, the agent in charge never sent his rebuttal to Mrs. Onassis, but he did give it to his superiors. It’s likely that she never knew the depth of the anger and resentment that agents felt toward her. He stated that he did not want to engage in “a long-range, nonproductive debate with Mrs. Onassis” but rather to document their response for their files. They were simply waiting out the clock. Caroline, now sixteen, had lost her protection at this point, and John had only sixteen months left. Macdonald responded to the agent: “I was aware of most of the facts contained in it and agree with you that any discussion of these facts with Mrs. Onassis would be counterproductive.” Their response should be recorded, he concluded, “for posterity, if for no other reason.” Instead, they sent Mrs. Onassis a pleasant note saying they accepted her restrictions and “appreciate the time you have taken to address yourself to this matter.”