Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service

by Petro, Joseph

  In the final analysis, though, what matters most to the Secret Service is that we lost the president. We failed. And in my mind, it was a failure of negotiation. The bubble top was a negotiation. Had the agents pushed harder to put it on the limousine, would they have saved the president? Undoubtedly. So I’d often wonder, How hard do I have to push? I’d ask myself, If something happens, will it be because I did not push enough? I constantly worried when I was responsible for the president. There was a persistent uneasiness always churning just below the surface wherever we went anywhere with him. And that uneasiness would torment me on foreign trips. My counterpart in some other country would try to assure me, “We’re responsible for the president’s safety while he’s here.” I’d have to tell him that he might think he is responsible, but if something happened to the president, anywhere in the world, the Secret Service would have to answer to Congress and to the American people. Our responsibility is simply not negotiable.

  The assassination of Robert Kennedy illustrates the significant difference between a bodyguard and a protective detail. On June 5, 1968, Kennedy finished a campaign speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and was heading out of the hotel through a pantry next to the kitchen. His bodyguard, L.A. Rams football star Rosie Grier, was there primarily to protect him from overenthusiastic crowds, not to prevent an assassination. Would Bobby Kennedy have been murdered by Sirhan Sirhan if he’d had Secret Service protection? The answer is a qualified no. Had Secret Service agents been around, Sirhan Sirhan would have had to change his tactic. Without the Secret Service, Bobby Kennedy was much more vulnerable.

  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on April 4, 1968, on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. In this case, agents might have been a deterrent to assassination, but the problem was the balcony and the fact that it’s not easy to protect someone from a sniper. No one with Dr. King was looking at windows, as agents would have. But then, agents would not have put him in a second-floor room where the only way in and out was along an open balcony. We would have kept him on the ground floor, where we could control physical and visual access to him. A lot of the decisions that were made by Dr. King and his staff would not have been made by Secret Service agents.

  The attack on Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, is a classic case of dealing with an assassin who is willing to give up his own life. It’s tough to defend against someone who is willing to die—as we’ve seen all too often since September 11—chances are he can get close enough to his target to be a very serious threat. Mehmet Ali Agca was just another face in a crowd of nearly a hundred thousand people that day, until he got within point-blank range and fired several times. The pope was in a wide-open car with Vatican security officers forming an inner perimeter around him. But there were no effective middle or outer perimeters, making it impossible to protect him in that crowd.

  The attempted murder of Alabama governor George Wallace in May 1972 is another case we’ve studied closely. As a candidate for president, Wallace was attending a political rally at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland. He spoke to the small crowd from behind a bulletproof shield, but then moved away from the podium to shake hands in the crowd. Suddenly, a twenty-two-year-old man named Arthur Bremer appeared with a .38 and got off five shots. All five hit Wallace, who was crippled for life. Three other people were also wounded, including agent Nick Zarvos, who took a bullet in the neck. Looking at the films, you see that, as soon as Bremer fired, agents dived for him, because that’s what they were trained to do. They expected that, if there was a problem, it would come from the crowd and that there would be a gun. In those days, crowds weren’t subjected to magnetometers. After the shooting, Bremer’s diary was found. In it he wrote that he’d tried to kill Richard Nixon but could never get close enough because the Secret Service was always in the way.

  How many times does that happen? We don’t know. How many times do people think about doing something but stop because there are Secret Service agents between them and their target? More than we will ever know.

  There were two attempts on the life of President Gerald Ford. The first occurred in Sacramento, California, on September 5, 1975, when a strange woman named Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme—a follower of mass murderer Charles Manson—broke through a crowd and pointed a handgun at the president. My friend Larry Buendorf was working the rope line right where Fromme was standing. He spotted the .45 coming out of her coat pocket, and lunged for it. He got his thumb between the hammer and the firing pin so that when she pulled the trigger, the gun didn’t fire. He wrestled her to the ground as other agents arrived. By that time, the president was in the car and out of there. Fromme got close because we didn’t run people through metal detectors during those years.

  Seventeen days later, in San Francisco, the president was just coming out of the St. Francis Hotel to get into the limousine when Sara Jane Moore fired off a round from across the street. The bullet missed the president and lodged in the wall of the hotel. Ironically, the night before the attack, Moore had been interviewed by the Secret Service because she’d written a threatening letter. After talking to her, an agent determined that she wasn’t dangerous.

  A few weeks after that, President Ford was giving a speech in an auditorium at the University of Michigan, with balloons in the room, and one of the balloons popped. Ford immediately ducked behind the podium as agents stood up and reached for their weapons. One agent was unfairly criticized in the media for reacting like that, but he did what he was trained to do. Everybody reacted properly. Even Ford was criticized for being so edgy, but a bursting balloon can sound just like a .22.

  We study those assassinations, along with the murders of John Lennon, Indira Gandhi, Benigno Aquino, and Anwar Sadat, to name a few. But it was the attempt on Ronald Reagan that significantly changed the way we protect the president.

  On March 30, 1981, the seventy-year-old president had been in office for just seventy days. After he spoke to a labor union group at the Hilton Hotel on Connecticut Avenue in downtown Washington, agents escorted him out through the special “presidents only” door at the side of the main door and onto the street. A rope line had been set up between that private entrance and the hotel entrance to keep reporters back. But a twenty-five-year-old man named John Hinckley had made his way into the press group and had a .22-caliber revolver in his pocket. Just as the president got to the limousine and raised his left arm to wave at the reporters fifteen feet away, Hinckley squeezed off five shots.

  One bullet hit press secretary James Brady in the forehead. Another hit District of Columbia police officer Thomas Delahanty in the neck. A third hit agent Tim McCarthy in the chest as he turned and stood up straight to put himself in front of the president. Whether Tim had time to decide that he would sacrifice himself for the president, I don’t know, but he was where he was supposed to be, doing what he was trained to do—act instinctively. It all happened so fast that it’s hard to imagine that Tim, or anyone else, had time to think. Mayhem had broken out in under two seconds.

  The back doors on that particular presidential limousine opened to the rear, which is the opposite of a regular vehicle. The president reached out to catch himself, and at precisely that moment a bullet ricocheted through the opening between the door and the structure of the car. It was a totally freakish shot, because the president was actually behind the armored door. As Hinckley was firing, Jerry Parr, the agent in charge of PPD, and Ray Shaddick, who was the shift supervisor, shoved the president into the car. He landed heavily on the transmission riser in the middle of the floor of the limousine just as Parr piled on top of him and Ray slammed the door shut. The car sped off for the White House.

  In the wake of the attempt, there was much publicity about how Hinckley had become obsessed with actress Jodie Foster after seeing her in the 1976 film Taxi Driver. To impress her, he decided to mimic the film’s main character—played by Robert De Niro—who plots to kill a p
residential candidate. It was later disclosed that, in October 1980, Hinckley had been arrested at Nashville airport with three handguns in his luggage on the same day that President Jimmy Carter was in town. More than twenty years after his attempted murder of the president, it has been revealed that Hinckley is still obsessed with Foster and, for a while, exchanged correspondence with serial killer Ted Bundy. To the chagrin of the Secret Service, Hinckley has now been allowed out of his mental institution on a day-release program. I am not alone in believing that Hinckley only escaped life in prison on a technicality—his insanity plea—and am not pleased that he’s out there somewhere, walking the streets, for several hours at a stretch.

  Secret Service agents on the scene, and Jerry Parr in particular, used their training to save the president’s life. In the limousine Jerry started running his hands around the president’s chest, back, and shoulders feeling for blood. When he didn’t find any, his first thought was that, luckily, the president had escaped serious injury. That’s when deep-red, frothy blood started flowing out of the president’s mouth. Jerry yelled to the driver to go to George Washington University Hospital, because from his training, Jerry knew blood that color indicated a lung injury.

  The motorcade instantly diverted. The hospital was alerted by radio that the president was on his way, and the limousine arrived within a couple of minutes. It was hectic and traumatic, but everything worked precisely the way it was supposed to, exactly the way we had trained to make it work. Especially Jerry Parr’s reaction. Had he not understood the significance of the blood, he would not have realized the extent of the president’s injuries, and Ronald Reagan surely would have died.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ON THE ROAD

  There is no time to think when all hell breaks loose, but there is plenty of time to prepare for it.

  The critical question is, What if?

  When I was with the president, I asked myself that question constantly. I would sit on a stage or on a dais or I’d be walking with him, always watching the audience, always within arm’s reach should I need to grab him, always asking myself, What if? And the answer to that question carries with it a substantial burden that agents didn’t face fifty years ago because, these days, everything the president does in public is videotaped. Somewhere there is always a camera running, just in case, even in the motorcade when one of the news crews is allowed to stick a camera out of the top of a press van. Agents know that if we are forced to react, whatever we do will be studied again and again. It will be dissected by Congress and the media nanosecond by nanosecond. So the thoughts at the front of my mind had to be, What if a shot goes off, how should I react? What if something happens, where’s the fastest way to safety? What if all hell breaks out, what should I do?

  To have answers at hand, every aspect of every event needs to be planned, reviewed, and rehearsed. We build into every event all the possible permutations and contingencies for any crisis. On paper that’s easy. In practice there are real conflicts between what the president’s staff wants the president to do, what the media expects of the president, and what the Secret Service feels it must do to protect the president. The staff is looking for controlled public access to the president, the media wants total access to the president regardless of the public, and we would prefer that no one at all gets too close to him. Too often, we get caught in the middle of those battles, and it’s the Secret Service that takes the blame when one side or the other isn’t happy.

  It presents a difficult balancing act. The trick is to get everyone’s issues resolved early on, to define the conflicting objectives, and to find solutions to all the problems—genuine and potential—long before the president comes into view. The difference, then, between a good advance agent and a great advance agent is how well he or she anticipates the unexpected. It can be something benign, such as the president needing to go to the bathroom. But you have to know where the bathroom is and have an agent already there so that when you arrive with the president, the place is secure. Or there could be a minor emergency. Say the president cuts himself and starts bleeding, or he takes ill, as George H.W. Bush did at a dinner in Japan. You need to arrange for a secure place where you can take the president so that a doctor can deal with the problem. Or there could be a very serious emergency, like a shooting or a heart attack or a stroke. You need to know the fastest route to the proper hospital from every point along the route—not just any hospital, but one equipped to deal with trauma, which may not be the nearest—and then you need a “hospital agent” already stationed there to coordinate the president’s emergency arrival. The measure of great advance agents is that they are always able to deal with any interruption to the schedule, on a scale from zero to ten, because they’ve taken every conceivable interruption into account and made plans to deal with it.

  With so much at stake, the advance process—the planning for any presidential appearance—has become a science. I witnessed the Nixon, Ford, and Carter White Houses as a young agent, and later the White House of George H.W. Bush, and I can say that none of them did it with the dexterity, competence, and talent of the Reagan White House. Much of the credit for that goes to Mike Deaver and Bill Henkel.

  Deaver was the pragmatic visionary who could predict issues and know where he needed to focus. A short, thin, balding, quiet man—a keen observer of all things around him—he had an absolute grasp of what made sense for Ronald Reagan. He had a terrific sense of an event and knew how to create a positive atmosphere around it. He was one of the two men who called the president “Governor”—the other was a ranch hand—and the president liked that greeting. You could see that there was a deep affection between them. What’s more, Deaver and President Reagan could read each other’s brain waves. Fiercely loyal, Deaver had a deep understanding of the president that allowed him, in a measured and philosophical way, to sculpt the Ronald Reagan image. It was Deaver, for example, who came up with the “Picture of the Day” concept. Wherever the president went, Deaver was always looking for a special setting so that one picture a day would help to shape and perpetuate the image. Deaver never missed a trick.

  Bill Henkel was different. He was just as demanding as Deaver—and as smart, perceptive, and visually adept as Deaver—but he had more of an ego and was much more volatile. A natty dresser who’d played football in high school and college, Bill learned his lessons the hard way, in the Nixon White House. He had joined the staff in 1970, at the age of twenty-nine, as an assistant in the advance office, and within two years he was running it. The following year he was promoted to special assistant to the president. Nixon made his now infamous 1972 trip to North Carolina for a Billy Graham revival while on Bill’s watch. The war in Vietnam was raging, and Henkel, acting on orders, instructed the Secret Service to keep protesters out of the event. So agents at the doors “profiled” people coming through, allowing in well-dressed men and women and turning away anyone who looked like a possible problem. Shortly after the event, a huge lawsuit was filed against Nixon, Henkel, and the Republican Party for discrimination. Because the Secret Service had carried out Henkel’s orders, we got sued, too. Years later, when I was working for the director of the Secret Service, the suit was still in progress.

  After working for Nixon, Bill served for a few years as deputy assistant secretary of commerce before going to Wall Street. By the time he returned to the White House in 1982 to take up his old post as special assistant to the president and director of the Presidential Advance Office, Henkel was streetwise and savvy, while still maintaining some of the old Nixon gruffness.

  We locked horns the first time we worked together on a preadvance trip to Kansas City in April 1983. The president was going to appear at a high school on the outskirts of town. All presidents like to visit high schools because students always show a lot of energy and enthusiasm, which makes for good footage on the evening news. Playing off that, Bill intended to put a group of students on the stage behind the president. That’s not something the Secret Servi
ce likes, because it’s very distracting for the agents. We can’t realistically be expected to watch everyone in front of the president and behind him at the same time. We want the audience in front of us and a clear escape route behind us. We don’t want to trample over anyone trying to get out of the place.

  As thirty of us on the preadvance trip stood around in the middle of a high school gym, Bill went on about students behind the president until I piped up. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

  Henkel flew into a rage. “We will do whatever we want to.” And his tirade lasted several minutes.

  I didn’t appreciate the public berating, so as we were getting ready to leave, I said that I needed to speak with him privately. We went out a nearby door, which led to a loading dock behind the gym. There, next to the Dumpsters, I told him that I found his behavior inappropriate and that it was no way for us to begin a relationship. I’m not sure he expected to be spoken to that way. But once I’d made my point, I calmly explained why it wasn’t a good idea to have all these kids behind the president. Decidedly uneasy out there with me, Bill said he merely wanted a picture with colorful images that come from a crowd behind the president. I suggested that he didn’t need hundreds of people, that he could get the same effect with forty people by putting the high school band behind the president. They were kids in brightly colored uniforms, and they had instruments to carry, which meant they’d be fairly static. I said, “That would be manageable,” Bill said, “I can live with that,” and he got his picture.