Margaret Truman Read online

  In the beginning, the president had no protectors. Thomas Jefferson included guardhouses in his plans to complete the White House but no one, including him, implemented the idea. Luckily, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe escaped unscathed and unthreatened, except for Madison’s encounter with those red-coated pyromaniacs in 1814.

  John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson displayed no interest in employing bodyguards, although Jackson could have used them. On January 30, 1835, he was striding through the rotunda of the Capitol when an assassin stepped out of the crowd and aimed a pistol at his heart from a distance of about three feet. The gun barked but only the cap exploded, not the charge that fired the bullet. Cursing, the would-be killer whipped another pistol from beneath his coat and pulled that trigger. The same thing happened.

  The infuriated Jackson bashed his attacker with his cane and seven or eight congressmen piled on top of the man, who shouted that Jackson was preventing him from becoming king of England.

  The two guns were taken to an armory where experts tested them. They were in perfect working order and fired bullets the first time someone pulled their triggers. The experts estimated the odds against both guns failing to work were about 1 in 125,000.

  If there is any conclusion that can be drawn from this incident, it may be that some presidents lead charmed lives and others are just unlucky.

  III

  Abraham Lincoln began receiving death threats almost from the day he was elected. He had won with only forty percent of the popular vote, which left a lot of the country angry. By the time the new president set out for Washington, D.C., in February 1861, most of the South had seceded and the atmosphere was even more rancid. Lincoln’s former law partner and a professional detective made the journey with him, armed with knives and pistols.

  As the war between the North and the South escalated, so did Lincoln’s death threats. There were more than enough to make him acutely conscious of his safety. He saw to it that the doormen and many of the inside servants were armed. A contingent of plainclothesmen from the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police was hired with instructions to conceal their guns by wearing suits that were a size too big for them.

  In this tense atmosphere, First Lady Mary Lincoln became the victim of an apparent assassination attempt. In July of 1863, she was staying in a house at the Soldiers’ Home in northeast Washington, where the Lincolns spent their summers. Confederate and Union armies were locked in a death struggle near the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Desperate to hear some news, the first lady climbed into her carriage and ordered the driver to head for the White House at top speed.

  As they hurtled down the road, the carriage suddenly disintegrated. Mrs. Lincoln and the coachman were flung headfirst into the dirt. By a miracle, they both escaped serious injury. Many people concluded that the carriage had been tampered with in the hope of killing the president.

  Another time, when Lincoln was riding out to spend the night at the Soldiers’ Home, a gunshot startled his horse. The president thought it was an accidental discharge, until someone inspected his hat and found a bullet hole. Thereafter, he never rode anywhere without a cavalry escort.

  Despite his precautions, Lincoln still fell victim to an assassin’s bullet. He died because he and his guards wrongly assumed that with the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, the Civil War was over and there was no longer any need for vigilance. The moral of the tragic story of Lincoln’s decision to go to Ford’s Theater on Good Friday night is one that the modern Secret Service never forgets. A president is never safe, anytime, anywhere.

  IV

  En route to that grim conclusion, two other presidents had extremely narrow escapes. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, stepped out of his office on the second floor one day to find a madman with a loaded gun rampaging down the hall. Johnson shouted for help and several servants and aides leaped on the man, who for some unknown reason did not pull the trigger.

  Next on the close call list was Benjamin Harrison. One evening in 1891, shouts and the sounds of a struggle drew him to the Red Room. He found two doorkeepers wrestling with a deranged man wielding a knife. The president helped the doormen pin the intruder down and cut a length of window cord to tie him up.

  These incidents were quickly forgotten, but the deaths of two other presidents could not be so easily overlooked. James Garfield was struck down by the bullets of a crazed job seeker as he walked through the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad Station in July of 1881. Next to die was William McKinley, in a scene that no modern Secret Service man can read about without wincing.

  The president was in Buffalo, New York, to open an exposition. On September 5, 1901, he arrived at the exposition grounds for a public reception that was supposed to last only ten minutes. Twice McKinley’s secretary, George Cortelyou, had scrubbed this event, arguing that it was dangerous. Twice the president had written it back into the schedule, saying: “No one would wish to hurt me.”

  Although Cortelyou dropped the subject, he made sure there was plenty of security. Eighteen exposition policemen and eleven well-armed soldiers formed a lane through which people passed to greet the president. Three Secret Service agents were also on hand.

  The Secret Service had been organized by the Treasury Department in 1865 to investigate and prevent counterfeiting. It was not responsible for protecting the president but its agents helped with security on an informal basis. Unfortunately, the arrangements were so informal that no one was really in charge. Nor did the agency have any system to detect potential killers before they struck. One of these, a man named Leon Czolgosz (pronounced chol-gosh) entered the line of handshakers without the slightest difficulty.

  Czolgosz, a native of Cleveland, had suffered a mental breakdown some years earlier. He drifted into anarchism, a philosophy that considered all rulers evil, and became obsessed with the assassination of the king of Italy in 1900 by an American-born anarchist. Czolgosz had been talking about killing McKinley ever since.

  Incredibly, not one of the supposedly alert guards noticed when Czolgosz, while standing in the receiving line, drew a pistol from his pocket and wrapped a handkerchief around it, making it look as if he were wearing a bandage on his right hand. By awful coincidence, the man just ahead of him had an authentic bandage on his right hand. When the man reached the president, he said: “Excuse my left hand, Mr. President.” McKinley smiled and shook his left hand.

  When Czolgosz approached the president, he, too, extended his left hand. As McKinley reached for it, the anarchist fired two shots through the handkerchief at point-blank range. The president toppled backward into the arms of those around him. Fatally wounded, he died eight days later.

  The sad story almost speaks for itself. Today, the Secret Service would very likely have heard of Czolgosz before he even got to Buffalo. Assuming the killer made it that far, they never would have let him get away with his gun-wrapped-in-a-handkerchief ruse. Even the innocent man who preceded him would have been hustled off before he got anywhere near the president.

  V

  After the McKinley assassination, the Secret Service was put in charge of protecting the president and two agents were assigned full-time to the White House detail. Even then there were lapses.

  Theodore Roosevelt often had evening appointments. Most of his callers were known in advance, but occasionally there were people whom the president had asked to stop by without bothering to add their names to his schedule.

  One evening a man appeared in full evening dress, complete with top hat, and informed the usher on duty at the front door that he had an appointment with the president. The man was invited to step into the Red Room and another usher went upstairs to tell the president that Mr. John Smith was there to see him. Roosevelt could not recall making an appointment with Mr. Smith but he decided to see him anyway.

  The president went downstairs and within minutes pressed the call bell that summoned Chief Usher Ike Hoover to the Red Room. When Hoover entered, Roosevelt walked over to him
and said quietly, “Take this crank out of here.”

  The president quickly left the room by another door while the chief usher signaled for help. When the visitor was searched, he was found to be carrying a large-caliber pistol.

  With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the White House became a magnet for people who blamed the president for the collapse of the nation’s economy. Herbert Hoover was inundated with death threats, crank letters, and bizarre visitors.

  As a result, forty to fifty men were assigned to the White House Police Force and two Secret Service men accompanied the president whenever he went out. When he traveled, the number of agents was increased to eight or ten and additional men were recruited from Secret Service field offices in the areas he was visiting. In addition, White House visitors were subjected to greater scrutiny. Briefcases, cameras, and women’s purses had to be inspected before their owners were admitted and anyone carrying a package was forbidden to approach the president.

  In spite of this extra effort, slipups still occurred. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s oldest son, Jimmy, tells a story that the Secret Service would rather forget. One night during World War II, he was home on leave and joined his parents at the White House for dinner. Afterward they watched a movie. When the lights came on, a neatly dressed young man, a complete stranger, was standing next to FDR.

  Instead of brandishing a weapon, however, the interloper asked for the president’s autograph. Somehow, apparently for a lark, he had gotten past the doormen and the Secret Service to penetrate the heart of the house. FDR gave him the autograph and the embarrassed Secret Service men escorted him to the door. You can be sure this breach of White House security never happened again.

  VI

  These days, there are an estimated two hundred agents assigned to the White House, although they are not all on duty at the same time. Other Secret Service agents protect such potential targets as the vice president, presidential and vice presidential candidates and nominees, former presidents and their spouses, and visiting heads of state. In addition, the Secret Service continues to investigate counterfeiting and other types of financial fraud.

  The Secret Service agents assigned to the White House detail wear civilian clothes and operate from a command post under the Oval Office. Agents are stationed near the secondfloor living area and at one of the doors leading to the Oval Office. At least one agent accompanies the president whenever he leaves the family quarters.

  The Secret Service also has a Uniformed Division. Its officers are posted at strategic areas around the White House. One unit, wearing black combat gear and silver helmets, cruises the President’s Park on multigear mountain bikes. Another, the Secret Service Counter-sniper Team, is stationed on the White House roof whenever protectees are entering or leaving the building or are anywhere on the grounds.

  VII

  Not a little of the Secret Service’s commitment to presidential safety emanates from tall, strong-jawed Edmund Starling. He started his job at the White House in 1914. In the course of his career, he worked for, or with, Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt. In those days the government paid for practically nothing except the Secret Service man’s gun. Starling and his fellow agents had to buy their own evening clothes so they could participate in White House receptions.

  Probably because he looked so physically impressive, Starling was often mistaken for the president. One day, Starling and Calvin Coolidge were out for a walk near the White House not long after Warren Harding died and Coolidge had become yet another accidental president.

  As they passed a gang of laborers digging a ditch, the Irish foreman spotted them and said to a Secret Service man a few feet ahead of them: “What a fine-looking fellow the new president is. So tall and straight! Who’s the little fellow with him?”

  The agent quietly informed the foreman that the little fellow was the president. “Glory be to God!” the Irishman said. “Now ain’t it a grand country when a wee man like that can get to be the grandest of them all?”

  Like many presidents, Calvin Coolidge at first declined to take the Secret Service seriously, and was always trying to sneak out of the White House without them. Starling converted this habit into a game, which he invariably won. He asked the staff to let him know when the president was planning to leave the mansion and what exit he would take.

  One day Coolidge was sure he had won. He had descended to the White House basement and slipped out a side door at the east entrance. As he passed the sentry box, Starling stepped out and said: “Good morning, Mr. President.” Cal did not speak to him for the entire walk.

  VIII

  One of the largest units of the Secret Service’s Washington office is its Technical Security Division, which provides security devices for the White House. The division has installed such low-tech protection as the fat concrete stanchions, called bollards, that line the sidewalks around the mansion, as well as such high-tech apparatus as the electronic locator boxes that indicate where their protectees are every minute of the day and night.

  Among the other devices the division can take credit for are the hydraulic gates at the vehicular entrances, the video and alarm systems along the perimeter and the radioactivity detectors in the areas adjacent to the Oval Office to indicate the presence of any nuclear devices.

  The Technical Security Division also handles packages and letters addressed to the White House that might contain lethal substances. Packages can be X-rayed at a Secret Service examining room several blocks away from the White House where they are also tested for timing devices. If the thing ticks, it is immediately soaked in oil to gum up the machinery— a good reason not to send any president a watch or clock as a gift.

  If the Secret Service has reason to suspect a package is deadly, it is placed in a special egg-shaped bomb carrier mounted on a truck that can withstand the blast of fifty sticks of dynamite. The package is then driven to a deserted area where a specially trained agent opens it with grappling hooks operated from outside the truck.

  IX

  Federal law provides Secret Service protection for presidential families, a mandate that has involved the agents in some unlikely assignments for brawny males trained to do battle with killers.

  One of these family assignments still makes me chuckle every time I think of it. Two agents were ordered to protect Barbara Ann Eisenhower, President Eisenhower’s twelve-year-old granddaughter, while she attended an all-girls camp in West Virginia. The agents lived in a tent next to Barbara Ann’s and were soon participating in cookouts, campfires, and Indian dances. The twelve-year-olds were entranced to have these two proto-heroes in their midst. At the end of the summer they made them members of their sacred campers’ club— the only males ever so honored.

  The agents assigned to guard Lyndon Johnson’s older daughter, Lynda Bird, encountered even more complications. She belonged to Zeta Tau Alpha at the University of Texas in Austin. The sorority house was in a large white colonial mansion near the campus. After some no doubt delicate negotiations, the Secret Service persuaded the Zeta Taus to allow two Secret Service agents into their all-female ménage. The guys operated out of a small first-floor room equipped with a closed-circuit TV system that enabled them to see everyone who entered the house. The room also contained a two-way radio and enough guns to hold off a small army.

  Nowadays, the Secret Service has women in its ranks. With female agents, the job of guarding presidential daughters and granddaughters is a lot less sticky. But it doesn’t have nearly as much potential for amusement.

  X

  In their efforts to keep the residents of the White House safe, the Secret Service is determined to leave nothing to chance. The thought of a president being attacked on home turf appalls them, which undoubtedly explains a story told to me by a recent visitor to the West Wing. While using the men’s room, he noticed that the neatly folded paper hand towels were imprinted with “The President’s House” and blithely pocketed a couple of them as souvenirs.
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  When he emerged, a Secret Service agent fell in step beside him and asked him to return the towels. There would be no charge, the agent added with a smile. It seems that the men’s room is monitored by a two-way mirror to make sure no one decides to load a pistol or set the fuse of a bomb in there.

  Some people may think this is carrying security a bit too far. But in and around the White House, eternal vigilance is the price of safety. At seven A.M. on December 6, 2001, the Secret Service arrested a twenty-six-year-old man “acting suspiciously” near the southwest gate. He was armed with a foot-long knife and when he led them to his pickup truck, they found an assault rifle, another rifle with a scope that snipers use to kill people at a distance, and a loaded handgun. The man, who had no fixed address, was jailed on weapons charges.

  Such incidents, which barely get a paragraph in the newspapers, only underscore that being president of the United States is dangerous work. I am sure every member of a presidential family pauses now and then to thank God that the Secret Service is on the job. I do it regularly.

  Questions for Discussion

  Can a president ever be completely safe?

  How might the history of the country have been different if the Secret Service had been guarding Abraham Lincoln?

  How has modern technology helped the Secret Service do its job?