Zero fail, p.11
Zero Fail, page 11
“I think it’s best we cancel the next stop, Governor,” the detail leader told Wallace.
But Wallace said he wasn’t that worried. They had traveled all this way, he said. He didn’t want to disappoint his supporters. The caravan sped on to the campaign’s next engagement: the Laurel Plaza Shopping Center on Route 1.
The Wallace entourage arrived in the colonial Maryland town of Laurel at 2:15—way ahead of schedule for the 3 p.m. event. That gave the governor and his wife time to eat a quiet lunch of hamburger steak and put their feet up in a room reserved for them at the Howard Johnson’s motel just down the road from the shopping plaza.
Agents responsible for perimeter security and surveilling the crowd—along with a few who would take over the afternoon shift at 4 p.m.—met for a brief lunch at the Hot Shoppes restaurant on the shopping center plaza. There, advance agent Tom Stephens walked through the outlines of where Wallace would enter and exit and gave each agent their assignment. He added that everyone should keep their eyes out for hotheaded hippies who might re-create the tense scene in Wheaton. As a precaution, county police stationed a rifleman on the shopping center roof.
But the Wallace entourage spilled out of their cars to find a very different audience in Laurel. Smiling spectators. Parents with children. It could have been a Sunday church outing, except for the straw hats and buttons that said Wallace for President.
“It was a very calm crowd, a very nice, congenial crowd,” Cornelia Wallace recalled. “Everything just seemed really nice.”
Wallace began his speech by railing against the high volume of “hypocrisy in Washington, D.C., and I mean among the politicians.” The crowd cheered. He urged bringing the troops home from Vietnam. More cheers.
As the governor spoke, two agents on the protective intelligence squad each paired up with a local police officer and folded into the crowd. Their job was to scan for any suspicious activity or trouble brewing. One of the agents was twenty-eight-year-old Ralph Basham, who had been with the Service for only two years. He would later rise to become director of the agency.
As the governor continued to speak, one of the roving Secret Service agents walked up next to Prince George’s County police officer John Davey, who was standing near the rope line to help control the crowd. “Keep an eye on that guy,” the agent said quietly. He pointed to a young raven-haired man off to Davey’s left, who was wearing a bright orange jersey, a green jacket, and Wallace buttons. The young man has been loudly shouting, “Yay Wallace!”
The man was Daniel Capizzi, a student at Prince George’s County Community College and an ardent Wallace supporter.
Some spectators in the crowd, however, were growing more suspicious about the behavior of another man: a short, blond, almost albino fellow who happened to be standing next to Capizzi.
This was Arthur Bremer.
Capizzi felt uneasy when he suddenly saw the wild-eyed look and grin plastered on Bremer’s face. Bremer kept bumping up against him, too, leading Capizzi to suspect the young man might be gay and trying to make a pass. Bremer spoke to him only once, gently elbowing him and ordering him to applaud the country band performing onstage.
Prince George’s County Police corporal Mike Landrum also took notice of Bremer because of that unsettling grin. He thought it odd how the man rhythmically rocked back and forth as if in a trance. Landrum pointed Bremer out to one of the Secret Service agents standing near the rope line. He wasn’t sure where the agent went next; he never saw the agent approach Bremer.
Wallace, nearing the end of his speech, criticized the “senseless and asinine” federal busing that yanked children out of their neighborhood schools. “You can send them a message,” Wallace said, using his campaign slogan as his standard closing. “Vote for George Wallace tomorrow!”
The crowd clapped and cheered. Wallace waved from his lectern, then came down the front steps of the temporary trailer stage, with a state trooper leading the way. Taylor and Dothard followed on Wallace’s heels. The governor pecked campaign worker Dora Thompson on the cheek as he reached the bottom of the stage, then signed autographs for her and a few others.
As the point man, agent Bill Breen then stepped forward from the base of the stage, intending to meet Wallace when he descended the stairs and lead him to the right, toward his waiting car. Just as Wallace began to fall in line behind Breen, shouts came from the roped-in crowd to the left side of the stage. “Hey, George, over here. Shake hands, shake hands, shake hands,” Bremer yelled loudly.
A few others in the crowd piggybacked on his request. “George, come here, over here,” a woman’s voice called out.
“I suppose I better shake hands,” Wallace muttered to Taylor. He took off his blue suit jacket and handed it to aide Frank Daniel.
“Don’t go, Governor,” Taylor said.
“That’s all right,” Wallace replied.
The detail shifted to follow Wallace’s lead. Taylor, a lanky man nearly a foot taller than the governor, walked behind Wallace to the rope line, placing himself immediately alongside Wallace’s right flank, as every detail leader had done a hundred times before. Trooper Dothard did the same on Wallace’s left side. Other agents filled in along the line to the right and left, and some shielded Wallace’s back.
But on this rope line in Laurel, Maryland, the standard Secret Service choreography got thrown off once more. And changing rote Secret Service protocol on the fly was never a good idea. On a normal rope line, Wallace would move continually to the left as he greeted each person in succession, shaking hands with his right hand. Agents on either side would move in lockstep with him. Agents on the far left would carefully scrutinize the people—especially their demeanor and their hands—before the governor reached them. On this day, Wallace took a few steps to the right instead, apparently to move in the general direction of his car and eventual exit.
But an obstacle blocked their path. Taylor realized it after he tried to move forward, taking a few steps to the right, and bumped into Agent Ralph Peppers ahead of him. Taylor asked for more room; Peppers stepped back from the rope line. Then Taylor saw that a large PA system was in their way. The governor and his team stalled there.
“Governor, this is as far as we can go,” Taylor said.
In that hardly noticeable span of three or four seconds, the five-foot-six-inch Bremer rushed up to the rope through rows of taller spectators and found a tiny opening in the detail’s blind spot. Bremer thrust his left hand forward as if he planned to shake Wallace’s hand.
Bremer fired his .38 caliber revolver once, paused, then fired four more times in rapid succession.
All but one of the shots struck the governor. Wallace fell backward onto the black macadam pavement, a bloody hole in his blue shirt below his sternum, his arms flung out at his sides. Trooper Dothard, whose right arm had been pressed against Wallace’s left arm when the shots were fired, saw Wallace fall backward and then realized he, too, was falling. A bullet had passed through the flesh of his abdomen.
Agent Nick Zarvos spun backward to the left, not yet realizing what had happened. He clutched at his jaw and began spitting blood.
Taylor and Agent James Mitchell both saw the faceless hand with a gun and lunged for the body behind it. Mitchell landed on top of Bremer with his knees in his back, losing his shoe in the scuffle. Agent Peppers held Bremer’s head, squished sideways, to the pavement. He and Mitchell ended up having to protect Bremer as some men in the crowd yelled, “Get him! Kill him! Kill him!”
Cornelia Wallace had been talking to campaign workers and rushed to her husband. She fell to her knees to cover his body, spreading herself over his frame.
“I thought they’d shoot him again. And so I jumped on top of him, trying to cover up his head and his heart and his vital organs, his lungs. And there just wasn’t anybody around him. Well, the Alabama bodyguard had been shot and blown out and knocked down. The Secret Service agent that was—these two were supposed to protect his body—got shot in the jaw and was vomiting and vomiting blood,” Cornelia Wallace recalled in a PBS documentary. “I kept saying, ‘George, I’m going to take you home. I’m going to take you home. And we’re going home now.’ ”
Wallace’s campaign manager had once boasted that Cornelia’s photogenic good looks and energetic personality were going to help take her husband all the way to the White House. He pledged he would make her “the Jackie Kennedy of the Rednecks,” a nickname that tickled her. That hot Monday afternoon, on her knees in the Laurel parking lot and sprawled over her husband’s body, the resemblance was darker.
Blood welled up in a puddle around the bullet hole in Wallace’s stomach, and a wet maroon circle bloomed on his dress shirt. Smaller trickles of blood showed where bullets had hit his arm. Cornelia had grasped onto Wallace’s frame in the seconds after his fall. When Secret Service agents and police officers lifted her to let a doctor tend to the governor, drops of her husband’s blood dotted the hem of her yellow dress.
CHAPTER 6
THE PRESIDENT’S SPIES
Around 4:30 p.m. Monday, President Nixon was in the Oval Office after finishing a jam-packed afternoon of meetings on the budget. He had just started a meeting with his secretary of state and the chief executive of Pepsi to discuss his upcoming trip to Moscow. About fifteen minutes into their meeting, the president’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, interrupted to ask for a moment. He pulled his boss into a side room adjoining the Oval Office. He had startling news.
“We just got word over the Secret Service wire that George Wallace was shot at a rally in Maryland,” Haldeman said. Nixon’s most trusted aide laid out the little he knew: Wallace was seriously injured but had been taken to nearby Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland, where trauma room doctors were preparing to remove a bullet from Wallace’s belly.
Incapable of restraining himself from strategizing, Nixon’s mind immediately started calculating how this shooting might help him. Working late that evening and continuing to make calls past midnight, Nixon fixated on two goals. First, he wanted to use the violent attack on one political foe to justify shadowing another rival. Then, the president wanted to control the investigation of the shooter and find a way to quickly blame the left for the shooting. In both these endeavors, the president would try to use Secret Service agents as his minions.
Nixon knew he had to appear serious and concerned, especially since the victim was one of his Democratic opponents. He called his wife, Pat, to tell her about the shooting and let her know he could no longer attend a dinner reception she’d planned for a group of wealthy benefactors who’d come from across the country to celebrate the reopening of the Blue Room. It would look terrible to be photographed in tuxedo, smiling and sipping champagne, while Wallace lay in a hospital, he said.
Nixon next summoned Treasury Secretary John Connally, who oversaw the Secret Service, to the Oval Office. The Laurel shooting had changed everything, he said. Because of this attempt to kill a Democratic candidate, the president said, Connally needed to persuade the last living Kennedy brother to accept Secret Service protection immediately.
The president was on shaky ground legally, his White House counsel warned. Senator Kennedy was not a candidate running for president, so he was not someone the Service was authorized to protect. But Nixon plowed ahead. The president stressed to Connally that Kennedy was a target because of his famous family name and because he was out campaigning as a surrogate for Nixon’s reelection opponent, Democrat George McGovern.
The president neglected to mention to Connally that for the last two years he’d been obsessed with digging up dirt on the young senator, part of his long-running jealousy of the Kennedy family. He’d nursed both bitterness and admiration for America’s political royalty ever since losing his White House bid to John Kennedy in 1960.
Though Ted Kennedy had ruled out a presidential run in 1972, he was considered a likely contender for 1976. Nixon hoped to tarnish the senator’s political star by leaking some embarrassing information. “I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon had told Haldeman a year earlier, in April 1971.
Nixon’s cabinet secretary called Ted Kennedy from the Oval Office while the president stood by listening. “Ted…the president asked me to come over here a minute ago. He said he doesn’t really care what the hell the law provides for as far as our counsel is concerned,” Connally told Kennedy. “He thinks out of all the people who are susceptible to some nut, you [are], probably more than anybody except George Wallace. And he would like this afternoon to offer you a full Secret Service protection, and I’m calling to tell you that, and it’s available to you, and it’ll be available as of tonight if you want it, Ted.”
Though Ted Kennedy was privately tormented by his brother Bobby’s death, he knew full well Nixon’s disdain for his family’s political dynasty. It was no surprise the president made Connolly the messenger. The former Texas governor served in the Nixon administration, but he shared a kinship of trauma with the Kennedys. Connally had been shot and injured while riding in the same open limousine with Ted’s older brother, President John F. Kennedy, when he was assassinated in Dallas.
For a few seconds, the youngest Kennedy brother paused, silently pondering the offer. “John, maybe they could just start as a temporary type of thing now and then we can just see,” Kennedy replied in his clipped Brahmin accent.
Connally pushed for a firm yes. “I think the president wants to g’awn and announce that it’s done,” he said in his Texas drawl. “We’ll give you full coverage. I think Ted you ought to g’awn and take it. Hell, very frankly, I don’t know that they can save you, but there’s a damn good chance they could if some nut came up. I know you’re not a candidate, but you’re exposed. I’ve known that all along.”
“Why don’t we just do it as a temporary…Thank you very much,” Kennedy said in a flat, quiet voice, sounding neither grateful nor enthused. “Then we can think about it.”
Connally agreed. They would dispatch a team of agents first thing in the morning. When the two men hung up, Nixon thanked Connally and they parted. The president had what he wanted.
The president had just moments earlier called Cornelia Wallace at Holy Cross Hospital, telling her that he was “terribly” worried about the governor and that he and his wife were praying for him. The governor’s wife told Nixon she had not been worried at first, but hospital X-rays showed one bullet lodged against Wallace’s spine. “He doesn’t have much feeling and he’s not able to move from his waist down,” she told Nixon. “So that’s concerning.”
“You tell him to just keep his spirit,” Nixon said. “Tell him that all of us people in politics have got to expect some dangers and that we, Mrs. Nixon and I, both send our very best wishes and you can be sure that we’ll remember him in our thoughts and our prayers.”
Before they said goodbye, Cornelia Wallace teasingly warned the president, with a modest laugh, “Well, he’s liable to be out there running against you in November.”
Nixon gave a flat laugh, said “All right,” then quickly said goodbye. After these key calls, Nixon next went to the residence to change and then accompanied his wife to a reception in the East Room. He welcomed their guests, thanked them for the contributions, and then quickly excused himself. “I am sure you will understand that under the circumstances I will want to return to the office to see what the situation is with regard to Governor Wallace’s condition,” Nixon told them.
Later, when the president could speak unfiltered in his Executive Office Building office with his three closest aides, he blamed Wallace for the shooting. “You know, how long did it have to be said that somebody was going to shoot Wallace?” Nixon told Haldeman and special counsel Charles Colson. “Didn’t he ask for it? He stirs up hate.”
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NIXON KEPT STRATEGIZING through the night with his deputies, fretting over his second goal. He insisted that the Secret Service and FBI share with the White House every shred of information about the shooter as soon as they learned it. He wanted them to clamp down on information and prevent early leaks to the press. “We damn well better know the details on this before the press does, Jim,” Haldeman warned Director Rowley when demanding an update for the president in a phone call at about 7 p.m. “Get us a full run on it as soon as you can….The key thing now is the identity of the assailant and all the particulars on it before they start reporting it in the press.”
Nixon fumed about the lack of information the White House had received about the suspect. He ordered that the Secret Service not lead the investigation. “This son of a bitch Rowley is a dumb bastard, you know. He is dumb as hell,” Nixon vented to Haldeman. “We’ve got to get somebody over there right away. Get Ehrlichman on him! Get Ehrlichman over there right away, Bob, to work on it. Don’t you agree? Secret Service will fuck this up!”
Just after the Rowley call, Nixon called Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst to order that the FBI take over the probe and quickly find out more about the shooter. “Get somebody over there…on our side who gets in and questions the son of the bitch before the left wing press and the rest gets in and does it,” Nixon said. “Do you understand?”
Kleindienst, sounding puzzled by Nixon’s concern, explained that the alleged shooter was securely locked up in jail, where no reporters would be able to interview him.
“Let me say the first news must not be in The Washington Post,” the president continued. “Goddammit be sure the FBI gets there before they do.”
Rowley and his top inspector correctly told the White House that Bremer was the shooter and they believed he acted alone. But within minutes of that call, a senior Justice official had given Nixon incorrect and outdated information. Kleindienst insisted that police had three teenage boys in custody as suspects, one who had been identified as the shooter and two accomplices.
