Zero fail, p.2
Zero Fail, page 2
I also came to appreciate how the Secret Service was born out of a fundamental tension that lies at the heart of American democracy: symbolism versus security. The weight that rests on their shoulders became palpable for me when some agents recounted their introduction to presidential protection from a standout leader of President Clinton’s detail. Special agent in charge Larry Cockell had begun their tutelage by sharing the obituary for the agent who drove President Kennedy’s limousine the day he was killed, and who had initially slowed the car at the sound of the first shot. The opening line of the death notice called out the agent’s role in a tragedy that would define his life.
“You are now part of an agency responsible for the life of the president and the stability of our democracy,” Cockell told them, the agents recalled. “This is what failure looks like. I can’t succeed unless you succeed. Unless we all pull together, we all fail. I expect you to be focused and invested in this and accountable at all times, and if you think there is any obstacle to you doing this, then I ask that you leave the detail today.”
America wants to project the image of being free and open, “of the people.” As recently as 1881, sixteen years after Lincoln’s assassination and fresh off James Garfield’s, the country rejected the idea of a presidential security force because it smacked of “royals” hiding behind an imperial guard. Despite the inherent dangers, Bill Clinton and JFK continually subverted their detail agents to get closer to their adoring fans—the latter famously ditching his detail to go for a swim at a public beach in California. Reagan’s handlers engaged in a heated debate with the Service over the optics of using metal detectors at the president’s first public appearance after the attempt on his life. Even internally, agents have nearly come to blows over such issues, including whether long guns on the White House roof would create the impression that the leader of the free world lives in a military compound.
A rare success in marrying these two competing impulses came at Barack Obama’s victory speech on the night of November 4, 2008, when more than 71 million prime-time TV viewers watched a joyous, almost spontaneous-looking event in Chicago’s Grant Park celebrating the election of America’s first Black president. Invisible to the cameras: the fact that the airspace had been declared a no-fly zone, and that two enormous sheets of bulletproof glass flanked the president-elect to thwart would-be snipers. In both practical and symbolic terms, the scene communicated everything you need to know about what the Service is routinely expected to achieve.
Zero Fail touches on this loftier story, but the history it recounts is ultimately more personal. This book is about the current and former agents, officers, and administrative staff in this secretive fraternity who chose to share their stories with me. I will be forever grateful to them for risking their careers—not because they wanted to share tantalizing gossip about presidents and their families, but because they know that the Service is broken and needs fixing. By telling their story, they hope to revive the Service they love. They deserve a public commitment to rebuilding their agency so they’re not left toiling in constant fear of failure, not to mention constant risk of personal harm.
America, its presidents and its citizens, have taken the Secret Service for granted in the past, too often with tragic results.
CHAPTER 1
PROTECTING LANCER
Win Lawson felt his chest puff out a little this particular day in Buffalo, his shoulders hiking his lanky frame just a little taller and straighter. Proud. Yep, he could admit it to himself. Win Lawson, the shy, quiet worrier, felt proud.
The thirty-four-year-old had grown up in a no-stoplight town along the banks of Lake Erie that few outside upstate New York had ever heard of: Portland, New York. The community, about sixty miles south of Buffalo, was best known for its chilly lake air, vineyards and apple farms, and families as hardy as the crops they tended.
Lawson, the son of an elementary school teacher and a local banker, had left for college the summer after high school. He got his degree, married a fraternity brother’s sister, and joined an Army intelligence unit as the Korean War began.
Now, a dozen years later, on this fall day in 1962, Lawson had returned to his home turf in a prestigious new role: He was an agent with the Secret Service, assigned to protect the president of the United States.
Nearly two hundred thousand people spilled across Buffalo’s largest downtown square, angling for a glimpse of the most famous man on earth, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And Win Lawson stood beside him.
Kennedy visited Buffalo on October 14, 1962, the day of the city’s beloved Polish heritage parade. Seeing the crowds eight deep on the limo route, Lawson thought: Polish or not, all of upstate New York has turned out today to see their dashing president.
Lawson and the seven other members of the president’s detail had a job that required every ounce of their concentration: Safeguard Kennedy from start to finish of the trip. They shadowed him as he stepped off Air Force One, as he stood waving from his limo the last half mile of the parade, and now finally as he addressed the enormous crowd in the city’s center—Niagara Square.
That inner ring of detail agents kept a unique vigil that relied largely on sensory instinct and coiled muscles. When “the Boss”—their informal name for the president—stepped on the platform stage, his detail trained their eyes and ears on the crowd for any odd duck, strange movement, or person with hands stuffed in their pockets. When Kennedy was shaking hands, as he loved to do, detail agents flanked him on either side, watching those outstretched hands for any sign of danger. Their duty: to put their body between the president and a gun, knife, or any other threat.
Standing at the base of the wooden stage in front of City Hall, Lawson rotated his head from left to right, scanning the square, a human periscope rolling over endless heads, faces, and arms, alert to any sign of danger.
For this visit, Lawson had the added duty of serving as the Secret Service’s chief of security planning. He had arrived three days earlier to assess the safety of every step the president would take on the visit, an elaborate choreography known as “the advance.” He had chosen which streets to block off for the motorcade, how close crowds could stand, and what perimeter posts local cops and motorcycle escorts would man.
But Lawson’s meticulous planning didn’t change the laws of physics: He and his fellow agents were ultimately insignificant dots in the swirling mass of people pouring into the square.
Cheers went up as Kennedy told the crowd they had kept Poland in their hearts and urged them to pray that her people might one day live free of Communist rule. “And as the old song says, ‘As long as you live, Poland lives,’ ” Kennedy continued. Thundering applause filled the square. Kennedy smiled at how long he had to wait before he could say the next line.
Kennedy was winning hearts, and—his political aides hoped—votes. To help Democrats win congressional seats that November, the White House wanted as many voters as possible to see the president. Secret Service agents privately disapproved of how close Kennedy wanted to get to his public, but they didn’t have the power to override him. Still, the agents knew that the longer the parade route and the more hand-shaking at rope lines, the greater the chances that something bad could happen.
Hard as it was to believe that the president needed protecting from the cheering masses in Niagara Square, Lawson and the detail had to assume at all times that an enemy lurked within the throng. Kennedy may have been handsome, rich, and devilishly charming, but plenty of people in the country despised him. A select few wanted him dead.
The forty-three-year-old politician threatened the status quo. He was the first Catholic to win the presidency, a shock for an older generation that considered Protestants the nation’s nobility. Many Americans were also deeply unsettled by Kennedy’s insistence that Black people deserved to study in the same schools, use the same bathrooms, and eat in the same restaurants as whites.
A few weeks after Kennedy won the 1960 election, Richard Pavlick, a retired seventy-three-year-old postal worker with a history of mental problems and rants against Catholics, loaded the trunk of his Buick with seven sticks of dynamite. He drove from his native New Hampshire to Palm Beach, where the president-elect was staying before his inauguration. Pavlick plotted to blow up Kennedy by ramming his car as he left to attend mass, but he scrapped the plan when he saw Kennedy’s wife and children walking by his side. Palm Beach police arrested him a few days later, based on a tip from a worried colleague who pieced together that Pavlick had been stalking Kennedy.
In Kennedy’s first six weeks as president, the White House received three times the average number of letters threatening violence against the president. “We are sick of the dirty black Catholics,” read one anonymous letter postmarked from Los Angeles. “The next bomb will be for you, Mr. Kennedy.”
The agents who made up the president’s White House detail privately feared for Kennedy’s safety. And not just because their job naturally bred paranoia. To the public, President Kennedy was a dashing, cerebral leader with a picture-perfect family. In private, Kennedy’s Secret Service agents saw a man courting danger.
Kennedy kept up an unrelenting pace compared to his predecessors, and it pushed his detail close to exhaustion. He was also extremely reckless with his own personal safety. His actions made some of his protectors uneasy and a few quite angry. The agents on his detail liked the new president personally, but professionally, he was their toughest assignment yet.
When Kennedy moved his young family into the White House in January 1961, the Service was so small it resembled a modest city police force more than a federal agency. The Service’s top official was even called Chief. The agency ran on a $5 million budget and employed just over three hundred agents, the majority of whom were stationed in field offices spread across fifty states. Just thirty-four agents were assigned to the White House detail—the arm that protected the president. They typically worked in six-man teams around the president, rotating in eight-hour shifts.
These agents—all men, and most of them from working-class backgrounds—had grown up in the shadow of World War II and possessed a keen sense of duty to country. The typical hire was an athletic, straitlaced college graduate in his late twenties or early thirties who served in the military or worked for a local police department.
New agents were always sent first to a field office, but “keepers” were summoned to the White House for a tryout on the detail within one or two years. The Service struck a deal with the federal government to bypass the federal hiring pool and instead hire any agent the chief wanted. As part of the agreement, the Secret Service had to put these relatively junior agents on the president’s detail within two years if the Service wanted to keep them on the job.
The agents received no specialized protection training, but learned on the job from experienced colleagues on the detail. “That’s how the Secret Service worked. They got you started, they paired you with someone good,” said Tim McIntyre, a former Kennedy detail agent. “The Service had a policy of allocating assignments to you and expecting you to respond. When you’re posted at various spots, it could be anyplace. It could be in an auditorium. They don’t have time to spend to explain a whole lot to you. They expect you to pick up the ball and run with it.”
The work of an agent, standing watch at a fixed post, was grueling—even boring. But working alongside the affable, debonair Kennedy gave the job a special cachet. And unlike the general before him, this president made an effort to get to know his agents and greeted them by name. His glamorous life, which included regular sightings of Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and the queen of England, sprinkled a little stardust on his security team. Agents relished standing next to history.
“I’d go down to the LBJ ranch, I’d be working the midnight shift. I’d be standing under one of those big oak trees out in front. And it’d be two in the morning, and it’d be cold,” Lawson grimaced, recalling one assignment. “You’d think, ‘What in the world am I doing here? You know I’m a college graduate and here I am almost like on guard duty in the middle of the night and so far away. I’ve been away from home, it’s over Christmas,’ whatever.
“Then maybe two weeks later, you’d go to an event you couldn’t buy your way into. I was at Cape Canaveral…for the first moonshot. I was there when they took off,” he said. “You think, ‘My gosh, I’m a guy from a little town in western New York and look what I’ve just been witness to.’ ”
The Polish heritage parade was one of those days for Lawson. After the parade was over, the president of the United States hopped into his open-topped limousine and left Buffalo, all without incident.
Then, as he’d prearranged, Lawson met his parents and brother at the Niagara Falls airstrip parking lot and quickly placed them in a choice spot on the fence line. He knew the president would shake hands there before boarding his plane for the return flight to Washington. Kennedy loved this part of his public outings best: the face-to-face greetings with voters who’d waited for hours to welcome him.
As the president neared Lawson’s family, Lawson stood behind his left shoulder and nodded quickly at his parents. Lawson’s shift leader, Floyd Boring, paused at their section of fence.
“Mr. President,” Boring said, “this is Agent Lawson’s family.”
Ever gracious, the president beamed. He shook hands with Lawson’s brother and father and thanked them for Win’s service. Lawson’s mother, wearing one of her best day dresses and a pillbox hat decorated with pink and lavender flowers, thrust her right hand toward him with a determined look.
“I am sorry for how busy we have been keeping your son,” Kennedy said, grasping the mother’s pale white arm. And then came that Kennedy trademark: his whip-fast humor. “He must be doing a pretty good job, because nobody has shot me yet,” the president deadpanned.
* * *
—
BIZARRELY, A STARK reminder of the many dangers that shadow the president of the United States on his daily outings had been staring the Kennedy detail in the face that day in Buffalo. McKinley Monument rose like a white finger from the center of the square—President Kennedy was looking directly at the monument as he spoke. The city had built this marble obelisk as a kind of apology to William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president, who had been assassinated there by an unemployed recluse in 1901. His death had prompted the creation of the modern Secret Service. An assassin’s bullet fired at the start of the century had brought Lawson and his fellow agents to the very posts where they now stood.
Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrants who settled in Detroit, had lived in brutal poverty most of his life. He had worked in glass and steel factories since he was a teenager, following his mother’s death when he was ten. By the age of twenty-eight, he had been without a job for several years due to the economic crash of 1893. Sick with a respiratory illness, he went to live on his father’s farm and grew increasingly isolated and bitter about what he considered the social injustice of America’s capitalist system. He read the leaflets of socialist and anarchist groups, and he believed the government was helping rich business owners exploit America’s lower classes and ignoring their poverty. After attending the speech of the famous American anarchist Emma Goldman in Cleveland in May 1901, he learned that another anarchist had shot and killed King Umberto I of Italy several months earlier. He took this crime as his inspiration. The assassin explained he had to commit a bold act to call attention to the plight of the common man.
In September, Czolgosz traveled to Buffalo and shot McKinley in a receiving line at the 1901 World’s Fair.
Members of Congress were shocked at the time at how easily McKinley had been killed, and chastened that the country had now lost three presidents to assassination in thirty-six years, after Presidents Lincoln and Garfield. Congress soon ordered the Secret Service, a small federal law enforcement team then primarily in charge of combating counterfeiters and check forgers, to secure the president’s safety from that point on. But Congress added this mission to the Service on the fly—hastily and without a cohesive strategy.
It was in a similar slapdash, reactionary rush that the Secret Service had been born, in the spring of 1865. President Lincoln and his Treasury secretary were still trying to recover from the brazen escape of a mass counterfeiter, Pete McCartney, and his return to a lucrative life of crime. The Civil War had just ended, which was a cause for great celebration, but the scourge of counterfeiting continued to destabilize the recovering nation’s fragile economy. During much of the war, states had issued their own paper money, a confusing array that made it difficult for merchants and bankers to keep track of the variations and easy for counterfeiters to pass forgeries. In 1862, the Treasury had begun issuing federal currency in notes worth $1 to $1,000. They were known as greenbacks because of the green print on the back of the bill. But counterfeiters adapted and quickly copied the seal of federal currency by making their own printing plates. Federal bankers estimated that one-third to one-half of the paper currency floating through the country in 1865 was fake.
For years, McCartney had been an especially talented thorn in the U.S. Treasury’s side. He was an intelligent, soft-spoken man who might have inherited the Illinois farm of his father, but instead as a teenager he took a job working for an engraver, William Johnson. Johnson was secretly the head of a counterfeiting clan that was based in Lawrence, Indiana. And in Pete McCartney, Johnson saw a natural. The young man had a keen eye for detail and shading and was a gifted draftsman and printer. On top of that, he was handsome and genial. Starting in the 1840s, Johnson groomed McCartney to be a master forger.
