Zero fail, p.5
Zero Fail, page 5
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THAT TUESDAY MORNING, November 12, Miami special agent Robert Jamison couldn’t tell whether the Georgia Klansman on the police tape recording was exaggerating or telling the truth. But his claim on the tape was unnerving. The man said he knew of a plan in the works to assassinate President Kennedy.
Joseph Milteer, a wealthy organizer of white supremacist groups, had been on a road trip through the South and visited his childhood friend in his Miami apartment the previous weekend. He didn’t know that his friend was a police informant working undercover to infiltrate the Klan—and recording their chat.
Milteer had gotten to know some notoriously violent Klan leaders whom police suspected in a recent series of bombings and murders. Police had hoped their informant, William Somersett, could get his old friend Milteer talking about the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing in mid-September that had killed four Black girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen. Milteer was friendly with their lead suspect at the time: Jack Brown, the Imperial Wizard of the Tennessee-based Dixie Klan.
Milteer wasn’t specific about the church bombing. He was much more specific when their conversation turned to the president’s pending visit to Miami.
“I think Kennedy is coming here November eighteenth to make some kind of speech,” Somersett said. “Well, he’ll have a thousand bodyguards, don’t worry about that.”
“The more bodyguards he has, the more easier it is to get him,” Milteer replied.
“What?” Somersett asked.
“The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him,” Milteer repeated.
“Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?” Somersett asked.
“From an office building with a high-powered rifle,” Milteer said.
“They are really going to try to kill him?” Somersett asked later.
“Oh, yeah,” Milteer said. “It is in the working.”
Milteer said Brown was the most likely one to kill Kennedy. He said Brown had also been shadowing civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in hopes of taking him out.
“He followed him for miles and miles, and couldn’t get close enough to him,” Milteer said.
“Hitting this Kennedy is going to be a hard proposition,” Somersett said. “I believe you may have figured out a way to get him, the office building and all that. I don’t know how them Secret Service agents cover all them office buildings everywhere he is going. Do you know whether they do that or not?”
Milteer gave an accurate explanation of why an advance agent like Lawson would not check nearby buildings.
“Well, if they have any suspicion, they do that, of course,” he said. “But without suspicion, chances are that they wouldn’t.”
He was right. Given the Secret Service’s small size, it was impossible to check the hundreds of buildings along any motorcade route. If there was a reason to suspect a specific problem, or a structure was very close, buildings could be checked or shuttered, as Lawson had done in Binghamton. But otherwise, the agents would do nothing about the buildings they passed.
That Tuesday morning, Jamison and his boss, the special agent in charge of the Miami office, conferred about the tape recording. Then they called the head of protective research, Robert Bouck.
Bouck was widely admired in the Service as a clever investigator and a natural leader. He had become fascinated with electronic surveillance and was dubbed the Service’s “electronics genius.” In 1962, at Kennedy’s request, Bouck installed a secret tape recording system in the Oval Office. An author before he became president, Kennedy wanted to keep a record of important discussions and events in the White House, most likely for writing a memoir.
After hearing about the threat, Bouck had to tread carefully. Normally, he would send agents to interview Milteer, but that would blow the informant’s cover. Instead, Bouck instructed Jamison to write up a “confidential” report about the suspected plot and alert the advance agent handling Kennedy’s upcoming visit to Miami. He told Jamison to share the report with just four other field offices—Atlanta, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia. Agents there would discreetly check on the homes and whereabouts of extremist friends Milteer had mentioned.
Lawson landed in Dallas on November 12 and the next day met with local police to map a route for the president and First Lady’s motorcade—from their landing at Love Field to his luncheon speech at the Trade Mart. Lawson knew he had to take Kennedy down Main Street through the busy downtown. “If a president or a vice president is going through a town or a city, it is to be seen and for people to see them,” Lawson said. “Often it’s arranged so they’re going around noontime or suppertime. Why is that? People are coming out of the office buildings. You have a built-in crowd. If you take someone to a downtown area that has a lot of office buildings, a lot of stores. That’s one reason we came downtown….The White House wanted people to see the president. The most people were going to be downtown. That route almost had to be what it was.”
So Lawson worked with police to map and block each intersection, meticulously choreographing a dizzying set of plans. For the Love Field arrival, for example, he stationed officers on rooftops of buildings immediately overlooking the tarmac receiving area. He scattered plainclothes police throughout the surrounding spectators. For the motorcade, he requested motorcycle escorts to form a buffer alongside the presidential limousine. He asked police to clear overpasses and bridges the motorcade would pass to keep people a safe distance from the president’s car.
He didn’t know what headquarters had learned from their Miami and Chicago field agents—threats of high-powered rifles along the motorcade ride.
“No, I never heard that,” he said. “I would have remembered.”
CHAPTER 3
THREE SHOTS IN DALLAS
On Monday, November 18, 1963, the president woke in his father’s sprawling Mediterranean-style beachfront estate in Palm Beach after a work weekend, headed with his detail to the airport, and boarded Air Force One, bound for Tampa. It was the first stop on a weeklong publicity tour through Florida and Texas.
Kennedy hoped a string of appearances in both these states would help secure him a second term in the White House. His aides were ecstatic that the First Lady—withdrawn and depressed since the death of her prematurely born baby son that summer—had decided to join him for the Texas portion of the trip.
“You’re going to draw the biggest crowds ever,” spokesman Pierre Salinger told Kennedy. “Going with Mrs. Kennedy will be terrific.”
The agents of Kennedy’s detail hoped for what they always hoped for on a trip away from the White House: no trouble. But they began the trip already exhausted from the last several months of heavy travel, which also forced them to rely on skeleton crews and some junior agents working the shifts around the president. They skimped on advances, sending one lone agent to some cities instead of two.
Still, the detail agents remained stoic. They figured if they just gutted it out the next five days, they could get the Boss from Palm Beach to Tampa to Miami to Washington to San Antonio to Houston to Fort Worth to Dallas to Austin to Vice President Johnson’s ranch and safely home again. They didn’t see then that the chinks in their armor had been multiplying. By this point, a very large hole had opened, leaving them vulnerable to attack.
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IT WAS 11:24 a.m. on November 18, 1963. The president and his entourage touched down in his plane, AF 26000, at MacDill Air Force Base. So began the busiest travel week the Secret Service had tackled in Kennedy’s term. The Boss was scheduled to make twenty-two public stops spread over three activity-crammed days on the road.
The president stepped spryly across the tarmac, appearing rested and carefree that Monday morning. Kennedy wore a custom-made gray suit and flashed his celebrity grin. With his head and shoulders high, he waved to the cheering crowd lined up near the air base officers’ mess.
Shift leader Emory Roberts walked a few paces behind the president and squinted into the hot late-morning sun. At six foot one, with a pale complexion and jet-black hair slicked back with hair cream, Roberts bore a resemblance to the stone-serious Joe Friday from Dragnet. After several years as a Maryland state trooper and two decades in the Secret Service, it was hard to rattle him. But agents fondly called him either Father Roberts or Mother Hen, because he took pains to guide newer agents through their assignments.
This morning, Roberts fretted a little about the president too. Would Kennedy balk at having agents directly behind him during the long limo ride through Tampa? The president had chafed at agents’ standing between him and a handshake. He good-naturedly complained when the detail tried to keep him dozens of yards from the crowds who wanted to greet him. “If I don’t mingle with the people, I couldn’t get elected dogcatcher,” he told another shift leader.
The thirty-four agents assigned to protect Kennedy and the First Family had chalked up an unhealthy streak of days working double shifts that year. Eleven of the most experienced detail members were unavailable to spell their co-workers; they were busy crafting advance security plans in other Florida and Texas cities Kennedy planned to visit.
Roberts, who worked straight through the weekend with Kennedy in Palm Beach, knew the protective layer he could put around the president in Tampa was thin: just twelve agents. Yet huge crowds, upward of 125,000, were expected. Kennedy and his entourage planned to travel twenty-eight miles on the motorcade route, the longest of Kennedy’s time in office.
Motorcades always stressed the detail. Jumbled crowds of excited spectators could seem harmless—but then someone would invariably lurch toward the slow-moving limo, hoping to get closer. Or, far worse: The happy throng could camouflage a lurking assassin.
The Tampa advance agent, Jerry Blaine, told Roberts he was worried about that long route. Blaine was focused on the risks posed by several groups in Florida. The mob had a considerable presence in Tampa, and the Kennedy administration had declared war on organized crime. Cuban activists based in the area—those who opposed and those who supported Fidel Castro’s regime—were threatening to use a presidential visit to make a public splash. Some of them were furious about Kennedy’s failure to fully support Cubans who had joined in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Blaine recommended that two agents ride on the rear steps attached to the back of the limo for the whole ride. The follow-up car, an open-topped 1955 Cadillac sedan loaded with armed agents and even an assault rifle, was the nerve center for shielding the president on these slow parades. Four agents rode standing on the follow-up cars’ side running boards so they could dash to the president if a stranger got too close. The two agents on the front of the follow-up car’s running boards typically ran forward and jumped onto the back of the limo at riskier moments in the ride. They moved onto the limo at times when the president was more exposed: when thick crowds forced the motorcade to slow down, or when motorcycle cops didn’t have room on the street to ride alongside the limo.
After greeting a crowd of thousands of military personnel, families, and spectators gathered on the airstrip at MacDill Air Force Base, inspecting the honor guard, and then eating a quick lunch, the president and a few agents hopped a helicopter for a speech at nearby Al Lopez Field. Roberts’s eyes went wide when they landed. It looked like a Beatles concert. Women screamed upon seeing the president, and people clambered over the stadium fence to avoid the long lines. A crowd of roughly ten thousand swarmed the five-thousand-seat stadium.
After the speech, Kennedy and two local congressmen took their seats in his open-air Lincoln Continental for the long ride through the city. Several times on the route, Kennedy grabbed on to a wide roll bar specially added to his interior car door. He stood, waved, and tried to lock eyes with voters.
Now and again the president turned back toward the dark outlines of two agents looming behind his shoulders. Chuck Zboril and Don Lawton stood on the rear steps on the tail of his limo, as Blaine had suggested, and held on to handles installed on the trunk. When the crowds thinned on Grand Central Avenue, the president bent forward to speak to trip supervisor Floyd Boring in the front seat. “Floyd, have the Ivy League charlatans drop back to the follow-up car,” Kennedy said dryly.
Boring paused at the word “charlatan.” He figured Kennedy, whom the Service had code-named Lancer, had made up his own teasing code name for his working-class bodyguards in their business suits. He radioed the instruction nearly verbatim to Roberts in the follow-up car: “Lancer requests the Ivy League charlatans drop back to your location.”
Roberts whistled to his agents, and once the limo slowed, they clambered back onto the follow-up car’s running boards. When the motorcade reached the local armory, Kennedy explained more to Boring: “It’s excessive, Floyd. And it’s giving the wrong impression to the people. Tell them to stay on the follow-up car. We’ve got an election coming up. The whole point is for me to be accessible to the people.”
From Tampa, they headed to Miami for a fast-paced three-hour visit: greeting the crowd at the airport, a chopper ride to a beachside hotel, and a dinner speech. They returned the president safely to the White House at around midnight.
On the flight back to Washington, Blaine puzzled over two competing worries. First, had he ticked off the president by putting the agents on the limo? Then again, didn’t moving them farther away leave the Boss vulnerable?
Sitting together on the plane, Boring told Blaine not to worry. Kennedy had thanked Blaine for the successful visit. Plus, they all had more assignments to tackle. Texas was coming up quickly.
“Forget it, Jer,” Boring told Blaine. “He told you, you did a fine job in Tampa. Now let’s try to get some rest. You think today was a long day, you should see the schedule we’ve got for Texas.”
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THE AGENTS ON Roberts’s shift rose before daybreak in their own homes the morning of Thursday, November 21, headed back to the White House for the ride together to Andrews, and then flew with the Kennedys and the Johnsons to San Antonio, arriving around noon. Over the next twelve hours, they covered more than five hundred miles of Texas by ground and air. They hit downtown San Antonio for a luncheon speech and motorcade, then lifted off for Houston for another motorcade and a dinner speech. Air Force One flew its last leg of the day, to Fort Worth, where the Kennedys and their entourage would stay overnight before spending the next day in Dallas and the weekend at Johnson’s ranch outside Austin.
The First Couple drew adoring crowds everywhere they set foot, but it still surprised newly arrived detail agent Tim McIntyre to glance out the plane window at Carswell Air Force Base as it taxied to a stop. A crowd of three hundred people waited excitedly in the drizzly dark night, waving from the airstrip fence and hoping to catch sight of America’s most famous couple.
Hundreds were crowded outside the Beaux Arts–style Hotel Texas when the Kennedy motorcade pulled up to the entrance at 11:45 p.m. It was absolutely not the welcome the weary agents were looking for. The president could not help but shake hands despite the late hour. After about five minutes, his detail got him and his wife securely tucked into suite 850.
Shortly after midnight, Roberts’s day shift could finally go off duty. The agents were ravenous. Their last meal had been a light lunch twelve hours earlier on the plane ride from Washington.
Bone-tired, room key in hand, the twenty-six-year-old McIntyre did the math. He had been on duty for twenty-three hours, and that day, he and his workmates had jogged or walked more than ten miles. The father of four wasn’t entirely sure where he’d slept the night before. Maybe Miami? Maybe Washington? He padded down the hall to his room. Then, seeing a familiar shift leader heading the same way, he realized he had drawn the short straw: McIntyre was sharing a room with Roberts, the detail’s legendary snorer. “We didn’t get a heckuva lot of sleep,” McIntyre recalled. “I probably got around six [hours]. The next morning of course we have to get up and do it again.”
But some got far less rest that night. Nine Kennedy detail agents headed to the Fort Worth Press Club in a nearby hotel, which reporters said was staying open late to serve light dinner and drinks for the traveling press. The sandwiches were all gone by the time the agents arrived, though, so they joined reporters for a few scotch and sodas and glasses of beer. Sometime after 1 a.m., press club president Cal Sutton told the group he had to shut down the party. It was against the law for the club to serve alcohol after midnight. So a reporter in the group called over to the Cellar, a legendary and slightly scandalous nightspot, and reached manager Richard Mackie. Could he bring over some fellow reporters, some Secret Service agents, and some White House people who were in town with the president?
Led by CBS News cub reporter Bob Schieffer and other members of the press, nine agents went on to the Cellar. Four of them—Clint Hill, Jack Ready, Glen Bennett, and Paul Landis—were scheduled to report for duty first thing the next morning. The men found a curious, dimly lit bar that was part gentlemen’s club, part beatnik coffee house. It was unlike any other bar they had seen in Washington. Some of the waitresses wore the skimpiest of outfits, more like bras and panties than clothes. The Cellar didn’t have a license to sell alcohol, but its owners kept hard liquor behind the bar and often served free “specials”—grain alcohol in fruit juices and other mixers—to friends. For club owner Pat Kirkwood, a wiry daredevil who wore cowboy apparel, those “friends” included anyone he felt might be useful to him: “all pretty girls, all reporters, all cops.” He and Mackie personally welcomed their Washington guests a little before 2 a.m. and showed them to a few open tables.
