Zero fail, p.8
Zero Fail, page 8
Sargent Shriver, a brother-in-law who was helping to coordinate with the military on their funeral plans, got nowhere warning Jackie about her safety. She didn’t care. He asked her to consider the world leaders who would feel compelled to walk with her, thereby placing themselves in danger.
“Nobody has to walk but me,” she answered.
Chief Rowley was flabbergasted that Saturday morning to hear of her plans. Her idea would turn the new president and nineteen visiting heads of state into a phalanx of slow-moving targets, sitting ducks for another gunman. Rowley told Behn to ask Clint Hill to see if he could talk the resolute widow out of this unthinkable walk. “Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” Hill said when they met later that day in a study in the private residence, “won’t you reconsider?”
Hill had been Mrs. Kennedy’s most trusted protector, but also her smoking buddy, and someone with whom she shared laughs, secrets, and now the worst trauma of her life. She agreed to compromise. She would walk only the eight blocks from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where the requiem mass was to be performed.
Rowley asked Treasury secretary C. Douglas Dillon, his boss, to try to talk Johnson out of joining the walk. After a budget meeting, Dillon did share the chief’s concerns. Johnson confided that he had initially decided that walking would be foolhardy. “But then Lady Bird told me I should do it,” the president said.
Rowley summoned agents from across the country to Washington. Even though Mrs. Kennedy had agreed to a shortened walk, the Secret Service still had to safeguard dozens of VIPs—the Kennedy family, the president, the visiting prime ministers, presidents, and royalty—through two days of public mourning.
On Sunday, his agents, joined by a small army of military servicemen, monitored a crowd of more than a quarter million who filed behind the Kennedy family as the late president lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. On Monday, the Kennedy family, the president and his family, and several heads of state walked from the White House to mass at St. Matthew’s.
All weekend, Rowley had found it difficult to delegate. He combed over the plan for security checkpoints and the posts for White House police officers and special agents. On Sunday, the chief returned to an old role. As the black-veiled widow led the procession, Rowley walked on President Johnson’s side, protecting his left flank.
The numb, sleep-deprived agents couldn’t believe they were walking a little more than a mile down Seventeenth Street with an exposed president—three days after the previous president had been gunned down in front of them. The high-rise buildings created a cavern similar to Dallas’s Main Street.
Hill clenched his jaw, fighting his emotions. His nerves could still register just one feeling: fear. Fear of the sound of gunfire. “But I knew it would be the longest mile I ever walked,” he said.
* * *
—
ON THE MONDAY of the funeral mass, Drew Pearson, a well-known syndicated columnist in Washington, received a shocking tip: Kennedy’s agents had been out drinking into the early morning hours before the Dallas trip. The tipster was a young Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter, Thayer Waldo. He explained that his managing editor, Calvin Sutton, was president of the Fort Worth press club, which had served the agents drinks until they went to a notorious club called the Cellar. Pearson, whose “Merry-Go-Round” column often skewered politicians, started making calls.
“We need to get our stories together,” Sutton told Pat Kirkwood, owner of the Cellar, in a phone call late Monday. “Because talk is already starting about the agents getting drunk.”
Sutton asked the club owner to help cover for the agents, and Kirkwood agreed. He would just emphasize that his establishment didn’t sell alcohol, which was technically true. Kirkwood wouldn’t mention that he provided alcohol free to reporters, cops, women, and a host of other VIPs and friends.
Despite their efforts, Pearson felt he had confirmed enough about the agents’ late night activities to run the story by the end of the week. On Saturday, November 30, Pearson hosted a radio show on NBC and revealed what he had learned. His column, published soon after, called for investigating the Secret Service agents:
Six Secret Service men charged with protecting the President were in the Fort Worth Press Club in the early morning of the day Kennedy was shot. Some of them remaining until 3 am….They were drinking….When they departed, three were reported en route to an all-night beatnik rendezvous “The Cellar.”
Pearson argued that the agents could instead have stayed up late checking the empty buildings along the motorcade route, like the one where Oswald hid.
Rowley was reeling as his staffer told him about the radio report. He wasn’t shocked that his men had had a few drinks at the end of a long travel day. But now a powerful journalist had all but charged his agents with negligence in the president’s murder. To get on top of it, the next morning Rowley dispatched one of his inspectors to Fort Worth to begin interviewing witnesses. Rowley ordered every agent on the trip to write a memo explaining where they were on the night of November 21, what they drank, and when they had returned to their rooms.
The White House tried to help blunt the bad press. Spokesman Pierre Salinger called Pearson to complain on Sunday. He said the agents drinking in Fort Worth were probably not in charge of protecting Kennedy in the motorcade. Yet, when Pearson pressed for names, Salinger said he didn’t know. “But it’s terribly unfair to the men to come out with this story,” Salinger said.
“I pointed out that I had praised the Secret Service over the years but that conditions had become lax,” Pearson would later write. “Neither a locomotive engineer, a newspaperman, or a doctor could afford to drink before going on duty.”
The inspector, Gerald McCann, gave his findings to Rowley on December 10 in a confidential report. McCann said no one he interviewed at the two clubs claimed to have seen the agents drunk the night before the Dallas visit. McCann noted that the Cellar did not even have a license to serve liquor.
The report sidestepped a less flattering reality. The club did serve liquor. “We didn’t say anything, but those guys were bombed,” Cellar manager Jimmy Hill told a Star-Telegram reporter in an interview nearly two decades later. “They were drinking pure Everclear.”
Nine agents admitted going to the press club and the Cellar and having a few beers or drinks through the night, according to the memos Rowley asked for, though they said they believed they were only drinking fruit juice mixtures at the Cellar. They stayed out until between 2:45 and 5 a.m.
Four of them—Ready, Hill, Landis, and Bennett—were agents who had to report for duty at 8 a.m. They were all assigned to protect the president in Dallas by riding behind him in the follow-up car. Never did they imagine that a few hours winding down at the bar after a long day would be dissected in newspapers across the nation. Shame hung over the entire Service.
The timing of the Pearson column couldn’t have been more painful for the Service. Many of the detail agents had been walking around like zombies, having already concluded that his assassination was their fault because of their failure to act quickly enough. But now Pearson gave the public a new and horrific reason to blame the agents for Kennedy’s death: indulgent boozing. Rowley had hoped to help snap them out of their devastation by honoring two of his men for their unusual bravery that day.
On Tuesday afternoon, December 3, at Mrs. Kennedy’s request, Dillon presented Hill with an award for exceptional bravery in Dallas. Hill, who had stared into the president’s skull, felt no joy or pride in the decoration. He waited numbly for the ceremony to end.
The next day, December 4, Rowley joined President Johnson for a similar ceremony honoring Rufus Youngblood. Rowley beamed like a father in the pictures as the president greeted Youngblood’s wife and called his detail agent “the most noble and most able public servant I have ever known.” Rowley hoped this signaled a bond of trust building between his agency and the new president.
But another blow to the Service came in the papers that Sunday. One of their own, former chief U. E. Baughman, criticized the Service’s performance in Dallas. In an interview with several journalists at his Alexandria, Virginia, home, Baughman said it appeared that agents had failed to follow protocol for checking buildings and hadn’t responded properly when shots rang out. He questioned why Kellerman and the follow-up car agents didn’t rush to shield the president, why the limo driver didn’t immediately speed away, “and why that agent in the front seat didn’t sort of cover [Kennedy] the way Rufus Youngblood did the vice president.”
Rowley told his spokesman not to give any comment.
Jim Burke, a senior inspector assigned by Rowley to study the mistakes in Dallas, saw Chief Rowley one night in the halls of the Executive Office Building. He was walking and staring down at a clutch of documents in his hand.
The chief had been logging twelve-hour days every day since Dallas. No one in headquarters had seen him shed a tear. He hadn’t snapped at his deputies, despite the intense pressure of the last several weeks. “Jim, how are you doing this?” Burke asked him in the hall. “How do you keep going?”
“I have to be fine,” Rowley replied. “Everyone is watching me. All the agents are going to look at me as a signal. So I have to be fine. For them.”
* * *
—
A WEEK AFTER Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy, President Johnson announced a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the assassination and the motives of the troubled former Marine. Johnson told the respected men whom he had pressured to serve on the panel—including four members of Congress, a former CIA director, and Earl Warren, the chief justice of the Supreme Court—that his first priority wasn’t getting all the details. He wanted them to tamp down public fears about conspiracy theories that suggested the Russians or Cubans had had the president killed. The commission was tasked with answering two central questions: What led to Oswald’s actions, and had he acted alone? The team was then also asked to examine why the Secret Service’s protective shield had failed.
After the New Year, the commission’s attorneys began to interview hundreds of agents, staffers, police, witnesses, gun experts, and others. The commission’s chief counsel, Lee Rankin, consulted from time to time with Rowley about security issues his team discovered.
But Rowley wanted to beat the Warren Commission to the finish line with his own internal fixes, both short- and long-term. That month, he made some immediate changes to agent protocol, zeroing in on two systemic weaknesses that he knew had allowed Oswald to gun down the president.
First, the Service had far too few men to shield the president during exposed motorcades and public events. So Rowley brought experienced former detail agents back to Washington from their jobs as supervisors in field offices. Overnight he nearly doubled the manpower on the president’s detail—from twenty-eight to fifty agents on any trip.
Secondly, Rowley instituted required checks on all buildings along presidential motorcade routes and the posting of additional men in the crowds. He still didn’t have enough agents to accomplish this, however, so for the first five months of 1964, Rowley “borrowed” 670 FBI agents, postal investigators, and other officers. They worked 9,500 hours on motorcade and crowd duty for the president’s trips.
Rowley then began crafting a long-range reform he hoped to unveil for Congress’s fall budget season. One step he later took led to one of the most significant advances in the Service’s history: He consulted with IBM, asking the new computing technology company to help replace and update the Service’s creaky system for identifying presidential threats.
Before visiting a city, agents flipped through a paper index of four hundred people who had been investigated by the FBI or local police and were deemed a credible potential danger to the president because of violent or antigovernment acts they had taken. The Service also kept brief background files on five thousand more people who might be—or might not be—threats to the president, based on their names being referred as potential trouble. This list of the Service’s had a major weakness: It was somewhat random and woefully incomplete. Federal agencies and White House staff were asked to let the Service know if they came across someone who was making threats against the president. The White House sometimes forwarded a crank letter it received in which someone said hostile things about the president, and agents then added the author to their threat list. But the list was largely dependent on others to report. And not everyone felt compelled to flag potential threats. The CIA and FBI, for example, were supposed to share names of people they considered concerning but often did not. These databases were also paper-based and unwieldy to search before a visit. IBM had computerized millions of workers’ pay information for the Social Security Administration. Now Rowley asked them if they could automate the Service’s threat files too.
Rowley also began looking into the success of early tests of bulletproof vests, electroshock weapons, and pepper spray, searching for modern tools that the agency could deploy. And of course Rowley analyzed how many additional agents he needed to better shield the president. Because Kennedy’s death had so shocked the country, Congress immediately reversed course. Lawmakers were now jumping over themselves to publicly pledge more money and staff for the Secret Service.
In early 1962, the chief had unsuccessfully sought enough agents to create a special “fourth shift” of the White House detail. By adding enough agents to create a fourth detail, the Service would be able to rotate agents off their draining protective assignment for a few weeks at a time. They would instead spend this dedicated period of time at headquarters to update their training, or take some essential days off.
In 1964, Rowley asked for the same thing again, politely calling this fourth shift “long overdue.”
Republican representative Silvio Conte of Massachusetts had once been among the lawmakers blocking Rowley’s push for more agents. With Kennedy’s death, he became the Service’s top advocate and Rowley’s lifelong friend. “I think we fell far short of the mark in this country in providing the necessary protection for the president of the United States,” Conte later explained. “And I think we’ve learned a lot. We went to town after that….I pushed like the dickens….We’ve come a long way, maybe we should have come a long way before that, but who knew?”
Conte also helped Rowley tell lawmakers in private what was indelicate to say in public: Kennedy had made the Secret Service’s job a lot harder. “Isn’t it true that the late president traveled around Washington sometimes at night without a Secret Service guard?” Conte asked Rowley in a closed House Appropriations meeting.
“Yes,” Rowley replied, “but how could you protect a president who didn’t want to be protected? There were a number of times when he slipped away from us at night. He didn’t want us, and there wasn’t a thing in the world we could do about it.”
* * *
—
WHILE ROWLEY FOUGHT for the Service, President Johnson was fighting Rowley. Paranoid by nature, Johnson suspected that most detail agents remained loyal to the Kennedy family. He told his aides that the agents were “not deep thinkers” and that they were constantly talking behind his back.
Some agents did find Johnson shockingly coarse in comparison to Kennedy. He urinated in front of them, gave them orders while lying in bed or sitting on the toilet, and cussed them out when he was frustrated.
A confidential staff memo stoked Johnson’s neuroses in January. It warned that agent morale was plummeting under Johnson and cited the high number of detail agents seeking transfers. Johnson’s staff also suspected agents had leaked a gossipy tidbit to Sports Illustrated. The magazine accurately reported that Johnson threatened to shoot out the tires of his agents’ follow-up car for driving too close and ruining his deer hunting.
“I think you better get all the men assigned to the White House detail together and tell them to quit their bellyaching,” the president told Rowley in a call. “If they don’t want to handle a president, I’ll send up an amendment to get the FBI to do it.”
Rowley stammered as Johnson said he’d be glad to “sever the connection” with the Service if the detail agents were so unhappy. “I’ll ask Edgar Hoover to assign some men to go with me,” Johnson said tersely before hanging up. “Let y’all go back to handling counterfeit.”
Johnson had periodically threatened to have the FBI—the Secret Service’s hated rival—take over the Secret Service’s job, and he increased his threats that winter. The FBI owed its very existence to the Secret Service. In 1908, Congress had blocked Secret Service investigators from helping the Justice Department probe a series of fraudulent land grants that gave away valuable Western timberland to profiteers rather than settlers. The investigation had already taken down an Oregon senator and congressman. A few members were upset that their august body was being investigated, but many in Congress decried the notion of a “secret service” of detectives spying on Americans and feared this loan of private investigators could lead to abuse. But President Theodore Roosevelt, furious at Congress meddling with federal investigations, permanently transferred eight Secret Service agents to a new unit, which eventually became the FBI. In the years since its creation, though, the FBI had surpassed its mother agency in both annual budget and clout. The vast development of cities across the nation in the early 1900s had birthed a wave of crime, and the FBI became the enforcer for the rapidly growing country.
In early 1964, President Johnson shocked Rowley by ordering him to cut the number of agents on his detail. The president handed down his orders just as the Secret Service chief was pressing Congress to agree to let him hire at least a hundred more agents in the coming year. “I want less when I go into the campaign than you had before the assassination,” Johnson told him.
