Last week’s column took a retrospective look at President John F. Kennedy, the converted Cold Warrior who never got to realize his evolving peace agenda and plans for a Vietnam troop withdrawal.
This week: a look back at how his history-changing assassination could have been avoided by better security. It’s prompted by more than the recent anniversary of that horrific event. It’s also a reaction to yet another Kennedy assassination book: Kennedy Detail by former Secret Service agents Clint Hill and Jerry Blaine. Hill was the agent who climbed aboard the presidential limousine after JFK had been shot and crawled along the trunk till he reached the back seat. He had been riding in the follow-up car.
In various interviews, including one on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Mathews, the agents, still visibly shattered nearly a half century later, acknowledge regrettably that nothing else could have been done that fateful day in Dallas. Even, as Hill maintained, had he actually been stationed on the back of the limousine, the line of fire would still have been unimpeded.
By the way, it was Kennedy’s preference that agents not always station themselves on his motorcade limo. And it was Kennedy’s call not to use the “bubble” top, which wasn’t bullet-proof. Technically, however, the Secret Service can countermand a president’s preference on security if it literally involves his safety. Harry Truman, in fact, once remarked: “The Secret Service was the only boss that the president of United States really had.”
But there remains something critically relevant unstated–and unasked. And you don’t have to be a conspiracy buff, a hard-core revisionist or even Chris Mathews to ask it. Why wasn’t more done BEFORE Kennedy came to Dallas, by then notoriously dubbed the “Hate Capital of Dixie”?
Keep in mind that at literally the last minute, Kennedy had to call off his planned trip to Chicago on Nov. 2. The reason: The Secret Service had arrested two members of a four-man sniper team suspected of plans to kill the president. The other two had escaped.
That was the dodged bullet.
Then just days before Dallas–Nov. 18–rumors were rife about an assassination attempt on Kennedy in Tampa. Unprecedented security, culled from the region and various bureaucracies to complement TPD, was implemented to protect the president, whose motorcade would pass by, among other buildings, the relatively high-rise Floridan Hotel. The likely M.O. of a potential assassin–or assassins–was known.
But JFK still went to Texas–to help mediate a Democratic Party feud between Gov. John Connolly and Sen. Ralph Yarborough and to help retain its 25 tenuous electoral votes in 1964. And despite a number of well-documented premonitions and dire warnings about Dallas, including one from United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been manhandled and spat upon in Dallas a few weeks prior.
It was a pragmatic, political given that the Texas trip had to happen. But given the Chicago and Tampa foreshadowings, how do you permit understaffed security, unmonitored buildings, an unobstructed target and a motorcade route that needed to slow to a virtual stop to make its Dealey Plaza dogleg turn? That’s why the competence of the Secret Service was criticized in the 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
And while we’re asking, how is it that the only “Secret Service” presence near the grassy knoll was an imposter with Secret Service credentials sufficient to fool police?
Indeed, the die had been tragically cast by the time Agent Hill raced bravely to Kennedy’s limo. But the time for something to have been done had fatefully–and negligently–passed.