Zero fail, p.19
Zero Fail, page 19
“Very few people can understand what it’s really like to have your husband shot at and almost die, and then have him exposed all the time to enormous crowds, tens of thousands of people, any one of whom might be a lunatic with a gun,” Nancy Reagan wrote in her memoir. “I have been criticized and ridiculed for turning to astrology, but after a while I reached a point where I didn’t care. I was doing everything I could think of to protect my husband and keep him alive. Living without Ronnie was unthinkable: I was willing to do anything I could to possibly keep him safe….Astrology helped me cope and no one has ever shown that it caused any harm to Ronnie or to the country.”
At first, Mrs. Reagan hid her astrology crutch from her husband. He didn’t know she and Deaver were secretly adjusting his schedule. One day, President Reagan heard his wife on the phone with Quigley and asked what that was all about. Mrs. Reagan told him.
“If it makes you feel better, go ahead and do it,” he said. “But be careful. It might look a little odd if it ever came out.”
Mrs. Reagan often asked Deaver, as well as the detail leaders Bob DeProspero and Joe Petro, whether they “felt sure” about security for a trip. She frequently asked whether they planned to have Reagan wear his bulletproof vest. Reagan detested the extra heat and bulk of the vest. But he complied when agents asked him to wear it—just as he had promised in his recovery room. Once, while helicoptering on Marine One to a church for Easter services, Petro saw the First Lady giving him the signal when her husband wasn’t looking. She patted her breastbone with her right hand. “She was traumatized by the assassination attempt. You can imagine,” Petro said. “She was very engaged in his protection. And in my experience, she was often right about things.”
In 1983, spurred by Nancy Reagan’s push for the funding, the Secret Service opened a training facility on five hundred acres of federal land in Beltsville, Maryland. There agents trained for bombings and shootouts on a life-sized replica of a city street with nearby buildings. They conducted simulation exercises for moving the president quickly in and out of a building entrance, evacuating in a medical emergency, scrambling to cover him during a sniper attack, and swerving his limousine through roadblocks to escape danger. The service named the center the James Rowley Training Center, in honor of the work the former director had begun.
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OF ALL THE people who lived through the Hilton shooting, Reagan seemed the least fazed by the attack. McCarthy, the agent who had taken a bullet in the gut, remained amazed at Reagan’s ability during his recovery to forgive John Hinckley. Several in his detail were also struck that he never questioned the Service’s efforts to ensure his safety. Reagan was respectful of his detail’s concerns, but also eager to make light of his risk. “I never saw fear or concern in the president as a result of the assassination attempt. Never,” said Petro, who succeeded DeProspero as head of the President’s Protective Detail.
In the summer of 1986, Petro grew quite worried that Reagan could be vulnerable to an assassination attempt at the upcoming United Nations General Assembly. The White House wanted the president to sit with the American delegation during a full meeting of the United Nations. Two problems: The U.N. building wasn’t screened, and Reagan would be sitting directly in front of the Libyan delegation. A few months before, Reagan had ordered a missile strike on Libya in retaliation for an attack on American citizens in Berlin. The April bombing had destroyed part of Gen. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s compound and killed his daughter. Petro strongly urged Reagan’s chief of staff, Don Regan, to keep the president from attending this wide-open forum.
“No, this is what we want to do. This is important. There are diplomatic reasons why we have to do this. Just make it work,” Regan told the detail leader.
“Don, I’m not comfortable with this. And I want to talk to the president,” Petro said.
“Be my guest!” Regan snorted.
And with that the two men marched to the Oval Office. Reagan was finishing up a scheduled lunch with Vice President Bush. He invited Bush and a chief of advance to stay while they sorted out what his aides called an urgent security matter.
Petro and Regan gave their competing arguments, each growing heated at times. Petro explained that Qaddafi was hard to predict and it was easy to sneak a weapon into the United Nations building. Regan said the White House had to hold its head high on the international stage. There had to be ways to control the risks.
Reagan interrupted: “Well, I think I agree with Joe. I don’t think I should do this,” the president said. He paused, crinkling his brow.
“But maybe this is something George could do,” he added.
Everyone, including the vice president, broke down laughing.
“Yeah, sure, paint a bull’s-eye on my back!” Bush said.
Reagan roared. The president had managed to get his whole team bent over laughing at a possible assassination attempt.
CHAPTER 10
A HAPPY SERVICE, A RISING THREAT
To hear agents and officers tell it, the Secret Service enjoyed some of its happiest days when George H. W. Bush occupied the White House.
Bush came from a patrician lineage that stretched back to Queen Elizabeth I. His father, who became a U.S. senator, had instilled in his son the creed of well-off WASPs: “Of those to whom much is given, much is expected.”
George H. W. Bush stepped into his first turn at public service on his eighteenth birthday. As a senior at Phillips Academy, Bush postponed leaving for college at Yale to instead enlist in the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He set a record at the time as one of the youngest naval aviators serving in World War II. Starting with a family stake, he then made his own millions in an oil and gas company in Texas. In the 1960s, Bush entered Republican politics and began serving his country in a string of lofty roles: congressman, chief liaison with China, CIA director, and vice president.
Despite his life of wealth and privilege, Bush forged a genuine kinship with fellow public servants on far lower rungs. The Secret Service agents assigned to surround him and his family both won his respect and tugged at his heart. Bush, as eager as any president to get closer to the public, politely held his tongue and accepted his agents’ restraining security recommendations. As vice president in 1981, Bush had lived through the shock of President Reagan’s near death after the shooting at the Hilton. He credited Reagan’s Secret Service team and their instincts with saving his life.
Bush and his wife, Barbara, treated the Secret Service agents who protected them and their large brood like part of the extended family—not like “the help.” The Bushes drew the agents closer into their unscripted lives than most First Families allowed. The warm feelings were mutual. Agents had seen the president try to calmly counsel a fuming grandchild and watched him cry recalling the death of his three-year-old daughter from leukemia. The president and First Lady often asked about the agents’ children and families. Bush and his children frequently pulled the agents into the family’s legendary sporting battles—as a fourth in a doubles match or as helpful ringers in a family football game. Barbara Bush was forever pushing extra sandwiches and appetizers left over from ceremonial events into agents’ hands and urging that aides take coffee to agents standing outside. Barbara Bush didn’t think twice about mothering—and bossing—the agents.
“Can you get the phone, dear?” she hollered to one through the family home at Kennebunkport during a summer break. And one winter, she scolded an agent to put on one of her husband’s knit caps that she held out in her hand—or else.
“You better do what Bar says,” President Bush warned.
One of the detail agents assigned to the Bush family, Marc Connolly, ended up becoming part of that extended family in a whole new way. He married the nanny who worked for the Bushes’ daughter Doro.
The Bushes demonstrated their gratitude to their security team with gestures large and small. President Bush made a habit of thanking his agents by name when he ended his workday and returned to the executive residence for the night. When the Bushes knew they’d be staying for several weeks in the summer at Kennebunkport, the First Couple invited the agents’ families over for big barbecues and swimming at Walker’s Point.
George H. W. Bush had been aghast as vice president to learn that the agents historically postponed their Christmas celebrations with their own families in order to be with the president at his family home. As vice president, Bush chose to delay leaving for Houston until Christmas Day so agents could enjoy some of the holiday with their own family. As president, the Bushes began spending Christmas Eve at Camp David for the same reason. The Maryland retreat is guarded year-round by military service members, which allowed more detail agents to take that day off. “That’s unbelievable, that the most powerful man in the world would think enough of other people to delay his vacation by twenty-four or forty-eight hours just so other people could be with their families,” Rich Miller, the former head of Bush’s detail, said. “That’s why people would do anything for the president and Mrs. Bush.”
Bush and his detail had a mutual respect and affection hard to match in another White House administration. The affection had its downsides, though. The Secret Service’s eagerness to please one of their favorite presidents ended up delivering him to danger’s door.
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IN APRIL 1989, just three months after President Bush’s inauguration, his White House aides and the Secret Service were working together to help the new president score some political points. They wanted him to get some credit for the United States’ steady stream of victories over Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, a key reason for President Reagan’s popularity at home. They scurried to put Bush on the perfect political stage to highlight a similar “win” in Poland. But their effort gave Bush’s secret stalker—a man named John Spencer Daughetee, who was entirely unknown to them at the time—an opportunity to shoot at the president.
Daughetee had been lurking around Bush without the Secret Service’s noticing, starting when Bush was a vice president and GOP nominee campaigning for the White House in the fall of 1988.
That spring, his aides wanted to showcase Bush’s role in helping Polish workers shake off their government effort to ban their Solidarity Party. The White House advance team proposed that Bush travel to one of the most predominantly Polish towns in America: an enclave near Detroit. He would use this stage to announce hundreds of millions in aid to the country just as Poland’s government was moving to recognize its popular, reform-minded workers’ party. They chose Hamtramck, a two-square-mile Michigan town of tightly packed brick homes and apartments, as the best symbolic stage for this news. Poles had emigrated to Hamtramck for a century, drawn to the familiar foods and the common language of this Polish community—and the steady work of the nearby auto manufacturing plants. The president was going to proclaim his financial support to Poland’s popular union leader Lech Walesa, just as Poland’s high court was expected to legalize Walesa’s banned labor party. What better place to find cheering supporters for Bush’s announcement than a town full of Polish Americans rooting for Walesa?
But at Secret Service headquarters, agents and supervisors heatedly disagreed about the wisdom of taking the president to Hamtramck. Agents in headquarters and the Detroit field office recommended against it, arguing that the cramped physical layout of the town made it hard to shield the president from an ambush.
This working-class hamlet had narrow streets that often required cars to slow down to pass one another. Hamtramck’s downtown was cut off from highways, and the main street consisted of a tight corridor of squat brick buildings jammed against each other, providing no escape route if agents had to quickly whisk the president away from danger. “There was no real freeway and no hospital nearby,” said a former agent who traveled to Hamtramck for Bush’s trip. “Really nowhere to land a helicopter. It was just a really crowded place…hard to get the president in or out quickly….Sometimes you have to say, ‘This is a terrible place. We can’t do this here.’ ”
But this was the stage the White House wanted. An advance agent on Bush’s detail took a trip to Hamtramck and reported back that he felt the Service could make it work. That pleased the president’s political advance team, which was rushing to place the president in the bosom of a Polish American community for his speech in time for the Polish court’s vote.
To beef up the president’s security, Secret Service advance agents landing in Detroit commandeered a string of school buses and lined them up bumper to bumper to create a walled-in corridor on either side of the Hamtramck City Hall where the Secret Service would erect a stage for the president. About four thousand residents and other spectators gathered to see the president on April 17, and the Service corralled them into a grassy park facing City Hall.
“We brought in all of these school buses and we just parked them in two parallel lines and literally cleared everyone into this park,” the former agent said. “We had to fight with the White House people because the optics were terrible.”
Nevertheless, between those buses poked the head of a stringy-haired Army veteran who believed it was his duty to kill President Bush.
Daughetee, a failed medical student, was then thirty-three and living with his mother in tiny Flora, Indiana. He had read about Bush’s much-publicized visit in the local paper and made the four-hour drive the day before. He thought this might be his golden opportunity to assassinate the president.
He dressed in a dark blue suit and white shirt and shoved into his waistband a .38 caliber handgun he had bought ten days earlier. He hoped his outfit would help him pass for a Secret Service agent so he could slip unnoticed past their security lines and closer to the stage. A day before Bush’s scheduled arrival, Daughetee had cased the Hamtramck park and chosen a piece of ground off to the left of the stage from which he thought he could get a clean shot at Bush.
For the past several years, Daughetee’s mind had been playing tricks on him—and egging him on to kill. Daughetee had graduated from the University of Wyoming with a degree in zoology and then spent two years on the U.S. Army’s enormous base in Korea. He had enrolled in medical school but quit after the second year. He struggled to keep up friendships and to keep a job. He kept hearing voices telling him to kill the president. If he couldn’t kill the president, the voices said, he should try to kill a group of school children.
The Secret Service had met Daughetee before. In 1987, while living in Indiana, he had blurted out to a friend that he wanted to kill President Reagan. Secret Service agents interviewed him at the time but concluded that he suffered from mental illness and was just confused. There was no evidence that Daughetee had crafted a credible plot to hurt the president, they decided, and so no grounds to charge him with the crime of threatening the president’s life. The agents in Indiana decided not to list him in the Secret Service’s computer database as “a person of protective interest.” That meant the Service didn’t think he was enough of a threat to check on his movements periodically. So the Secret Service didn’t know that, several months after his threat in Indiana, Daughetee had to be hospitalized twice at the Veterans Administration hospital in Indianapolis. He told his doctors that voices in his head kept telling him to kill.
The next year, in 1988, Vice President Bush was campaigning for president and Daughetee noticed news stories about his upcoming visits to battleground states and the big cities near his home: Detroit, Indianapolis, and Chicago.
In the frantic final weeks of the presidential campaign, in late October 1988, Daughetee stood outside Heritage High School in Saginaw, Michigan, hoping to catch sight of Bush at a late afternoon rally there. Later, just weeks after Bush was elected, Daughetee saved enough money to drive to Washington. He stood for hours outside a downtown Washington building—much as John Hinckley had—waiting for Bush to emerge from a public event inside.
Daughetee never took a shot at Vice President Bush—not in Saginaw or in Washington. He was frustrated that he couldn’t get close enough to him. Agents never noticed him. So he decided to keep trying.
That chilly April afternoon he stood on the edge of Hamtramck’s downtown park, looking over the heads of strangers toward the building where Bush would give his speech. It was nearly time for Bush to arrive onstage—11:45 a.m., according to the precise schedule—and Daughetee felt trapped. Local police were directing him and other spectators toward a bank of magnetometers so they could enter the front portion of the park. Daughetee feared he couldn’t reach his chosen spot without police finding the gun in his waistband. He looked for another way but found no opening. He tried jogging to other high spots in the park, behind the magnetometers, but by the time he found a clear shot, Bush had finished his speech and was leaving the stage. Daughetee stood there, dejected.
The Secret Service agents later took the president off the stage, unaware how close Daughetee had gotten to the president. Oddly, a different threat did show itself that day. When Bush’s speech was over, the motorcade sped the president back to Selfridge Air National Guard Base north of Detroit to board Air Force One for the return trip to Washington. Along the way, agents in the follow-up car saw something fly across the motorcade’s path. They thought it was a bolt from a crossbow. The president never noticed anything. But because of the possibility that this was a real attack, motorcade agents alerted their colleagues back at the site. A team of Secret Service agents from the Detroit field office and Michigan police officers were dispatched to the nearby woods. They searched the area along the road for days for traces of the possible attacker. They found nothing. “They tramped through the woods with the state police for days trying to find out what the heck happened,” one former headquarters agent said. “But there was somebody out there.”
