The Impossible Mission

The eyes of Texas were upon us for the second day, thousands of them, peering down from countless windows, from rooftops, staring excitedly from curbside and doorways, from wherever they could get a view over the heads of those in front. Fathers hoisted little children onto their shoulders, and as the line of cars approached, cameras were lifted, aimed, whirring and clicking as we passed, and then lowered when we were gone, their own private moment of history recorded. It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had come to Dallas with the express purpose of being seen by as many people as possible, hoping this would help change the opinion Dallas had shown at the polls in 1960 when the elections came around again the following year.

I was there, one of sixteen Secret Service agents in the motorcade for the protection of the president and the vice president. I was the agent in charge of the Vice Presidential Detail, and in this capacity I rode in the front seat of the Lincoln convertible that took Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird, and Senator Ralph Yarborough through the crowded streets, two cars behind President and Mrs. Kennedy.

While the crowds watched the Kennedys and the Johnsons, the Secret Service watched the crowds. We were as unseen as the referee invariably is in a boxing arena.

This motorcade through Dallas, as planned, was virtually indistinguishable from three the previous day, in San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth. The streets through which a presidential motorcade moves may differ from city to city: the faces along the route are not the same, the worker sitting in an open window munching a sandwich on his lunch break is not the one you saw yesterday, yet there is a sameness about motorcades, whether they take place in New Delhi or New York, Dakar or Dallas — if they go according to plan. The Secret Service is there, in a sense, to maintain that sameness. It had been maintained in the other cities, but the Secret Service agent on protective duty lives on the brink of disaster. His job borders on the impossible.

It is a job of interception. When the eager young man with a camera in his hands breaks from the curb toward the cars, he must be intercepted and as unobtrusively as possible moved back into the crowd. The camera might not be a camera at all; it could be a bomb or a gun.

When the fellow standing in the front row half a block ahead, wearing a raincoat on a sunny day, pushes his hands into his pockets, an agent may drop almost casually off one of the cars and position himself between that man and the one he is assigned to protect.

As a Secret Service agent, you are constantly on the alert for the individual who somehow does not fit. You scan the crowd, the rooftops, the doorways, the windows, ready to take whatever action may be necessary should you observe something that could jeopardize your mission. You look into thousands of faces and you try to determine in each if he or she may be the one who came to do more than look. You seldom know whether some action on your part may have thwarted that individual — the young man with the camera or the man sweltering in the sun in the trench coat — because you have passed and he has melted back into the throng that dissolves in the wake of the motorcade. If he was the man, he may give it up altogether, or he may be at the corner of Fourth and Main in the next city when you get there, ready to try again.

He was there in Dallas, faceless, nameless so far, but he was there. He had a rifle powerful enough to bring down a grizzly bear, and he had a telescopic sight that extended its effectiveness. His training as a rifleman had been the best, the U.S. Marine Corps, and he had constructed a sniper's nest as perfect as a duck blind. He must have known the odds were in his favor; we — the Secret Service — knew it. The attack he planned was the one against which we were virtually defenseless at that time. We had long been concerned that when we had to move the president through the streets of a city in an open car, it was like moving him on the track of a shooting gallery and inviting one and all to step right up and take a shot.

The man in Dallas was not one of the faces at the windows, smiling and cheering. He hung back in the shadows, and as we moved directly toward him, we saw only a half-open empty window. The motorcade swung slowly into a tight curve directly beneath him, and one by one the big cars straightened, the Secret Service agents scanning the rooftops of the buildings and the windows where many of his coworkers sat and waved.

An agent in the lead car saw people standing on an overpass ahead, and he motioned for the Dallas policeman stationed there to move them away so that the cars would not have to pass below them.

The man, waiting patiently behind stacked cartons of schoolbooks in a dingy storeroom six floors up, saw the car bearing his quarry as it began to move down the incline toward the overpass. The car, moving straight away from him and slightly downward, presented him with a target that was, in effect, almost stationary. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, his finger touched the trigger, and he positioned his eye against the scope. In the cross hairs, the open limousine must have seemed almost close enough to touch. The figures were clearly defined in the bright Texas sun, the young woman on the left, the man on the right, his head and shoulders plainly outlined above the seat back.

The rifle barrel inched out the window, across the ledge. The finger, with the steady, deliberate movement of the marksman, tightened on the trigger. Between the three quick blasts, the men on the floor below could hear the shell casings bouncing onto the floor above them. In a matter of seconds, it was all over.

The Secret Service had carried the mandate of presidential protection for sixty-one years, with the shadow of a failure of the first magnitude hanging over it twenty-four hours of every day. There had been some close ones, but the record of no losses had held.

That record ended a few seconds after 12:30 p.m., November 22, 1963, on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas.

The U.S. Secret Service

I joined the Secret Service in 1951, not because of any burning desire to be a Secret Service agent — I had only a general idea of what the Service did — but because my chosen line of endeavor had fallen unexpectedly on hard times, and I had a family to support.

Like some sixteen million other Americans, I had put in my World...