Were Secret Service Agents Shot When Jfk Was Killed
On Nov. 18, 1963, in the midst of a whirlwind entrada trip, President John F. Kennedy told Secret Service supervisor Floyd Irksome that agents riding on special boards installed near the torso of his machine should drop back and tail him from a follow-up vehicle instead.
"It'southward excessive, Floyd. And it's giving the wrong impression to people," said Kennedy. "Nosotros've got an election coming up. The whole point is for me to exist accessible to the people."
Kennedy'due south bristling at the proximity of the agents was not uncommon for those being protected past the Clandestine Service, especially The states presidents. Simply subsequently his assassination four days later, some agents wondered if that extra car-length prevented them from saving JFK's life.
"Zero Fail: The Rising and Fall of the Underground Service," by Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig (Random House, out May eighteen), recounts presidential history from the service's point of view, documenting how inadequate budgets, resistant protectees, political infighting and a macho, frat-boy culture take frequently left the agents ill prepared for their vital, lifesaving missions.
In the example of JFK, his personal charisma — most constructive when he could interact directly with the public — and his frequent dalliances with young women made him a special challenge.
"In private, Kennedy's Secret Service agents saw a man courtship danger," Leonnig writes.
"Kennedy was extremely reckless with his own personal safety. His deportment fabricated some of his protectors uneasy and a few quite angry. Professionally, he was their toughest assignment yet."
Kennedy, capitalizing on his telegenic appeal, broke all records for presidential trips outside the White House immediately upon taking office in 1961.
At the fourth dimension, the White Firm'due south Hugger-mugger Service detail had just 34 agents, working in vi-human teams in rotating eight-hour shifts.
In order to embrace the president's blazing schedule, the agents worked double shifts and on their days off, ofttimes forgoing a nighttime's sleep.
But often, the problem was not lack of manpower, but Kennedy himself, as he would ditch his guards at any opportunity, believing them ultimately ineffective.
"If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he tin can do it," Kennedy told his spokesperson. "All he must exist prepared to do is give his life for the president's."
It was in this spirit, then, that Kennedy would skid into "an unmarked machine with his brother or a friend … trying to feed a seemingly insatiable appetite for sexual conquest" even every bit "members of his item feared that inside a sea of random women he met for trysts, 1 would endeavor to blackmail, toxicant or kill him."
And while the Secret Service routinely conducted background checks on anyone who met privately with the president, this was forbidden for the president'south mistresses.
Agent Tim McIntyre joined JFK's detail in 1963 and tried to make light of the president's affairs, joking with other agents, "What happens if i bites him?"
McIntyre, writes Leonnig, "stood witness to a steady parade of secretaries, starlets, and even prostitutes escorted to the president's bedroom — in hotels and in his private residence. The Secret Service agents weren't allowed to ask the women's names."
When Kennedy embarked on a weeklong tour of Florida and Texas in November 1963, the service was depleted after months of intense travel, relying on skeleton crews and often sending simply i agent to programme a trip'south advance security instead of the usual 2.
Then, in the middle of the trip, Kennedy ordered his agents to pace 1 car dorsum.
On Nov. 21, Kennedy's agents spent near 24 hours directly on duty, walking or running more than x miles in the process.
That nighttime, instead of heading to slumber, nine of the agents — four of whom were scheduled to report for duty first thing in the morn — wound up at a "legendary and scandalous nightclub" called The Cellar after 1 a.grand. Over the course of the night, three more than agents joined them at the Fort Worth establishment.
Drinking liquor on the route was forbidden, since agents "could be chosen for duty at any fourth dimension when the president was traveling," but this rule was widely ignored.
The Cellar had no liquor license, but the owners served a free concoction of fruit juice and grain alcohol that they kept behind the bar.
The agents returned to their hotel betwixt 2:45 a.m. and five a.m. The twenty-four hour period shift began at 8 a.m.
Every bit they drove through Dallas several hours later, agents who would usually exist riding by the president'south side were a automobile-length behind him instead.
Clint Hill, caput of the showtime lady's particular, was riding in the follow car instead of in his usual spot next to her lady. He appeared to be the but agent who heard the get-go shot and immediately realized what had happened, seeing the president "heighten his hands to either side of his throat."
"I knew I should take been on the back of that auto!" Hill thought. "His trunk could accept kept the assassin from getting a clear shot," Leonnig writes, noting that the other agents heard the shot, merely were initially confused about the source and the target.
Nib Greer, the driver, idea a motorcycle had backfired and reflexively slowed the car down, inadvertently giving Lee Harvey Oswald an easier target for his side by side two shots. The tertiary shot connected with the right side of the president's head.
In the ensuing chaos, a shocked Jackie Kennedy "stretched her trunk and right arm out over the car'due south trunk. She reached out to call up something on the shiny blackness metal of the trunk'southward lid — a small chunk of her husband'due south brain and skull." The showtime lady would keep that in her hand until she could requite it to the surgeon.
Hill immediately "pressed the first lady back into her seat and spread his body across the dorsum of the broad convertible to shield the couple."
In the agonizing carve up seconds during and immediately after the shooting, numerous agents performed valiantly, scurrying toward their protectees and selflessly sprawling their bodies across them in an endeavour to forestall, deflect or even absorb the violence intended for the president.
But in the years that followed, several of them were tortured by guilt that they weren't able to practise more than.
"Hill would eventually be considered a hero past generations of agents after him for his bound onto a moving machine," writes Leonnig.
But on the airplane ride home from that nightmarish trip, he was "racked past unremitting pangs of guilt that would trouble him for most of the balance of his life: 'If I'd only been on the rear steps of the car, I would have been close plenty to go to him before the third shot,' he idea. 'If only I'd been faster.'"
Were Secret Service Agents Shot When Jfk Was Killed,
Source: https://nypost.com/2021/05/16/jfk-told-secret-service-to-keep-its-distance-on-assassination-day/
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