Richard Paul Pavlik - 1 June 1990

Three weeks ago there arrived in Ottawa an advance team of Soviet officials, including the nucleus of what we used to call bodyguards and now call the security force.

They were there, of course, to plan in precise detail the timetable of Mr Gorbachev's visit. And the first thing they wanted to get straight was not the sequence of the official meetings, dinners, museum visits, what he would say to Prime Minister Mulroney, but the time, the place and the duration of Mr Gorbachev's spontaneous stop, on the way from the airport, in order to mingle with the people on the street and, as President Lyndon Johnson used to say, "Press the flesh".

The Canadian security men were alarmed when the Soviet team picked a big fruit and vegetable market in a crowded section of downtown Ottawa. It wouldn't do, they said, too many people, too much bustle, impossible to scrutinise and control. It was, of course, the first Gorbachev appearance for the Canadian security men and they wondered wistfully if, for once, Mr Gorbachev mightn't want to skip the whole idea.

But Mr Gorbachev's spontaneous leaps from his motor car, his impulsive habit of a walkabout, or shove-about, through the welcoming crowds is, by now, as much of a ritual as the Pope's descent from his airplane to kiss the good earth of every country he arrives in.

"It's always done", said one of the Russians, "and it's spontaneous". They then discussed alternative sites and times of day, giving a new twist to the word "spontaneous". They finally settled on a short street of shops and cafés for pedestrians only.

Watching Mr Gorbachev get out of his car and walk into the maelstrom of clapping, pushing people, I wondered about the occupational risk of heart attack among security men and I thought back to a night in Texas and the following weeks when, in this country at least, we entered reluctantly a new era of presidential security.

The night in Texas was, you'll have guessed, the last night in the life of John F Kennedy. Before he went to bed, he was sitting around with a crew of cronies, what we used to call the Irish Mafia, that went with him everywhere. The last topic that came up was the chances of assassination and the best way to foil them.

And Kennedy said, "There is no way. If somebody wants bad enough to kill the president, all the security in the world won't save him". Next day, on the way from Dallas airport, it happened. And that night, at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, we watched in a whirling daze of disbelief as President Lyndon Johnson now pledged, in a hoarse voice, to carry on and keep the faith.

In the following days, there were many meetings of the secret service squad whose whole occupation is the protection of the president. Against the protests and the pleas of the new president, it was settled that there would be no more drives in open cars, no more walkabouts, no more unplanned exposure on the streets.

The next month, with Christmas coming up, Mr Johnson took off for his Texas ranch on the Pedernales River. And we, then a quite small White House press corps, were housed in a hotel 30 miles away in Austin, which is the capital city of Texas.

Wherever any president has his winter retreat – with President Truman it was the marine base in Key West, Florida, with Kennedy, his father's house in Palm Beach, Florida – the place he's staying becomes the winter White House. So the Johnson ranch was the White House. All the telephones are implanted with little discs saying White House, the numbers are changed, the hot line to Moscow is rerouted and so forth.

We were, understandably, a very subdued press corps. And for the first time I could remember, we had no contact with the president. All we got from the secret service was that the president "hunkered down" as he put it, at the ranch, and they were going to keep him there. It did not make for very informative copy.

Well, one morning, it must have been about the fourth day, a friend of mine, the chief Washington correspondent for a Chicago paper came striding into the hotel coffee shop and said, "You won't believe it! The Pied Piper's in town! Come! On the double!"

We went out and up the street and there, striding along the cross street, was that always outsize human being, the huge, rangy, striding figure of President Johnson.

There were very few people about. Two secret service men were puffing to keep up with him but straggling alongside him. Hardly believing what they were doing were a couple of sassy children, an old lady, two or three amazed pedestrians.

The president stopped by the local barber – known as such in those days –ducked into a saloon, handled a vegetable or two at a fruit stand, cut across to a synagogue to talk with his old friend the rabbi. All the shopkeepers were old friends. At least he called them by their first names, embraced them, shook hands, waved at people who were beginning to appear at upper windows.

We came on down our street and the two secret service men bundled him into the hotel lobby and we went into the bar. Or would have gone into the bar, if it had not been locked. Texas was then still a dry state.

But all the correspondents had been sold keys, $2 each, when they checked in to what was called "the club", and one of us unlocked the door, we got in there, and the president sat down at a banquette and he said, "I did this just to make my peace with the secret service".

Well, making peace meant demanding the surrender of the service. Mr. Johnson said, "You can't keep the president cooped up. There isn't going to be a new system. The President of the United States has to get out and be seen by the people, no matter what!"

He invited us to a barbecue at the ranch the next day and that was that. True, there were no more open cars for a while, but even that rule went by the board the next year, during the election campaign of 1964. When Mr Johnson jumped out of his car, whenever he felt like it, he really did plunge into truly spontaneous walkabouts and gave the secret service fits.

When the presidential campaign was over and Mr Johnson had gone back into the White House on a landslide, I ran into an old secret service man who'd decided to retire.

"I can't take this any more", he said, "This man is impossible. He doesn't just wade into crowds, he gets lost in crowds. I thought Pavlick was bad enough. Remember Pavlick? I was in Palm Beach then and I thought this is for me the absolute limit."

Yes indeed, I remembered Pavlick, a name and a story which was strangely never reported at the time. I didn't write about it until almost four years after the event, which was after the presidential commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy had turned in its report.

The place was Palm Beach, the time, December 1960. President-elect Kennedy was spending his first Christmas after the election in his father's house, getting together his team, appointing Cabinet members, feeling his way into the job before his inauguration in January.

The fateful date was Sunday, 11 December, a hot, shining day. Just before 10 o'clock in the morning, a small car, just one man in the driver's seat, slowed down along a boulevard and parked across from the large house of the president's father. There was nothing then against any citizen's parking close to where the president was staying.

Across the road, there was a highway patrol man banking his motorcycle against the sidewalk. He was there to keep an eye on sightseers. Then four secret service men came out of the big house, for President and Mrs Kennedy were getting ready to go to church.

Pretty soon they appeared on the veranda of the house with their two small children. They laughed, then they embraced and the president waved at the few passersby who'd stopped. He and Mrs. Kennedy got into their car and they were on their way.

The car parked across the street started up, drove off and its driver was on his way. That driver was a man named Pavlick. He'd had second thoughts. His car was rigged with seven sticks of dynamite. By the pull of a switch, Pavlick, the chief of the secret service reported later, could have blown up a small mountain.

It would have wiped out the Kennedys, Pavlick, the service detail – anybody within two blocks. Pavlick had written threatening letters to the President-elect and for several months the secret service had been tracking him down, first to his home in New England, then to various stops along the way, as he drove south, 1800 miles to Palm Beach. They lost him somewhere in Florida.

So on that Sunday, when Pavlick saw the two children appear on the veranda with Mrs Kennedy, he had a change of heart. "I wished no harm," he said later, "to her and the children. I'd get him some other time at the church". So he never pulled the switch. He drove away. They caught him later and he was adjudged mentally disturbed, a lunatic and was put away for good.

I suppose every head of state, head of government, learns early on that much of the incoming mail is from deranged or aggrieved people. Though I wonder if any country can match the normal burden of the White House which received, addressed to the president, about 15,000 threatening or obscene letters a month. So, it takes certain bravery – if you don't have it, you must acquire it – for any monarch or president to mingle with ordinary people in the open.

The Soviet advance team insisted on maintaining this new custom of the spontaneous walkabout because they must know that, more than any other manifestation of glasnost, openness, it is the one that has captured the imagination and affection of every city, even in the Soviet Union, that Mr Gorbachev visits.

Mr Boris Yeltsin, the new president of the Russian republic who is, at the moment, a nuisance to Mr Gorbachev and may soon be a threat, has written an autobiography. In it he mocks Mr Gorbachev's "meet the people" stops, he says they're so well planned, that in some Soviet provinces local dissidents were taken into custody well in advance.

Let us hope so.

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