Secret Service Secrets - 13 July 2001

The scene is a small resort town on the Atlantic.

It's set in an old, colonial New England village, notable for its splendid old elms and its graceful white wooden 18th Century houses - surmounted on the roof by those tiny, fenced-in terraces called, in the early days of most Yankee seaports, "the captain's walk", but then, after a century's experience of stormy nor'easters "the widow's walk".

Until only a dozen years or so this coastal resort was famous for two other features - it was the summer home of Booth Tarkington.

How's that again? Booth Tarkington - once a most famous popular novelist, author of Monsieur Beaucaire, Alice Adams, The Magnificent Ambersons. You saw the movies, now read the books - if you can find them.

The other inevitable feature of this coastal village is well said in an old guide book.

"Lobsters, taken green from the cold sea waters are within an hour served piping hot in scarlet shells."

Now you know, as old Yankees said, where you're at. Nowhere but the state of Maine whose lobsters, it's conceded even by Norwegians and Spaniards and chefs of every nation, the best there are.

The name of this village is Kennebunkport and alert followers of American sport will instantly recall it as the place where a recent president of the United States played golf.

This past week two presidents - both named Bush - played golf there, for Kennebunkport has for two or three generations, perhaps more, been the summer retreat of the Bush family.

And this past week the present man in charge - George Dubya, as he's universally known - went up there to relax for the first time since he went into the White House.

These presidential vacations, taken during a national holiday when Congress is briefly in recess, are trailed not only by the small nucleus of the White House press corps, which follows him everywhere, but by an army of domestic and overseas reporters who look on a president's holiday as the best time to come up with what is called "a human interest story" - especially since the introduction of television and the arrival of editors who want to squeeze some humanity out of any and every story.

Successive presidents have responded to this trend by usually letting the press watch them at play or fish or by holding a little press conference in which they're expected to tell, in a jokey fashion, how they spent their days.

Up at Kennebunkport, George Dubya didn't attempt any witticisms, but for his first round of golf as president he couldn't wait to shed the press and get off with his father alone on the links. Alas, there is no such thing as a president alone anywhere.

First, there's a man who must never be more than 10 seconds away from the president's side - the man who carries the secret code of the nation's nuclear headquarters, which changes every day and belongs solely to the president. Of course this unholy secret is something every president learns about, no longer than 10 seconds after his inauguration.

And of course he knew from his father's experience of the presence of the secret service men, a posse of whom is literally at his side indoors and out in every public appearance. But the golf course would be different.

However, when President G W looked down the fairway he was amazed to see darting figures - figures peering up trees - men near the greens checking on cell phones. He surveyed these slinking, running, stationary midgets near and far, after all their special problem is protecting 130-150 acres from any invisible sneak with ill intentions.

Once a man with a gun made it into the pro shop during a presidential round at Augusta, of all sanctuaries. It never made the papers.

President Bush looked ahead and sighed: "Amazing how this job follows you everywhere."

And I'm sure if questioned he could have confirmed the ultimate shock which President Eisenhower, long after he retired, confessed to a friend.

Eisenhower was talking about the transformation of your private, as well as public, life, once you're in the White House.

He said he was resigned to losing much privacy, but the first morning he woke up as president and went to the bathroom he was no sooner installed in what King Charles I called "a very private place", when the president heard a cough.

As he opened the door to leave there two feet away sitting on a chair was a secret service man.

"I thought", said Eisenhower, "I mean, this is the end."

But it was only the beginning of the end of any truly private life.

The Secret Service: It's an interesting institution and is, I find, often misidentified, by Americans too, as a sort of private arm of the FBI or the crack corps of a national police.

First, in America there is no such thing as a national police force - they're all local or state.

Secondly, the FBI is the enforcement arm of the Department of Justice and can take charge only over crimes that involve a suspect crossing a state border.

The Secret Service is a department, believe it or not, of the United States Treasury. It was set up originally to detect people who attempted to defraud the Treasury.

When the civil war started in 1860 there was no national currency. Every state had its own, and you can imagine, when every sort of businessman was trying to sell or buy rifles, war materials of every kind, counterfeiting and forgery were rife throughout the Union.

The Secret Service was started by a Union brigadier general to catch such people and then approved by Congress.

In April 1865, only five days after the war was over, President Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theatre in Washington.

And after that a special detail of the service was assigned to protect the person of the president and to accompany him whenever he is away from Washington.

Thirty-six years later President McKinley was assassinated in upstate New York and from then on the Secret Service was strengthened and required to protect the president and his family - and anyone elected to be president and his family.

In a country with, for whatever reason, a long inclination to violence, there have been four assassinated presidents and several other attempts.

The Secret Service is understandably more highly trained, more than ever on the alert and more ubiquitous.

Its staff is well acquainted with what it must account as failures - the very close call, only 20 years ago, with Ronald Reagan, an attempt on Truman, two attempts on President Ford, and certainly they've heard about the very close call which could have kept Franklin Roosevelt from ever becoming president.

He was president-elect in 1933 and making a speech down in Miami. A shot aimed at him was diverted by a woman standing by.

It missed Roosevelt and killed the mayor of Chicago who was at Roosevelt's side. That is probably the most famous recorded near miss in presidential history.

There's one other which never made the papers, which I heard about several years after John Kennedy was dead.

It was an attempt on him, also shortly after his election, when he was down in Palm Beach staying at his father's house in December 1960.

There is an office of the Secret Service known, not well known, as the protective research section.

It has files on every letter - threatening or obscene letter - written to the President of the United States. The file has over 50,000 such notes, swollen by the never-ending dribble of the same offensive letters that come in to every incumbent president.

If two notes appear to be from the same author the service puts out its feelers. Well, on Friday 9 December 1960 the protective research section received a letter from a postal inspector in a small New England town.

It warned about the mischievous possibilities of a local character, one Richard Pavlick, who'd publicly uttered threats against the life of President-elect Kennedy.

The Secret Service tracked the man to his home town and then started alerting airports, especially Palm Beach in Florida.

However, two days after getting that warning note, on the following Sunday, a private small car drove along a Palm Beach boulevard and parked across from Mr Joseph Kennedy's house. At the wheel was Richard Pavlick.

His car was equipped with seven sticks of dynamite - enough, it was later calculated, to blow up a small mountain. They were rigged to go off at the pulling of a switch.

President-elect Kennedy appeared and was about to go off to church. He appeared on the veranda of the house with, by great good luck, the beautiful Mrs Kennedy and their two merry children.

Pavlick had his hand on the switch. He suddenly paused - overcome, he said, by a passing impulse.

"I didn't want," he said, "to harm her or the children. I'll get him later at the church."

Well, he drove off. Only three days later did the Secret Service learn that Pavlick had left New Hampshire and was headed for Florida.

However, 24 hours later they caught him - checking, once again, the layout of the Kennedy's church.

He was, like many more that you've never heard about, put away for life.

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