Protecting the president

The years of the spring and days of the morn, the time of the singing of birds is come and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. Not to mention the blaze of the azaleas, the blush of the camellias, the dazzling forsythia, the red bud and a snowstorm of dogwood down in the bushes at the feet of the enormous ramrods of the Georgia pines.

When I tried that opening out for voice level, the young engineer said, 'They'll think you're mad.' 'They think?' I replied, 'What think they? Let them think!'

It occurs to me that it was only in the nineteenth century that poets, novelists, even a journalist, could give vent to his springy feelings and his reader would say, 'Amen' because neither of them knew that a mutiny was brewing in India, that vast populations in Africa and Asia and the American South were bowed down for a piddling wage, if any, to reap the crops that made the cotton and the silk with which Mr Browning and Mr Dickens would encase themselves before they took off for a healthy stroll down Piccadilly or through Regents Park.

They weren't, I'm sure, less sensitive, more callous, than we are but they didn't see these things on television every night. They had to burrow in the papers to be aware of disasters at one end of the globe or the other.

This week, the nineteenth century has been isolated in a 170 acres of the state of Georgia, the Augusta National Golf Club – a great, rolling garden, fenced off for about 20,000 people from disaster and from any knowledge of the world outside. I've been down there this week watching the tournament of all tournaments which is more like a huge Edwardian garden party than a competition and, every morning and through the long days, we've trod the spongy fairways and blinked the bristling hot sun and, even in the shade, blinked again at the blazing wild flowers, hence my preoccupation with pink dogwood and white dogwood and red bud and azaleas and camellias and a dozen blooms native to the south.

I remember all too well in 1968 cancelling my annual trip to the Masters, the first of the four great golf tournaments because I had just covered the grizzly tragedy of Martin Luther King and it didn't seem right to escape from it into the unreal world of Augusta. My daughter, who was still in her teens, phoned me and was surprised to find me still in New York. I told her why. 'Look!' she said, 'Is there anything you can do about Memphis? No. And it will do no good to anybody for you to sit and brood in New York. Tell them you've changed your mind and get down there!'

It was a sensible a bit of advice as I've ever had. I went there and, on the way back, stopped to play with an old friend in Baltimore and, frankly, wallowed in this respite from the news until a fleet of cars moved past the golf course at midday with all their lights on. It was a puzzle to us but not for long. It was a signal to the black population of Baltimore to arise and mount a protest through two days and nights which left parts of the city burning brightly and left other parts in ash.

The outside world had moved in on us with a vengeance and I don't remember many other, long, placid intervals in that dreadful year, for a couple of months later I was in the hotel pantry in Los Angeles as Bobby Kennedy went down and, after that, there were frightening election rallies and the final horror of the Democratic convention in Chicago.

It occurred to me just too late for last week's talk and I'm glad I forgot it that the president then, Lyndon Johnson, had planned to go to that convention under security precautions so elaborate, so fearful, that they made a mockery of government of the people for the people. He was to be flown in at an undesignated time in a helicopter and land on a pad specially constructed on the roof of the convention hall. He would then be surrounded by a huddle of secret service men, he'd go down in a private elevator to the hall, be hustled on to the platform and speak briefly behind a bullet-proof transparent screen. He would wave, duck backstage, be huddled off to the private elevator again and the helicopter would wing him away from his own party's convention and all the baying thousands who were supposedly there to celebrate a nominating.

Well, long before the convention, he looked over the ruins of his policy in Vietnam and he decided not to run. Even so, they said for a while, he would attend the party convention. He thought better of it. It was a bitter decision for him to make because it meant he had finally given in to a plea that he'd defied almost five years before. I was down in Austin, Texas with him and the White House press corps only weeks after the assassination of John Kennedy. We were camped in a hotel there and he was 20 miles or so off on his ranch on the Pedernales River.

One day we were all invited to a barbecue. We were carefully screened and driven off in a bus and it was a pleasant occasion but hardly a merry one. That's the last we saw of him for almost a week. The secret service was having a battle royal with him. They begged him to renounce, once for all, all public appearances and it seemed he'd given in.

Then there came a startling day when a newspaper friend of mine dashed into the hotel, caught one or two of us at lunch or just sitting around and said, 'Come quick and see the sight!' What sight? 'Unbelievable!' the man said. We dashed out and ran one block up to the main street and there, striding down it like Dick Whittington or Wyatt Earp, was this huge, loose-limbed, padding figure, paced by an old lady, a small boy, one or two stragglers and two brisk, upstanding young men with one hand in the right coat pocket, the only secret service men on tap. The figure was, of course, the president, loping like the big kindly Hollywood sheriff, greeting everybody at high noon, ducking into the barbers, the jewellers, the drug store, the clothing store, embracing and joking with all the shopkeepers and townspeople he'd known since he was a young man.

And when it was over, he strolled on down to the hotel with us and sat down and opened his huge mouth and poured in a draft of beer. 'Well, I tell ya,' he said and he told us. He had fought day and night with the secret service. He had glumly given in. Then he woke up one morning and horrified them by saying, 'I'm going into town and I'm gonna walk out in the open and I don't care what happens. I'm the President of the United States and I'm gonna press the flesh.' He was the greatest flesh-presser of his time and he died in his bed.

This one bizarre gesture restored the president to where he believed he belonged – to the people. He had killed off, for the time being, in his lumbering but dramatic way, all further talk of reforming the security tradition for the protection of the person of the president.

Well, as you might guess, it has come up again. While the papers and the networks are agog with debates and discussions and interviews with every sort of official about the never-ending topic of handgun control, the FBI, the secret service, two congressional committees and the secretary of the treasury are looking into the rules and customs of presidential protection.

The secretary of the Treasury comes into it because he is the head of the secret service which was set up during the Civil War to detect and punish counterfeiting of currency. After the assassination of Lincoln, the service began to train men in the new specialty of guarding the president in and out of the White House. Thirty-five years later, after the assassination of President McKinley coming out of a railroad station, the service extended its protection to the president's family and, also, to the president-elect and his family.

In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, then the president-elect, had a very close call. The man standing next to him at a rally, the mayor of Chicago, was killed instead. The secret service detail was enlarged and so on. After the two Kennedys were killed, personal protection was given, and still is, to the widows of ex-presidents and, after this 30 March, the courtesy or precaution was extended to Senator Edward Kennedy as a special case. The plight of a senator who had one brother murdered in the presidency and another while he was running for it is surely a special case.

Well, nothing's been decided or published so far. We were told that extraordinary, undefined security arrangements were taken for the appearance last Tuesday evening of Vice-President Bush, standing in for the president, at a hotel dinner in Washington but the feeling is growing that in a country which has over 50 million handguns rattling around in the possession of licensed donors and non-licensed donors, it is folly to keep on with the custom of having the president available for a few words, or even for a waved greeting, to every passer-by who might want to stop behind a barricade only 15 feet away from him. It was noticed, with some sarcasm, that when John Hinckley was taken to the courthouse for his arraignment, he was wearing something the president was not wearing – a bulletproof vest – and that, of course, seems a possible innovation but it would still advertise at every glimpse of the president in public, the precariousness of the president's comings and goings in the land of the free.

The ultimate decision will, of course, rest with the president himself. Just now it does seem that some of the president's public speeches will not be publicised and that any occasion to which the public has access will keep the crowd back at a new, specified distance but every solution proposed so far is advanced in the sorry knowledge that it is no solution. Perhaps there can be none in a nation whose people directly elect the president and want to see him.

The night before he was assassinated, John Kennedy was sitting in his hotel room in Fort Worth, Texas which is a hop, skip and a jump by air to Dallas. He and a few of his closest aides fell to discussing this perennial theme. Kennedy got up at the end of it to go off to bed. 'All I can say', he said, 'is if somebody is absolutely determined to kill the president, there's no way he can be stopped.'

The White House, the Treasury, the FBI and the secret service and those committees of Congress are now wrestling to find a way.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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