Protecting the President

New questions about whether the Secret Service can do better

“If anyone wants to do it, no amount of protection is enough. All a man needs is a willingness to trade his life for mine.” So observed President John F.Kennedy less than a month before his words came tragically true. After last week’s attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan, the question is again being asked with great urgency: What can be done, if anything, to better protect an American President from the risk of assassination?

In an attempt to find answers, two congressional committees began hearings last week to investigate the role of the Secret Service in providing such protection.

At the same time, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan has ordered his own review of the agency, which is part of his department. More than likely the inquiries will not solve a basic dilemma: How to guard a President as fully as possible in an open society? Says a longtime Secret Service official: “It may be unsolvable:

Can you stop a free individual in a free society, who is willing to take that ultimate risk, and still avoid a police state?”

Founded in 1865 to combat the rising tide of counterfeit “greenbacks” then flooding the country, the agency now numbers some 1,500 special agents, up from 389 at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. Once selected, a recruit is dispatched to offices around the country to help track down counterfeiters and pursue stolen or forged Government checks and bonds. Only superior agents are eventually picked to serve in the protection service, which is responsible for guarding not only the President, the Vice President and their families, but also presidential candidates and former Presidents.

The agents then undergo extensive instruction at the Secret Service Training Center in Beltsville, Md. They practice moving a make-believe “president” through crowds (composed of other agents) to a waiting car, sometimes under fire, as well as through specially built auditoriums, hotel foyers and offices. In a weapons course, computer-controlled cutouts of possible assassins and harmless citizens pop up from the ground and twirl past windows on a Hollywood-like back-lot street of mock buildings. The agents must fire and hit a threatening target but refrain from shooting at an unarmed figure—or at the image of a woman wheeling a baby carriage, who may quickly slide in front of an armed figure.

Secret Service preparations for a presidential trip are equally thorough: teams of agents, aided by local police, carefully travel presidential itineraries in advance, check the backgrounds of hotel employees and others who may meet the President, and make certain that local hospitals have a supply of blood in the President’s type.

There are no set rules for the number of agents required for a presidential trip; for a routine speech like the one that Reagan gave last week at the Washington Hilton Hotel, perhaps two dozen agents will be used. Every presidential motorcade has at least two cars filled with agents, including a station wagon, code-named War Wagon, that is crammed with weapons (ranging from Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns to shotguns), first-aid supplies and even tools for prying the President out of his car in case of a crash.

The Secret Service keeps a list of some 25,000 people believed to pose potential threats to the President, and 300 to 400 considered especially dangerous. Yet none of the persons involved in wellknown assassination attempts since 1963 —Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremer, Lynette (“Squeaky”) Fromme, Sara Jane Moore and John Hinckley—ever appeared on the Secret Service list.

If the Service cannot always recognize —or stop—a potential assassin, can anything more be done to lessen the dangers? Many law enforcement officials recommend that Reagan wear a bulletproof vest when making public appearances.

Modern vests, made of fiber glass, are both lightweight and flexible.*Ted Gunderson, former head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, suggests that whenever possible, the President should exit a hotel or auditorium through a basement garage. The Secret Service argues that the President risks being trapped in a basement garage, and so prefers ushering him through an exit that leads to an open driveway—and the waiting limousine. Others recommend that the Secret Service start closing off streets around the exit to all spectators; some even suggest that the President entirely stop mingling and shaking hands with onlookers. Says Chicago Police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek: “It’s time to consider keeping some distance between crowds and the President, offering them a fleeting glimpse instead of a slower wave.”

But there are great drawbacks to isolating a President from the people he must serve. Presidents, like most U.S. politicians, relish contact with crowds; indeed, they may come to rely on that kind of interaction to keep them going in so grueling a job. Ronald Reagan has already demonstrated his fondness for pausing and responding to shouted cries of “Mr.

President! Mr. President!” as he moves about Washington — a practice his agents would dearly like to stop. Yet the ease with which an attack can take place was dramatically demonstrated to Reagan be fore last week’s shooting. As then Candidate Reagan campaigned in Miami in November 1975, a college dropout named Michael Lance Carvin, 20, managed to break through the crowd and point a toy gun directly at him.

When an attack by a deranged loner occurs, there is not much that even the Secret Service can do. Sums up one senior agent: “We try to get our bodies between him and the bullets, and then get the hell out of there” — which is just what they did last Monday, efficiently and even heroically.

— By James Kelly.

Reported by Jonathan Beaty and Johanna McGeary /Washington

*If Reagan had been wearing only a “front-and-back” vest last week, his sides would have remained exposed and he probably would still have been wounded. Only the full, wrap-around model would have protected him.