Agents Act as President’s Human Shield

To be a Secret Service agent on the White House detail is to be haunted by boldly etched nightmares but bolstered by decades of success in keeping the nation’s president out of harm’s way.

The agents who protect President Clinton are shadowed by these images from history:

* The anarchist’s hand--the revolver it holds concealed by a white handkerchief--reaching out from the receiving line in the steamy hall at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., toward the belly of President William McKinley.

* The glint of Texas sun on the gun barrel thrusting from the sixth-floor window of the book depository in Dallas toward John F. Kennedy’s open limousine.

* The young man, obsessed by a fantasy, standing in a cluster of gawkers outside a Washington hotel. His bullets came within inches of ending Ronald Reagan’s administration on March 30, 1981, just two months and 10 days after it began.

One of the most memorable photographs from this year’s election will be Republican candidate Bob Dole sprawled on the ground in pain at a Chico, Calif., rally. No Secret Service agent apparently had been close enough to prevent him from tumbling over an unsecured railing and falling from the platform.

But the Secret Service has much to remember with pride, albeit sometimes mixed with pain: the foiled attack on Harry S. Truman at Blair House that killed one uniformed member of the service; Richard Nixon shielded against a Latin America mob; two gun attacks on Gerald Ford parried; and Reagan safeguarded from further harm.

The service remembers agent Rufus Youngblood shielding Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson with his own body in the Dallas motorcade.

“It could have been a firecracker, a bomb or a shot,” Youngblood said afterward. “I recognized it as an abnormal sound and realized some action had to be taken.”

Agent Timothy McCarthy, leaving a Washington hotel with Reagan, was alerted by gunfire. He spread his legs and arms to protect the president and survived a bullet fired at Reagan from John Hinckley’s .22-caliber pistol. Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, was severely wounded.

Another agent, Dennis McCarthy, sharing the same last name but no relation, lunged at Hinckley. He later wrote: “I came down in the middle of the gunman’s back just as he fired the last bullet in the pistol. I wrapped my right arm around his head and reached for his gun with my left hand.”

The Secret Service notes that 29 of its people have died in the line of duty, beginning with agent William Craig in 1902, killed in a collision between the presidential carriage and a street car. The most recent victims were six Secret Service employees in the Oklahoma City federal building when it was bombed in 1995.

But the agency can point to countless presidential motorcades, speeches, rallies, receptions, vacations and overseas trips in which it has upheld this principle: The ballot-box decisions of America’s voters should not be overturned by violence.

It is an irony of history that Abraham Lincoln authorized the creation of the Secret Service on April 14, 1865, the day of his assassination.

This year, as Clinton and Dole concluded the nation’s 53rd presidential campaign, Lincoln’s creation was a human shield in crisp suits, polished shoes, dark sunglasses and earphones.

But Lincoln, who was accompanied to Ford’s Theatre that Good Friday evening by a sole city policeman--later said to be drunk--had no intention of forming an elite detail to protect America’s chief executives.

What the 16th president wanted was a unit inside the Treasury Department to protect America’s currency from a wave of counterfeiting. Counterfeiting was the Secret Service’s sole charge for decades. It remains its central, if less glamorous, mission.

After Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy, the Secret Service’s protective mission changed forever, in ways seen and unseen. There were no more open cars in motorcades, no motorcade routes that were not planned and scouted in advance, few windows and observation routes along presidential routes left unchecked.

After Hinckley shot Reagan, there were even more changes: Presidents and candidates now only rarely stride through crowded hotel lobbies; secured parking garages are the entry of choice. In other locales, large white tents screen the presidential limousine from sight. Many speeches and rallies are open to ticket-holders only. All those attending file through metal detectors. Presidents no longer plunge into crowds. They are separated from their audiences by a “rope line” of metal barricades.

And after a light plane crashed on the White House lawn, after a gunman fired shots through the north fence, after the truck bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, the Secret Service prevailed in its long campaign to close the one-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Executive Mansion.

For most of the 19th century, the White House was virtually an open house. Office-seekers filed in and lined the stairs to the president’s office. The public strolled through the grounds unhampered.

The pattern of light security remained even after John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln, even after an unsuccessful office-seeker mortally wounded President James Garfield in 1881.

Two agents stood near President McKinley the day he was fatally shot in Buffalo. Their intervention came too late to prevent the fatal wound.

And then the pattern changed.

“McKinley’s assassination was the great catalyst, spawning a constant fear that the president might be harmed,” wrote historian William Seale in “The President’s House, A History.”

Inevitably, the agents came to see their presidents not just as important people to be protected but as human beings.

Agent Ed Starling remembered Woodrow Wilson, a widower, paying court to Edith Galt at her Washington home: “He talked, gesticulated, laughed, boldly held her hand. It was hard to believe he was 58 years old.”

And Starling saw the president, emerging from the house, often well past midnight, whistling and using his dancing feet to tap out the rhythm of the popular song: “Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll.”

All presidents since Wilson have shared his fate.

Only upstairs in the White House residence can they be alone.