Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [118]
3: Without Fail
His feet planted shoulder width: Interview with Parr; the former agent described going to the range that morning for target practice and provided a detailed description of the range and the shooting test; interview with Paul Kelly, who was an instructor at the Secret Service’s training center at the time.
Originally formed: Excerpts from the History of the United States Secret Service 1865–1975, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978.
By the time: Testimony of Secret Service officials on March 7, 1962, before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Treasury and Post Office Departments and Executive Office Appropriations. At the hearing, Secret Service chief James J. Rowley requested more agents because the agency was stretched thin. “We have 325 agents devoted to investigative and protective activities, but this is simply not enough to meet our responsibilities,” Rowley said, six months before Parr joined the service. “With the advent of President Eisenhower the mode of presidential transportation was stepped up from Constellation to jets and to helicopters. President Kennedy has continued in this pattern and we find today that we require more agents. When I was on the detail years ago, I could hedgehop, as it were, in a DC-3 and keep ahead of the president across the country. Today, with the use of the jet, we cannot hedgehop. We have to put two or three men at another stop, so that in all you may have 20 men out there in advance, whereas I only took five men in those days.” After Kennedy’s death, the agency swelled—to 575 agents in 1968, another watershed year in the service’s history. By 1973, there were 1,238 agents, according to congressional testimony.
During Parr’s nearly two decades: Treasury report; Secret Service testimony before the Appropriations Subcommittee of Treasury, Postal Service and General Government, April 2, 1981; “The U.S. Secret Service: An Examination and Analysis of Its Evolving Mission,” Congressional Research Service, January 23, 2009.
But one fundamental aspect: Interviews with more than a dozen Secret Service agents.
recent assassinations: Of these three men, only President Kennedy had Secret Service protection.
Better training might have: Many Secret Service agents expressed this sentiment in interviews. Vincent Bugliosi meticulously documented Kennedy’s slaying in his tome Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Kindle location 2068–2094 is an especially helpful reconstruction of what transpired in Dallas); William Manchester, who also chronicled the assassination, criticized the service’s lackluster training. When Kennedy was shot, the driver of his limousine, Bill Greer, and another agent in the car, Roy Kellerman, froze, according to Manchester. “Even more tragic was the perplexity of Roy Kellerman, the ranking agent in Dallas, and Bill Greer, who was under Kellerman’s supervision. Kellerman and Greer were in a position to take swift evasive action, and for five terrible seconds they were immobilized,” Manchester wrote in The Death of a President, pp. 155–56. Manchester blames the Secret Service hierarchy for the agents’ failures. “It was the responsibility of James J. Rowley, Chief of the Secret Service, and Jerry Behn, Head of the White House Detail, to see that their agents were trained to cope with precisely this sort of emergency. They were supposed to be picked men, honed to a matchless edge,” he wrote.
Nearly a decade later: The description of the Wallace shooting comes from transcripts of the trial of Arthur Bremer and a lengthy interview with former Secret Service agent Larry Dominguez, who was guarding Wallace when the politician was nearly assassinated on May 15, 1972. Because he was never properly trained on what to do when someone opened fire in a crowd with a pistol, Dominguez thought he was hearing a “string of firecrackers” when Bremer started shooting, and he hesitated before taking any action. In later years, Dominguez went through stepped-up training. Assigned to protect Reagan