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In his bland suit and equally nondescript coat, the fifty-year-old agent looked completely ordinary—in fact, he was anything but. An eclectic reader, he enjoyed the works of such philosophers and writers as Immanuel Kant, Thomas Merton, and Ernest Hemingway. On his commutes, alone in the car, he often pondered his favorite poem, Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” a melancholy work about a soldier in World War I whose life is destined to end on a blazing battlefield. It was this poem that inspired President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous phrase “rendezvous with destiny,” and President Kennedy so admired it that he often asked his wife, Jacqueline, to recite it for him. But the meaning of Seeger’s famous poem was far darker than the campaign slogans it inspired, which is perhaps why it resonated so intensely with Parr, a man who relentlessly trained for a day he hoped would never come. He found the last two lines of the poem particularly powerful:

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Born in 1930, Parr grew up poor in Miami, the son of a cash register repairman and a beautician. His parents divorced when he was nine; after her second marriage failed, Parr’s mother married yet again, this time to a man who claimed to have slain his first wife and threatened to kill Parr’s mother if she left him. For four years, Parr slept with a knife under his pillow so he could protect his mother if the hot-tempered man ever attacked, though he never did. After high school, he took a job with a local electric company and spent thirteen years working as a lineman, interrupted only by a stint in the air force. He married and then decided to attend college, ultimately earning a degree in English and philosophy; when he graduated, he interviewed with a wide range of companies and organizations, including the Secret Service.

The service had intrigued Parr for years. As a boy, he’d been enthralled by a 1939 movie called The Code of the Secret Service, which starred twenty-eight-year-old Ronald Reagan as the dashing Secret Service agent Lieutenant “Brass” Bancroft. Hollywood’s version of an agent’s workday was wonderfully fanciful: Bancroft is falsely accused of killing a fellow undercover agent in Mexico, survives a shooting, breaks out of a Mexican jail, and arrests the villain on the other side of the U.S. border. Though the movie was absurd—many, including its star, judged it to be Reagan’s worst feature film—Parr never forgot Bancroft’s daring exploits and for years dreamed of following in his footsteps. When the opportunity arose, he jumped at it.

Parr joined the service in 1962. He was the oldest rookie in his class; in his earliest days as an agent, while standing guard at a New York airport, he marveled at the swagger and poise of President Kennedy’s Secret Service detail and decided that he wanted to be just like those agents. He even fantasized about being the lead agent in an inaugural parade and sitting in the front seat of the president’s armored limousine. But from the start, he understood that he would never come close to achieving his dream without putting in years of hard work; he also knew that his educational and professional background made him something of a misfit in the straitlaced service. His first supervisor, in fact, had written in an evaluation that Parr was “not White House material.”

Still, Parr was persistent and ambitious, and he loved the challenges he encountered each day. He rose through the ranks quickly, and was honored when he was chosen to serve on the vice presidential details of Hubert Humphrey and Spiro Agnew. He enjoyed devising ways to defeat potential terror threats while planning trips to war zones, former war zones, and the kinds of neighborhoods where everybody seemed to own a gun. Even visits to elementary schools were an ordeal, because nobody was above suspicion, not the principal or even the kindergarten teacher. Everyone and everything had to be checked, rechecked, and checked