When Arizona Congressman Morris Udall was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, a Secret Service agent advised him not to visit a crowded fraternal hall in Wisconsin. A patron had told the agent that there was a man at the bar carrying a concealed pistol. Recalled Udall: "I went ahead, but I looked into every face and wondered, 'Is this going to be the one?' " Udall told this story not as an example of courage—or foolhardiness—but to illustrate how little effect the danger of assassination has had on presidential candidates' behavior, even after two decades of violence that have seen the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the crippling of George Wallace and two near misses on Gerald Ford.
Despite widespread feeling that the danger should bring a change in the traditional politicking, candidates have not abandoned the face-to-face style—open motorcades, speeches from unprotected podiums, handshaking forays into excited and surging crowds.
This election is no different, despite the presence of two politicians who have been brushed by assassinations: John Connally and Ted Kennedy. Connally, who was wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, believes that there is no way a candidate can be made entirely safe. Says an old associate, former L.BJ. Aide George Christian: "Connally just doesn't worry about it. He's come to terms with it." Kennedy's attitude is similar. Last summer a friend tried to talk him out of running. Said the friend: "Somebody's out there waiting for you." Replied Kennedy, with a shrug: "They could be waiting for me even if I weren't running for President."
One reason for such fatalism is that American assassins have generally not been political foes whose acts might be anticipated but psychotics or social misfits who kill for bizarre and unpredictable reasons. Says Robert Delaney, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and an expert on terrorists: "The most frustrating thing is that you are dealing with a randomness. There is no knowing when, how or if." Or why or who. Researchers say that assassins in U.S. history have typically been short, white, unmarried men with mental disturbances dating from their childhood. True, but both attempts on Ford's life were made by women.
Kennedy runs a special risk, of course, and not only because he lost two brothers to assassins. Says Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, state director of mental health in Michigan: ''The same charisma in Ted Kennedy that stirs some people to the good, stirs other people to the bad.'' In September, Jimmy Carter ordered the Secret Service to guard Kennedy. They now watch over him around the clock, three shifts of five or six agents each, all identified by a lapel button and an earplug linked to a walkie-talkie. When traveling, Kennedy is usually accompanied by Aide Lawrence Horowitz, who is a licensed physician.