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An overabundance of caution on behalf of a President who has already been shot once is understandable. Yet such are the inherently unforeseeable dangers that presidential security is supposed to foresee and guard against that an overabundance of security cannot guarantee perfect safety any more than a mere abundance can. Governments in other parts of the world, while fully conscious of risks to leaders, seem to be much more aware than the U.S. of the impossibility of trying to predict and thwart all possible dangers. The result is security arrangements that sometimes seem downright casual by contemporary U.S. standards. In West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt is customarily assigned only three bodyguards, and he conducts press conferences whose audiences are not put through any security screening. In Venezuela, President Luis Herrera Campins in three years has made some 250 trips from Caracas to smaller interior towns where, as political custom demands, he wanders among the populace, listening and letting himself be surrounded by children and old women; a few bodyguards go along, but advance security checks are unknown. In India, while hundreds of guards form the official security structure in New Delhi, Indira Gandhi, once herself the target of an inaccurately thrown knife, begins her day each morning by holding an open session on her office lawn for anyone who wishes to speak to her, and goes about in a non-bulletproof car escorted by one security car and a motorcyclist. In Taiwan, President Chiang Ching-kuo ventures out regularly with only two or three guards.
Pope John Paul II preferred his security to be as unobtrusive as possible before he was shot last year and, in spite of the heavier security since installed around him, still insists on relative freedom of movement. Away from the Vatican, amid crowds, he keeps breaking through his security cordons to press the flesh of those who turn out to see him. When he did so in Fatima, Portugal, last spring, a man disguised as a priest lunged toward him with a bayonet. "This is not the first attempt on the life of the Pope," the Pontiff said later, "nor will it be the last."