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An attitude of resignation in the face of imponderable risks is not unusual among top leaders; sooner or later, most realize, anyone in high office can turn into a target for an infinitude of reasons, or for no good reason at all. In the 19th century Abraham Lincoln abjured heavy protection both because he was fatalistic and because the notion of a palace guard offended him. And a century later John F. Kennedy said, "If anyone wants to do it, no amount of protection is enough. All a man needs is a willingness to trade his life for mine." Such a view, chilling though it may be, fits reality. When human violence is able to strike the famous, it is not always or even usually because of the absence of security. When John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, the President's sole bodyguard had stepped out for a drink, true; but it is also true that when Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy, 28 Secret Service agents and some 600 police had been deployed to protect him. The limits of even the closest guarding were never made clearer than in the fatal shooting of President William McKinley as he took part in a reception line. Assassin Leon Czolgosz had to go through two columns of soldiers and police to reach McKinley, who, even as the shots were fired, was closely surrounded by four detectives, four soldiers and three Secret Service agents.
It is only the backward look that makes past assassinations and other security breaches seem preventable. But hindsight tends to overlook the fact that the one thing common to all such assaults is that they were utterly unforeseeable. Reality leaves security planners in the position of those generals who used to spend their careers planning to fight the previous war: plans to forestall assassinations like previous ones doubtless exist in abundance in security offices all over the world. What no security organization on earth can possess is the plan to ward off what is utterly beyond predicting—a John Hinckley landing as randomly as a fallen leaf outside a Washington hotel, a death squad popping out of the very middle of a military parade to put an end to Egypt's Anwar Sadat.
This summer's Buckingham Palace caper is now long enough past to be pondered as a wry lesson in the limits of security.
Here was a case of an unlikely culprit with inscrutable motives intruding into a royal fortress by climbing a fence, entering unlocked windows, shinnying up a drainpipe and passing through electronic surveillance gear that failed to work. He completed his visit to the Queen in her boudoir while police failed to respond promptly to either automatic or telephone alarms. Afterward, authorities tightened security, then soon recorded two further breaches of it. Enduring lessons: culprits are always unlikely, their motives are always murky, every fence is climbable, somebody always leaves some window open, mechanical systems will never be perfectly reliable, authorities can never be absolutely counted on to respond speedily to emergencies, and, finally, tightened security systems can often be breached just as easily as loosened ones.