His job was to guard the lives of Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D.
Roosevelt. So, for 29 years, Colonel Edmund W. ("Big Bill") Starling has studied second-floor windows, climbed into attics with a flashlight, intently scanned the faces of milling crowds.
Last week Kentucky's courtly, blue-eyed Colonel Ed, 68, his back still shot gun-straight in a 6-ft.-2-in. frame, his tread still cat-smooth, announced his retirement, effective Nov.1. After nearly three decades on the White House detail, U.S. Secret Service, Colonel Ed was going fishing.
Big Bill Starling began as a White House Secret Service man in 1914, after flings at being a deputy sheriff and a railroad special agent. He was deeply impressed by the fact that Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley had met violent deaths. As he understood it, his job was to keep that sort of thing from happening again. If there was an infernal machine or an assassin's bullet being planned for the Chief Executive, Colonel Ed figured that his life was worth less than the President's.
He is the original hard-eyed man, one hand in coat pocket, or arms folded with hands at shoulder holsters, always standing by unobtrusively. He often shows up in Presidential photographs (see cuts).
Gentlemen and Others. In guarding five U.S. Presidents, Colonel Ed made most Presidential trips twice—once as advance man, once as guard-companion. He made two trips to Europe with Woodrow Wilson (and stood behind the President in the Hall of Mirrors while the Treaty of Versailles was being signed). He was with Warren G. Harding on the trip that ended fatally in San Francisco. He flew down to Buenos Aires in 1936 to clear the path for Franklin Roosevelt. But Colonel Ed was always more than a detective. He walked, fished, hunted and golfed with five U.S. Presidents.
Colonel Ed has seen things in the company he has kept that, would burn and illumine the pages of history. But his memoirs, if he ever writes them, would probably lack the acid, gossipy trivia that make such memoirs bestsellers. To this native of Hopkinsville, Ky. the world contains two kinds of men: gentlemen and others. In his rougher dealings with possible assassins (the legend is that Starling can "sense" a crank in a crowd), gentlemanly Colonel Ed has been known to address a suspicious character as "pahdner." Ambassadors, foreign potentates, Supreme Court justices, Congressmen, newsmen and other citizens are "suh." Through five Administrations, suh, there have been gentlemen in the White House:
Mr. Wilson "used to like comic operas and good acting. Three times a week we'd go to the theater. Always, outside the theater, the crowds banked deep. All the Presidents like to see those crowds waiting. Somehow, all of them . . . know how the crowd feels toward them by the way the crowd acts. It's natural. Wouldn't you like to come out of a building and get cheered by maybe 50,000 people?
"In Paris, Mr. Wilson was quite centered on his mission; had his mind on it entirely. ... I used to walk the streets with him, around the hotel and up by the Eiffel Tower. He was always reticent, but human and sociable too.