New questions about whether the Secret Service can do better
"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." So observed President John F.Kennedy less than a month before his words came tragically true. After last week's attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan, the question is again being asked with great urgency: What can be done, if anything, to better protect an American President from the risk of assassination?
In an attempt to find answers, two congressional committees began hearings last week to investigate the role of the Secret Service in providing such protection.
At the same time, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan has ordered his own review of the agency, which is part of his department. More than likely the inquiries will not solve a basic dilemma: How to guard a President as fully as possible in an open society? Says a longtime Secret Service official: "It may be unsolvable:
Can you stop a free individual in a free society, who is willing to take that ultimate risk, and still avoid a police state?"
Founded in 1865 to combat the rising tide of counterfeit "greenbacks" then flooding the country, the agency now numbers some 1,500 special agents, up from 389 at the time of Kennedy's assassination. Once selected, a recruit is dispatched to offices around the country to help track down counterfeiters and pursue stolen or forged Government checks and bonds. Only superior agents are eventually picked to serve in the protection service, which is responsible for guarding not only the President, the Vice President and their families, but also presidential candidates and former Presidents.
The agents then undergo extensive instruction at the Secret Service Training Center in Beltsville, Md. They practice moving a make-believe "president" through crowds (composed of other agents) to a waiting car, sometimes under fire, as well as through specially built auditoriums, hotel foyers and offices. In a weapons course, computer-controlled cutouts of possible assassins and harmless citizens pop up from the ground and twirl past windows on a Hollywood-like back-lot street of mock buildings. The agents must fire and hit a threatening target but refrain from shooting at an unarmed figure—or at the image of a woman wheeling a baby carriage, who may quickly slide in front of an armed figure.
Secret Service preparations for a presidential trip are equally thorough: teams of agents, aided by local police, carefully travel presidential itineraries in advance, check the backgrounds of hotel employees and others who may meet the President, and make certain that local hospitals have a supply of blood in the President's type.
There are no set rules for the number of agents required for a presidential trip; for a routine speech like the one that Reagan gave last week at the Washington Hilton Hotel, perhaps two dozen agents will be used. Every presidential motorcade has at least two cars filled with agents, including a station wagon, code-named War Wagon, that is crammed with weapons (ranging from Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns to shotguns), first-aid supplies and even tools for prying the President out of his car in case of a crash.