Development of Presidential Protection

This third assassination of a President in a little more than a generation—it was only 36 years since Lincoln had been killed—shook the nation and aroused it to a greater awareness of the uniqueness of the Presidency and the grim hazards that surrounded an incumbent of that Office. The first congressional session after the assassination of McKinley gave more attention to legislation concerning attacks on the President than had any previous Congress but did not pass any measures for the protection of the President. Nevertheless, in 1902 the Secret Service, which was then the only Federal general investigative agency of any consequence, assumed full-time responsibility for the safety of the President. Protection of the President now became one of its major permanent functions, and it assigned two men to its original full-time White House detail. Additional agents were provided when the President traveled or went on vacation.

Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first President to experience the extensive system of protection that has surrounded the President ever since, voiced an opinion of Presidential protection that was probably shared in part by most of his successors. In a letter to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1906, from his summer home, he wrote:

The Secret Service men are a very small but very necessary thorn in the flesh. Of course, they would not be the least use in preventing any assault upon my life. I do not believe there is any danger of such an assault, and if there were, as Lincoln said, “though it would be safer for a President to live in a cage, it would interfere with his business.” But it is only the Secret Service men who render life endurable, as you would realize if you saw the procession of carriages that pass through the place, the procession of people on foot who try to get into the place, not to speak of the multitude of cranks and others who are stopped in the village.

Roosevelt, who had succeeded to the Presidency because of an assassin’s bullet, himself became the object of an assassination attempt a few years after he left office and when he was no longer under Secret Service protection. During the Presidential campaign of 1912, just as he was about to make a political speech in Milwaukee on October 14, he was shot and wounded in the breast by John N. Schrank, a 36-year-old German-born ex-tavern keeper. A folded manuscript of his long speech and the metal case for his eyeglasses in the breast pocket of Roosevelt’s coat were all that prevented the assassination.

Schrank had had a vision in 1901, induced possibly by McKinley’s assassination, which took on meaning for him after Roosevelt, 11 years later, started to campaign for the Presidency. In this vision the ghost of McKinley appeared to him and told him not to let a murderer (i.e., Roosevelt, who according to the vision had murdered McKinley) become President. It was then that he determined upon the assassination. At the bidding of McKinley’s ghost, he felt he had no choice but to kill Theodore Roosevelt. After his attempt on Roosevelt, Schrank was found to be insane and was committed to mental hospitals in Wisconsin for the rest of his life.

The establishment and extension of the Secret Service authority for protection was a prolonged process. Although the Secret Service undertook to provide full-time protection for the President beginning in 1902, it received neither funds for the purpose nor sanction from the Congress until 1906 when the Sundry Civil Expenses Act for 1907 included funds for protection of the President by the Secret Service. Following the election of William Howard Taft in 1908, the Secret Service began providing protection for the President-elect. This practice received statutory authorization in 1913, and in the same year, Congress authorized permanent protection of the President. It remained necessary to renew the authority annually in the Appropriations Acts until 1951.

As in the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, the coming of war in 1917 caused increased concern for the safety of the President. Congress enacted a law, since referred to as the threat statute, making it a crime to threaten the President by mail or in any other manner. In 1917 Congress also authorized protection for the President’s immediate family by the Secret Service.

As the scope of the Presidency expanded during the 20th century, the Secret Service found the problems of protection becoming more numerous. In 1906, for the first time in history, a President traveled outside the United States while in office. When Theodore Roosevelt visited Panama in that year, he was accompanied and protected by Secret Service men. In 1918-19 Woodrow Wilson broadened the precedent of Presidential foreign travel when he traveled to Europe with a Secret Service escort of 10 men to attend the Versailles Peace Conference.

The attempt on the life of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 further demonstrated the broad scope and complexity of the protection problems facing the Secret Service. Giuseppe Zangara was a bricklayer and stonemason with a professed hatred of capitalists and Presidents. He seemed to be obsessed with the desire to kill a President. After his arrest he confessed that he had first planned to go to Washington to kill President Herbert Hoover, but as the cold climate of the North was bad for his stomach trouble, he was loath to leave Miami, where he was staying. When he read in the paper that President-elect Roosevelt would be in Miami, he resolved to kill him.

On the night of February 15, 1933, at a political rally in Miami’s Bayfront Park, the President-elect sat on the top of the rear seat of his automobile with a small microphone in his hand as he made a short informal talk. Fortunately for him, however, he slid down into the seat just before Zangara could get near enough to take aim. The assassin’s arm may have been jogged just as he shot; the five rounds he directed at Roosevelt went awry. However, he mortally wounded Mayor Anton Cermak, of Chicago, and hit four other persons; the President-elect, by a miracle, escaped. Zangara, of course, never had any chance of escaping.

Zangara was electrocuted on March 20, 1933, only 33 days after his attempt on Roosevelt. No evidence of accomplices or conspiracy came to light, but there was some sensational newspaper speculation, wholly undocumented, that Zangara may have been hired by Chicago gangsters to kill Cermak.

The force provided since the Civil War by the Washington Metropolitan Police for the protection of the White House had grown to 54 men by 1922. In that year Congress enacted legislation creating the White House Police Force as a separate organization under the direct control of the President. This force was actually supervised by the President’s military aide until 1930, when Congress placed supervision under the Chief of the Secret Service. Although Congress transferred control and supervision of the force to the Secretary of the Treasury in 1962, the Secretary delegated supervision to the Chief of the Secret Service.

The White House detail of the Secret Service grew in size slowly from the original 2 men assigned in 1902. In 1914 it still numbered only 5, but during World War I it was increased to 10 men. Additional men were added when the President traveled. After the war the size of the detail grew until it reached 16 agents and 2 supervisors by 1939. World War II created new and greater protection problems, especially those arising from the President’s trips abroad to the Grand Strategy Conferences in such places as Casablanca, Quebec, Tehran, Cairo, and Yalta. To meet the increased demands, the White House detail was increased to 37 men early in the war.

The volume of mail received by the White House had always been large, but it reached huge proportions under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Presidents had always received threatening letters but never in such quantities. To deal with this growing problem, the Secret Service established in 1940 the Protective Research Section to analyze and make available to those charged with protecting the President, information from White House mail and other sources concerning people potentially capable of violence to the President. The Protective Research Section undoubtedly permitted the Secret Service to anticipate and forestall many incidents that might have been embarrassing or harmful to the President.

Although there was no advance warning of the attempt on Harry S. Truman’s life on November 1, 1950, the protective measures taken by the Secret Service availed, and the assassins never succeeded in firing directly at the President. The assassins—Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, Puerto Rican Nationalists living in New York—tried to force their way into Blair House, at the time the President’s residence while the White House was being repaired. Blair House was guarded by White House policemen and Secret Service agents. In the ensuing gun battle, Torresola and one White House policeman were killed, and Collazo and two White House policemen were wounded. Had the assassins succeeded in entering the front door of Blair House, they would probably have been cut down immediately by another Secret Service agent inside who kept the doorway covered with a submachine gun from his vantage point at the foot of the main stairs. In all, some 27 shots were fired in less than 3 minutes.

Collazo was brought to trial in 1951 and sentenced to death, but President Truman commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on July 24, 1952. Although there was a great deal of evidence linking Collazo and Torresola to the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico and its leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, the Government could not establish that the attack on the President was part of a larger Nationalist conspiracy.

The attack on President Truman led to the enactment in 1951 of legislation that permanently authorized the Secret Service to protect the President, his immediate family, the President-elect, and the Vice President, the last upon his request. Protection of the Vice President by the Secret Service had begun in January 1945 when Harry S. Truman occupied the office.

In 1962 Congress further enlarged the list of Government officers to be safeguarded, authorizing protection of the Vice President (or the officer next in order of succession to the Presidency) without requiring his request therefor; of the Vice President-elect; and of a former President, at his request, for a reasonable period after his departure from office. The Secret Service considered this “reasonable period” to be 6 months.

Amendments to the threat statute of 1917, passed in 1955 and 1962, made it a crime to threaten to harm the President-elect, the Vice President, or other officers next in succession to either office. The President’s immediate family was not included in the threat statute.

Congressional concern regarding the uses to which the President might put the Secret Service—first under Theodore Roosevelt and subsequently under Woodrow Wilson—caused Congress to place tight restrictions on the functions of the Service and the uses of its funds. The restrictions probably prevented the Secret Service from developing into a general investigative agency, leaving the field open for some other agency when the need arose. The other agency proved to be the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), established within the Department of Justice in 1908.

The FBI grew rapidly in the 1920’s, and especially in the 1930’s and after, establishing itself as the largest, best equipped, and best known of all U.S. Government investigative agencies. In the appropriations of the FBI there recurred annually an item for the “protection of the person of the President of the United States,” that had first appeared in the appropriation of the Department of Justice in 1910 under the heading “Miscellaneous Objects.” But there is no evidence that the Justice Department ever exercised any direct responsibility for the protection of the President. Although it had no prescribed protection functions, according to its Director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI did provide protection to Vice President Charles Curtis at his request, when he was serving under Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933. Over the years the FBI contribution to Presidential protection was confined chiefly to the referral to the Secret Service of the names of people who might be potentially dangerous to the President.

In recent years the Secret Service has remained a small and specialized bureau, restricted to very limited functions prescribed by Congress. In 1949, a task force of the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government (Hoover Commission), recommended nonfiscal functions be removed from the Treasury Department. The recommendation called for transfer of the White House detail, White House Police Force, and Treasury Guard Force from the Secret Service to the Department of Justice. The final report of the Commission on the Treasury Department omitted this recommendation, leaving the protective function with the Secret Service. At a meeting of the Commission, ex-President Hoover, in a reference to the proposed transfer, expressed the opinion that “the President will object to having a ‘private eye’ looking after these fellows and would rather continue with the service.”

In 1963 the Secret Service was one of several investigative agencies in the Treasury Department. Its major functions were to combat counterfeiting and to protect the President, his family, and other designated persons. The Chief of the Secret Service administered its activities through four divisions: Investigation, Inspection, Administrative, and Security, and 65 field offices throughout the country, each under a special agent in charge who reported directly to Washington. The Security Division supervised the White House detail, the White House Police, and the Treasury Guard Force. During fiscal year 1963 (July 1, 1962-June 30, 1963) the Secret Service had an average strength of 513, of whom 351 were special agents. Average strength of the White House Police during the year was 179.