Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

LINCOLN

Even before his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln was thought to be the target of plots and conspiracies, with evidence that extremists plotted to attack him as he passed through Baltimore en route to Washington. For the inauguration, the Army took unprecedented precautions, stationing soldiers at strategic points along the procession route and at the Capitol while armed men in plain clothes mingled with the crowds; Lincoln rode in a carriage with President Buchanan, surrounded by such dense masses of soldiers he was nearly hidden from view. Lincoln lived in peril throughout his presidency, receiving a high volume of threatening letters that yielded little when investigated. He was reluctant to accept guards and often sought to evade protection, reflecting a characteristic presidential instinct for personal privacy and freedom to meet the people. Protection during the war varied with Lincoln’s susceptibility to warnings; military units were sometimes assigned to guard the White House and accompany him on travels, and his friend Ward H. Lamon, upon becoming marshal of the District of Columbia in 1861, took personal charge of presidential protection but grew so exasperated at Lincoln’s lack of cooperation that he offered his resignation, which Lincoln refused. In November 1864, four Washington policemen were assigned as bodyguards, though Lincoln tolerated them reluctantly and demanded they remain inconspicuous. In the war’s closing days, John Wilkes Booth, a fanatical Confederate sympathizer, hardened his earlier plot to kidnap Lincoln into a plot to kill him after the Confederacy’s fall. On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Booth learned Lincoln would attend Ford’s Theater that night; the assigned bodyguard, Patrolman John F. Parker, abandoned his post outside the Presidential box to watch the play and visit a saloon, leaving the President totally unprotected. Shortly after 10 p.m., Booth entered the Presidential box and shot Lincoln in the head; the President died the next morning. Booth was captured on April 26 at a farm near Bowling Green, Virginia, died of a bullet wound hours later, and a military tribunal sentenced four associates to death and four others to imprisonment. A congressional committee conducted an extensive investigation but called for no protective action for the future, reflecting a tendency to view Lincoln’s assassination as a unique crisis unlikely to recur.

THE NEED FOR PROTECTION FURTHER DEMONSTRATED

For a short time after the war, War Department soldiers and Metropolitan Washington policemen continued to protect the White House, with a permanent police guard reduced to three assigned to the White House; there was no special group of trained officers to protect the President’s person, and presidents continued to move about Washington virtually unattended, with White House doormen providing such protection as existed. This lack of personal protection was tragically highlighted by the shooting of President James A. Garfield in 1881 by Charles J. Guiteau, a self-styled “lawyer, theologian, and politician” who believed his illusory efforts in the 1880 campaign entitled him to a consular appointment in Europe. Bitterly disappointed by Garfield’s repeated rejection of his requests and obsessed with megalomania, Guiteau resolved to kill the President, testified at his trial that the “Deity” had commanded him to do so, and apparently suffered from delusions and hereditary mental problems. Guiteau later testified he had three prior unguarded opportunities to attack Garfield within three weeks, and on July 2, 1881, shot Garfield in the back as the President walked to a train at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington; Garfield lingered until September 19. Guiteau was convicted despite evidence of serious abnormality and hanged on June 30, 1882. The New York Tribune predicted the assault would make the President “the slave of his office,” but no protective steps were taken, and President Chester A. Arthur once took a public conveyance hailed in front of the White House to a ceremony at the Washington Navy Yard. During Grover Cleveland’s second administration, the volume of threatening letters increased markedly and Mrs. Cleveland persuaded the President to expand the White House police force from 3 to 27; in 1894, while investigating a plot by Colorado gamblers to assassinate Cleveland, the Secret Service informally assigned operatives to protect him, including agents who accompanied him and his family to their Massachusetts vacation home, and for a time two agents rode in a buggy behind his carriage until opposition newspaper attention forced discontinuation. During the Spanish-American War the Secret Service stationed a continuous detail at the White House for McKinley, and after the war the guards remained at least part-time; between 1894 and 1900, the assassinations of European leaders and concern that anarchist police action in Europe was driving anarchists to the United States led the Secret Service to increase the number of guards and require one to accompany the President on all trips. Despite being guarded, McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, at a public reception in the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo by Leon F. Czolgosz, a 28-year-old American-born factory worker and self-styled anarchist who concealed a pistol under a handkerchief; although detectives, soldiers, and Secret Service agents were stationed nearby, two agents had been asked to step back to allow McKinley’s secretary and the exposition president to flank him. Czolgosz, who did not believe in rulers of any kind and was found by alienists to have suffered from delusions, including that it was his duty to assassinate the President, was swiftly tried, convicted, condemned, and electrocuted 45 days after McKinley died of blood poisoning on September 14; investigations found no accomplices or plot.