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

BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

In the early Republic there was remarkably little concern for presidential safety. Early presidents received threats and threatening letters similar to those faced by later chief executives but moved about freely without protective escorts. Thomas Jefferson walked alone from his boarding house to the Capitol for his inauguration, and Washington had no police authority until 1805 when a high constable and 40 deputies were appointed. John Quincy Adams was threatened in person at the White House by an Army sergeant yet continued his solitary walks and early morning swims in the Potomac. Andrew Jackson contemptuously endorsed his many threatening letters and sent them to the Washington Globe for publication; he was once assaulted by a former Navy lieutenant, Robert B. Randolph, but refused to prosecute. In January 1835, Richard Lawrence, an English-born house painter, accosted Jackson at the Capitol and fired two pistols at him, both of which misfired; Lawrence was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined for life. The attack produced no protective action. Martin Van Buren walked to church alone and rode horseback alone in the woods near the White House. After an intoxicated painter threw rocks at President John Tyler on the White House grounds in 1842, Congress passed an act establishing an auxiliary watch of a captain and 15 men, though the measure appeared aimed more at protecting the White House building than the President.

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.