A Clear and Present Danger (7 page)

Hamilton Winship sat in his mahogany-paneled office in the Treasury Building, poring over the confidential memo sent to him
by a young agent named Benjamin Justin Slayton. Underneath the memo was a manila folder containing a dossier on the memo writer,
which Winship intended to read next.

Halfway through the memo, Winship shoved his chair back from his desk and sighed. He took off his glasses, rose from his chair,
and paced the floor in his vest and shirtsleeves.

Photographs of Washington and of world notables, all of them shaking hands with Winship, covered those sections of the walls
not filled by bookshelves or paintings. He paused as he passed by each of the Presidents he had known in his time—Roosevelt,
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and now Reagan. He had met Reagan for the first time back in 1968,
the first time Reagan had been a Presidential candidate, the time when two men armed with Molotov cocktails were arrested
by alert California state troopers outside the then-Governor’s Sacramento residence.

All of the Presidents had been the target of assassins, Winship mused. The public had known about most of the attempts, though
the Secret Service had managed to keep out of the press those attempts against Eisenhower, Johnson, and Carter.

Now this attempt on Bush.

Winship muttered. Bush would keep quiet, he figured. He was an ex-C.I.A. man, so he would keep his mouth shut about this.
Thankfully, no press had been on hand when it happened. And the press was still being so polite with the new Reagan-Bush administration
that no one thought to ask why Air Force II was mysteriously called down to Dublin, why the Vice President’s appearance in
London had an unannounced twenty-four-hour delay.

He wanted a drink very badly. Winship felt the old paranoia, which he knew deep down to be a perfectly proper reaction to
many of the events he watched from his office, and the simultaneous outrage. Other Americans must feel the same way at times,
he thought. One of these days, someone like Lyndon LaRouche was going to be taken seriously. His paranoid constituency would
eventually be able to show that someone, somewhere is after us all.

Winship took some small comfort in knowing that men like himself, who ran the intelligence divisions of the Treasury Department,
had always worked against the frustrations of an official Washington which refused to be vigilant.

The first refusal to recognize the special vulnerability of Presidents and Vice Presidents came on the tenth of January, 1835.
Winship reflected on the history of that day:

President Andrew Jackson was attending the funeral of a South Carolina Congressman in the Capitol Rotunda. One of the mourners
was a fellow named Richard Lawrence, who worked his way through the crowd, confronted the President, flung open his coat,
and brandished two pistols.

The first pistol failed to fire. Jackson was enraged, and rushed his assailant with the intention of delivering a sound thrashing
with his own hands. But Lawrence managed to wriggle out of Jackson’s grasp.

Lawrence stepped back and squeezed the trigger of the second pistol. Miraculously, that, too, failed to fire. Andrew Jackson
lived.

At his trial a few months later, Richard Lawrence was adjudged not guilty by virtue of “having been under the influence of
insanity at the time he committed the act.”

No special action was taken by Congress—or even the Department of the Treasury—to establish a formal bodyguard service for
the President.

Then came Lincoln.

In 1861, an operative of the Baltimore private detective agency headed by Allan Pinkerton got wind of a conspiracy involving
a group of Southern extremists bent on assassinating the Yankee President as he traveled through Baltimore en route to Washington.
The Pinkertons—with absolutely no help from the government—arranged a series of disguises for the President, and managed to
switch railway cars, thereby successfully foiling the death plot. That time.

There would be, of course, a bullet for Lincoln. It would come four years later at the Ford’s Theatre in Washington, on the
evening of April 14, 1865. In that tensest time of the nation’s history, a time when assassination plots and assorted other
treacherous conspiracies filled Washington’s air following cessation of the Civil War, the President was guarded by a single
police officer employed by the City of Washington.

That police officer became bored with his duty that fateful night and left the theatre for a nearby saloon. Enter John Wilkes
Booth, a man who for months previous to April 14 had told anyone who cared to listen that he was bound and determined to murder
Abraham Lincoln.

During the afternoon prior to the evening murder, John Wilkes Booth actually prepared the stage, as it were, for homicide,
going about his deadly business with complete freedom from interference by any police agency or police officer. He bored a
peephole in the door to the private box reserved by the theatre for President and Mrs. Lincoln; he made certain that the door
could not be latched in the normal way from the inside; and he even constructed a device with which he could bolt the door
himself after he had gained entry for his murderous deed.

After killing Lincoln with a single shot, Booth injured himself in flight, actually breaking a leg. Even so, the President’s
security was so lax that a man with a broken limb managed to flee the city in the dark of the night.

But even the assassination of Abraham Lincoln failed to bring about proper and permanent Presidential protection.

Sixteen years later, President James A. Garfield was gunned down in a Washington railway depot some four months after being
sworn into office. Like John Wilkes Booth, Garfield’s assassin—one Charles J. Guiteau—was a man whose repeated public utterances
about assassinating the President should have guaranteed him a prominent place in even the crudest file of individuals to
be kept under surveillance and away from the vicinity of the President.

And even this Presidential assassination would not be a catalyst to Congressional action. William McKinley would have to fall.

It was on September 6, 1901, while President McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York, that
a young anarchist named Leon F. Czolgosz slowly moved through a throng around the President and his party, quietly removed
a .32 caliber Iver-Johnson revolver from his belt, and jammed it up against the President’s breast bone, firing twice before
being beaten senseless by a swarm of local police and a handful of soldiers accompanying the President.

On that occasion, the President’s guard had seemed adequate, in terms of the sheer number of men around him, and in terms
of accurate intelligence. Twice the schedule for McKinley to receive the public was postponed when his guards heard of anarchist
plots to kill him. But McKinley himself refused to cancel his appearance altogether, telling his aides, “Why, no one would
want to hurt me!”

Theodore Roosevelt became President upon McKinley’s death. He managed to convince the public and the Congress that the Presidency
offered the surest route to the grave since Russian roulette, and saw to it that the Treasury Department’s Secret Service
unit, busied heretofore with the formidable battle against rampant counterfeiting, was assigned the additional task of protecting
the President and the Vice President. It became the single most difficult job to be laid before the doorstep of a law enforcement
agency anywhere in the world.

Teddy Roosevelt himself would be the victim of an assassin’s attempt eleven years after assigning the Secret Service its sobering
responsibility. He was saved from death by gunfire when the would-be assassin’s bullet was slowed on its path to Roosevelt’s
heart by a thick manuscript of the speech he carried in his inside breast coat pocket.

In the next few decades, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would nearly be killed by Giuseppe Zangara, whose five shots squeezed
off at Roosevelt in a Chicago appearance between F.D.R.’s election and 1933 inauguration managed instead to kill Mayor Anthony
Cermak. Zangara, it was learned, had originally intended to kill lame-duck President Herbert Hoover, but decided at the last
minute on Roosevelt, as the newcomer would be a handier target.

Following F.D.R., President Harry S Truman would be the target of a pair of Puerto Rican nationalists bent on gaining world
attention through assassinating the President. Then Gerald Ford, in the mid 1970s, would twice be the target of assassins,
one of whom, “Squeaky” Fromme, had been a member of the Charles Manson murder cult. Richard Nixon would be stalked by one
Arthur Bremer, who, like Zangora before him, switched his sights and gunned down Presidential candidate George C. Wallace
instead, crippling the former Governor of Alabama for life.

That was the stuff of public consumption. Along with a few other high-level intelligence men in Washington, Winship knew of
other attempts not detected by the media.

In June of 1957, for instance, a lunatic inspired by billboards calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren and political tracts
which accused President Eisenhower of actively assisting the “international Communist conspiracy,” was nabbed on the fourteenth
hole at Burning Tree Country Club when Secret Service agents accompanying the President noticed something amiss about the
golf bag of an odd-looking man who spent a lot of time in the rough searching for errant balls. Agents discovered a shotgun
where a seven-iron should have reposed.

A few months after Lyndon Johnson left office to retire at the Pedernales ranch he had acquired while a high-rolling Senator
from Texas, he was fired on from a helicopter as he rode the range of his spread in an open-top Lincoln Continental. The murderous
pilot was shot down out of the sky. The Secret Service managed to trace the identity of the dead assassin, and because he
was a recluse inventor with no special reason to go after Johnson, also managed to keep the lid on the story.

Not long after Jimmy Carter was in office, he signed a blanket amnesty order, forgiving offenses against young men who had
avoided conscription during the Vietnam War years. A deranged ex-Marine sharpshooter made an appearance outside the White
House gates during a ceremony on the South Lawn. An agent of the Treasury’s I.R.S. investigation unit happened to spot the
young man on the street as he hoisted what appeared to be a pool-cue carrying-bag through the gate bars in the general direction
of President Carter. Again, the incident went unnoticed by the public.

Winship thought for several moments about the Carter incident, reflecting on the irony of Carter’s would-be assassin being
an ex-Marine sharpshooter. Kennedy’s assassin was an ex-Marine sharpshooter.

Winship stood in the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows of his office, directly behind his desk, the windows looking over toward
the White House.

“This new President,” he said aloud, though he was alone in the office. “I wonder how long before he’s attacked?”

He shook his head, clasped his hands behind his back and paced.

“It wasn’t a week before they went after Bush,” he said, as if trying to help his thinking by verbalizing the incident.

He stopped in his tracks. “The Mannlicher-Carcaño!” he said. “My God!”

Winship returned to his desk and dropped heavily into his chair. He shuddered. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and
opened the Slayton dossier.

For the next twenty minutes, Winship read intently, occasionally issuing a favorable grunt as he came across entries such
as Slayton’s military career as a fighter-bomber, his strong linguistic abilities, his expertise in Oriental martial arts
and now the newest episode of his career as a T-Man—the discovery and defusing of a bomb timed to detonate some time during
the arrival of Vice President Bush to a London reception party, the act of a cool and thorough professional.

Cool and professional despite certain drawbacks in his character, Winship thought. He recollected the first time he met Benjamin
Justin Slayton.

It was three years ago, when Slayton was a rookie with the Treasury Department, just nicely past his academy training, and
assigned to the Bureau of Foreign Asset Control. Hamilton Winship made an inspection tour of the B.F.A.C. one afternoon and
was horrified by the sight of one of his T-men, namely, Ben Slayton, and his hair.

“What’s your name, son?” Winship asked after a starchy march to Slayton’s desk, covered with a clutter of papers and sandwich
wrappers.

“Slayton. Benjamin J. And you?”

Winship didn’t identify himself. “I would have thought you were lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones,” he said instead.

“Indeed I was,” Slayton replied, “before I found peace and contentment rummaging through bank balances of sheiks and assorted
pals of David Rockefeller temporarily between
coups d’état.”

“We have an image to maintain here, son, and that means a clean-cut image,” Winship thundered.

“Don’t sweat the chickenshit, sir, with all due respect. I have on my desk at this moment the certified thievery of one Mohammed
Reza Pahlevi, better known as the Shah of Iran, and I can’t help but notice that the major banks of the good old U.S. of A.
are only too happy to handle his extortion accounts. Now, this outfit I work for has two ways to handle something that’s sure
to come to a nasty head: refuse to be the Shah’s accomplice in the looting of Iran, or make a big fuss about the length of
my hair.”

Winship’s jowls trembled and quaked. Young Slayton regarded him with an expression that betrayed not a whit of emotion. Slayton
had no way of knowing that Winship agreed with him, and Winship, at that time, had no way of knowing the destiny of their
relationship. Besides, Winship had a role to play.

“Cut your hair,” Winship said. “That’s an order. And that’s all.” He turned on his heel and walked away, red-faced.

The next day, he received a memorandum from Ben Slayton which read, “Hair has been duly trimmed. However, I stand by my remarks.”