This arrangement would provide a continuing high-level contact for agencies that may wish to consult respecting particular protective measures. For various reasons the Secret Service has functioned largely as an informal part of the White House staff, with the result that it has been unable, as a practical matter, to exercise sufficient influence over the security precautions which surround Presidential activities. A Cabinet-level committee which is actively concerned with these problems would be able to discuss these matters more effectively with the President.
Responsibilities for Presidential Protection
The assignment of the responsibility of protecting the President to an agency of the Department of the Treasury was largely an historical accident.[C8-230] The Secret Service was organized as a division of the Department of the Treasury in 1865, to deal with counterfeiting. In 1894, while investigating a plot to assassinate President Cleveland, the Service assigned a small protective detail of agents to the White House. Secret Service men accompanied the President and his family to their vacation home in Massachusetts and special details protected him in Washington, on trips, and at special functions. These informal and part-time arrangements led to more systematic protection in 1902, after the assassination of President McKinley; the Secret Service, then the only Federal investigative agency, assumed full-time responsibility for the safety of the President. Since that time, the Secret Service has had and exercised responsibility for the physical protection of the President and also for the preventive investigation of potential threats against the President.
Although the Secret Service has had the primary responsibility for the protection of the President, the FBI, which was established within the Department of Justice in 1908, has had in recent years an increasingly important role to play. In the appropriations of the FBI there has recurred annually an item for the “protection of the person of the President of the United States,” which first appeared in the appropriation of the Department of Justice in 1910 under the heading “Miscellaneous Objects.”[C8-231] Although the FBI is not charged with the physical protection of the President, it does have an assignment, as do other Government agencies, in the field of preventive investigation in regard to the President’s security. As discussed above, the Bureau has attempted to meet its responsibilities in this field by spelling out in its Handbook the procedures which its agents are to follow in connection with information received “indicating the possibility of an attempt against the person or safety of the President” or other protected persons.
With two Federal agencies operating in the same general field of preventive investigation, questions inevitably arise as to the scope of each agency’s authority and responsibility. As the testimony of J. Edgar Hoover and other Bureau officials revealed, the FBI did not believe that its directive required the Bureau to notify the Secret Service of the substantial information about Lee Harvey Oswald which the FBI had accumulated before the President reached Dallas. On the other hand, the Secret Service had no knowledge whatever of Oswald, his background, or his employment at the Book Depository, and Robert I. Bouck, who was in charge of the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service, believed that the accumulation of the facts known to the FBI should have constituted a sufficient basis to warn the Secret Service of the Oswald risk.
The Commission believes that both the FBI and the Secret Service have too narrowly construed their respective responsibilities. The Commission has the impression that too much emphasis is placed by both on the investigation of specific threats by individuals and not enough on dangers from other sources. In addition, the Commission has concluded that the Secret Service particularly tends to be the passive recipient of information regarding such threats and that its Protective Research Section is not adequately staffed or equipped to conduct the wider investigative work that is required today for the security of the President.
During the period the Commission was giving thought to this situation, the Commission received a number of proposals designed to improve current arrangements for protecting the President. These proposals included suggestions to locate exclusive responsibility for all phases of the work in one or another Government agency, to clarify the division of authority between the agencies involved, and to retain the existing system but expand both the scope and the operations of the existing agencies, particularly those of the Secret Service and the FBI.
It has been pointed out that the FBI, as our chief investigative agency, is properly manned and equipped to carry on extensive information gathering functions within the United States. It was also suggested that it would take a substantial period of time for the Secret Service to build up the experience and skills necessary to meet the problem. Consequently the suggestion has been made, on the one hand, that all preventive investigative functions relating to the security of the President should be transferred to the FBI, leaving with the Secret Service only the responsibility for the physical protection of the President, that is, the guarding function alone.
On the other hand, it is urged that all features of the protection of the President and his family should be committed to an elite and independent corps. It is also contended that the agents should be intimately associated with the life of the Presidential family in all its ramifications and alert to every danger that might befall it, and ready at any instant to hazard great danger to themselves in the performance of their tremendous responsibility. It is suggested that an organization shorn of its power to investigate all the possibilities of danger to the President and becoming merely the recipient of information gathered by others would become limited solely to acts of physical alertness and personal courage incident to its responsibilities. So circumscribed, it could not maintain the esprit de corps or the necessary alertness for this unique and challenging responsibility.
While in accordance with its mandate this Commission has necessarily examined into the functioning of the various Federal agencies concerned with the tragic trip of President Kennedy to Dallas and while it has arrived at certain conclusions in respect thereto, it seems clear that it was not within the Commission’s responsibility to make specific recommendations as to the long-range organization of the President’s protection, except as conclusions flowing directly from its examination of the President’s assassination can be drawn. The Commission was not asked to apply itself as did the Hoover Commission in 1949, for example, to a determination of the optimum organization of the President’s protection. It would have been necessary for the Commission to take considerable testimony, much of it extraneous to the facts of the assassination of President Kennedy, to put it in a position to reach final conclusions in this respect. There are always dangers of divided responsibility, duplication, and confusion of authority where more than one agency is operating in the same field; but on the other hand the protection of the President is in a real sense a Government-wide responsibility which must necessarily be assumed by the Department of State, the FBI, the CIA, and the military intelligence agencies as well as the Secret Service. Moreover, a number of imponderable questions have to be weighed if any change in the intimate association now established between the Secret Service and the President and his family is contemplated.