“The crowd was cheering and everyone was responding well to him,” recalls William Breen, a Secret Service agent on his detail at the time. “He certainly could electrify a crowd. And when he concluded his speech, he was supposed to leave the podium and go directly, directly to the car. There were not to be any intermediate stops. And as he started—I was the point agent—he was to follow me. And I was going to go right over to the automobile. He was to get in and that was it, we were off to wherever we were going.”
“You’ve got my vote,” Clyde Merryman, an exercise boy at Pimlico Race Track, told Wallace.
Just then, Arthur Bremer jumped from the second row of spectators and yelled, “Governor, over here!”
“He [Wallace] just went right to Bremer, and of course the configuration of the protective circle changed,” Breen says. “Bremer opened up on him and shot him.”
The first .38 caliber bullet tore into Wallace’s midsection. Bremer fired five more times. All but one shot hit its mark.
The governor, coatless under the afternoon sun, fell backward on the pavement. There were red stains on his blue shirt. His wife, Cornelia, rushed to his side, crying and cradling his head in her hands. Her beige suit was smeared with blood.
“Jimmy Taylor, who was the agent in charge of the detail, and I were the first to Wallace, and we got him on the ground,” Breen says.
“Governor, this is Bill. You’ve been shot. You’ll be all right,” Breen whispered into his ear.
Secret Service agents and Alabama state troopers pounced on Bremer. Besides Wallace, Bremer had wounded Alabama trooper E. C. Dothard, Secret Service Agent Nicholas Zarvos, and Dora Thompson, a Wallace campaign volunteer. Although Wallace survived, he was paralyzed, and he dropped out of the race.
Like most assassins, Bremer kept a diary. His jottings described how pathetic and insignificant he thought he was. Also, like most assassins, Bremer had stalked his victim. Before shooting Governor Wallace, Bremer had stalked Richard Nixon and other national figures. Only days before he shot Wallace, Bremer had sat in his car in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for nearly the entire day outside an armory where Wallace was scheduled to speak. A store owner called the police, and Bremer was picked up as a suspicious person. He told police that he was waiting to hear Wallace’s speech. Satisfied, the police released him without searching for a weapon.
As with the previous assassination attempts, the Secret Service learned lessons from the incident. Back then, the Secret Service did not travel with emergency medical technicians in case of an assassination attempt. Breen remembers looking for a pack of cigarettes so he could rip off the cellophane and try to stanch a gaping wound in Wallace’s chest. Now the Secret Service alerts hospitals when the president or other protectees will be in their area. At least as far back as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a military doctor has traveled with the president and has maintained a medical facility at the White House.
“If something happens now, you have an entire medical staff waiting for you when you get to the hospital,” Breen says. “It’s nothing like back in 1972, when Jimmy Taylor and I were confronted with the worst thing that could happen to a Secret Service agent, to have a protectee hurt or killed. This is your job, you’re supposed to protect him, and something like this happens. And it rarely does, but it certainly happens. The agents feel horrible about it, and you live with it a long time.”
While the Secret Service wanted to screen crowds with magnetometers, candidates like Wallace objected, saying such security measures would needlessly irritate people and discourage them from showing up. After the Reagan shooting, the Secret Service began using magnetometers routinely to find hidden weapons. To allow crowds into an event without magnetometer screening became unthinkable. Yet in recent years, under pressure from politicians’ staffs to let crowds into events without screening, the agency has buckled.
Only one such incident has been publicized. The press reported complaints from current or retired law enforcement officials that an hour before a rally for presidential candidate Barack Obama was to start at Reunion Arena in Dallas on February 20, 2008, the Secret Service stopped magnetometer screening.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that Danny Defenbaugh, a former FBI agent who was inspector in charge of the bureau’s investigation of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, questioned why guards would suddenly stop searching for weapons.
“Why were they doing it in the first place?” Defenbaugh asked rhetorically, adding that “of course” screening for weapons should have continued. “Dallas, 1963,” he added. “You know what happened. I don’t think Dallas wants that to happen again.”
“This relaxed security was unbelievably stupid, especially in Dallas,” Jeff Adams of Berkeley, California, said in an email to the paper, noting the assassination of President Kennedy in that same city more than four decades earlier.
Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, denied that stopping screening posed a problem.
“There were no security lapses at that venue,” Zahren told the Dallas paper. There was “no deviation” from the “comprehensive and layered” plan, implemented in “very close cooperation with our law enforcement partners,” he added.
But agents say such lapses occur periodically and defy common sense. An agent who was on Obama’s presidential candidate detail says it was “not uncommon” to waive magnetometers at events when the crowd was larger than expected. While the overflow might be seated far from the candidate and often behind a buffer zone, “Someone could still fire a gun, make their way to the front, or detonate explosives,” the agent says.
Other agents say magnetometers have also been waived for events attended by President George W. Bush, John Edwards, John Kerry, and others. Agents attribute such obvious lapses in security to the fact that the Secret Service does not have enough manpower to screen everyone properly.
“It’s complacency,” says the agent who was on Obama’s detail. “They say we can make do with less.”
On top of that, the Secret Service not only slashed the number of agents on counterassault teams assigned to the candidates from the necessary five or six agents to two, it delayed assigning them a CAT team. Then, when the candidates insisted that the CAT teams stay out of sight, the Secret Service caved.
During the 2008 campaign, “The agents assigned to the candidates were told to stay at least one terrain feature away from the working shift,” an agent says. “Most of the time, that means a street block away from the protectee.”
While CAT agents need to be kept out of the kill zone, they should have the candidate directly in sight.
“An attack, from beginning to end, could sometimes last no more than ten or twenty seconds,” a current agent says. “If you are a block away, you cannot identify the threat, know where the protectee is, respond to the threat, engage the threat, and then respond to wherever the working shift leader orders you to go.”
In a stadium or auditorium, the CAT team is stationed at the point where the protectee leaves the stage. In that situation, the audience cannot see the team, so the candidates did not object to its presence. But when the CAT team is outside, stationing it at a distance renders the team “completely ineffective,” an agent who was once on the CAT team says. “It is basically window dressing. The attack would be over before the tactical element could even respond.”