JFK - THE SITTING DUCK IN DALLAS

THE NOT-SO-SECRET SERVICE: AGENCY TALES …

(Waterville, OR: Trine Day, c2017)

BY VINCENT MICHAEL PALAMARA

Rev. by Hugh Murray

This is a difficult book to read, literally and figuratively. The author includes many clippings and articles from old newspapers, but the black print (at times blurred) on the seasoned columns can be impossible to decipher. Palamara also includes pages listing Secret Service Agents assigned to various missions: p. 61, 113-15, 157-59, 173-74. These lists should have been reduced to footnotes or included in an appendix, not in the text unless the purpose is to pad out a 200-page volume. The quotation by Pres. Truman that the Secret Service is the only boss that the President of the US has to obey is repeated several times (28, 29, 58), but the repetition is justified to stress to the reader the importance of this little-known reality.

What is positive about this book is that Palamara's research makes it abundantly clear that the Secret Service procedures normally followed elsewhere were not followed in Dallas. Reviewing reports, supplemented with photographs, of the motorcades going back to Franklin Roosevelt, the evidence is conclusive. Agents might place snipers atop tall building along the route of a president's motorcade. Along the route, buildings would be cleared of enemies of the president, or any other possible crank or violent person. If the Secret Service did not have sufficient men for this, they would be supplemented by local police or other agencies. Plainclothes officers might mingle with the crowds. If the president's limo were moving fast, it might be alone in the caravan, but when it slowed, motorcyclists would be beside and behind the limo, and on older cars, on the running board. Recent models had a place for agents to stand on the back of the limo, but some ran along side of the car. Palamara provides the old clippings to clinch his argument about what normal procedures were, and these were operative for FDR, Truman, Ike, and Kennedy. They were the procedures even for Kennedy's trip to Tampa of 18 November 1963.

In Dallas, there were no marksmen atop buildings, and the buildings were not purged of potential threats, and as the limo slowed down for the turns and deep turn in Dealy Plaza, there were no cyclists beside the limo, no agents running along with it or standing on the back of the President's vehicle. Palamara notes that an FBI informant on 9 November 1963 had taped Joseph Milteer when he spoke someone shooting Pres. Kennedy with a high-powered rifle from a tall building, and then having the murder quickly blamed on a patsy. Milteer was not questioned further at that time, and he phoned the informant on 22 November 1963 saying that he was in Dallas (though this is not mentioned by Palamara in this book.

Palamara does much to challenge the view, popularized by the best-selling author William Manchester, that the reason the motorcyclists and agents were absent from the sides of the President's limo was to obey the wishes of Pres. Kennedy himself; JFK had ordered the agents to stay away from the sides of the car because he wanted to be close to the people. Yet, the alleged source for this information in Manchester's book, Agent Floyd Boring, denied both the quotation and the content and even that he had ever been interviewed by author Manchester.(31) The effect of Manchester's assertion that Kennedy himself ordered the removal of the Secret Service agents from the sides of the limo was, in effect to blame the President for the success of the assassination. Thus, the Secret Service “was prevented from doing ...[its] job by the president.”(26)

Palamara concludes that the source of this “blame the victim” myth was Secret Service Agent Gerald Blaine, and part of this book is a debate between the claims of Blaine about the blame for the assassination, and Palamara's interviews with other agents that deny that Kennedy ever ordered the removal of guards surrounding the limo. Typical of Palamara's approach were his questions to Special Agent Vincent Mroz: “When asked point blank, if JFK had ever ordered the agents off the car, Mroz said forcefully, 'No, no - that's not true.' When asked a second time, the former agent responded with equal conviction: 'He did not order anybody off the car.'”(37)

Palamara concedes that the Secret Service may have been understaffed in 1963, that married men required to travel often may have missed some of their family life, and other problems. But this was no excuse for the failure to protect JFK in Dallas as they had done on his other trips.

There is a video where two agents are preparing to run along with Kennedy's limo, and they are ordered back, away from the President's car. They look bewildered by this order, wondering why the regular procedure is being aborted. Palamara contends that the video reveals the agent who gave that order to stand down, was Emery Roberts.(195) Palamara reports that Agent Roberts was a favorite of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and following the assassination, Roberts, while still assigned as a Secret Service agent, became the receptionist for President LBJ.(107) Palamara argues that Roberts abandoned the general policy of the Secret Service that agents be non-political; the receptionist post was political. Moreover, Johnson then nominated Roberts for a high-paying cushy job with the US Parole Board.(108)

Palamara relates that the Secret Service Agency destroyed files when the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) had already indicated it wanted to peruse some of those very files. Before that, in an attempt to cull the JFK file, Agent James 'Mike” Mastrovito had destroyed a fragment of Kennedy's brain that had been included in the file.(162) But in the 1990s the Agency itself essentially defied the ARRB in trashing files that had perked the interest of the new investigators.(162) Interestingly, Mastrovito in an interview with the ARRB revealed: “[Agent Thomas] Kelley interviewed Oswald in the DPD jail... he never wrote a final report....Kelley wrote detailed reports regarding his participation in the interviews with Lee Harvey Oswald.”(163) Did these notes reveal what Oswald said under questioning in Dallas?

In this book Palamara, after additional interviews and research beyond his earlier books, concludes: “JFK's assassination was either attributable to gross negligence or worse of the part of the Secret Service...At the very best, by standing down with security in the Dallas motorcade, the Secret Service left JFK a sitting duck.”(195)

Palamara's book covers more than the assassination of Kennedy, the attempted murder of Reagan and the many attempts on Truman and threats to all the presidents, up to those who jumped the White House fence and actually entered the White House itself. Palamara has interviewed many agents, including family members of agents, some of whom, like the woman who had led anti-Mussolini underground fighters in WWII Italy, had led fascinating lives of their own. But the details of the book are still centered on the Kennedy murder. Some of the rest is almost like a high-school year-book of the agency. There is padding and disorganization. Nevertheless, there is convincing material that makes the book worthwhile.