The Dangers of Travel

At commencement time last year, a husky Secret Service man wiggled under a stage at an East Coast college, where the President of the United States was to receive an honorary degree. In the shadows he spotted a tin can, lifted it gingerly out and raised the top. Inside was a note: "This could have been a bomb." But the Secret Service did not need a college prank to remind them of the danger. This June, when Ike is on the road 15 days out of 30, the Secret Service will be on the move 30 days out of 30.

The Advance Men. Before the President flies to San Francisco to speak at the U.N. tenth anniversary ceremonies (June 20), or arrives five days later at Parmachenee Lake in Maine to catch some salmon and trout, teams of Secret Service men from the 35-man White House Detail will fan out to anticipate every danger. Back in Washington, other agents will comb the central files for names and photographs of crackpots and suspicious characters in the areas that Ike will visit.

Any time the President moves, the Secret Service moves first. They examine his routes for likely vantage spots for gunmen, and assign local police to those spots. Hotel personnel, with emphasis on food handlers, are checked. Local police are asked for pictures of mental cases and other possible assassins, and the agents commit the photographed faces to memory. Some dangerous persons are held on vagrancy charges until the President leaves.

The President's regular traveling companion is a burly Irishman from The Bronx, James Rowley. 46, the special agent in charge of the White House Detail. In crowded reception halls, he moves at the President's elbow; when the President makes an address, Rowley is a pace behind him, impassive and alert; when the President rides in a car, Rowley sits in the front seat. Rowley went to work as a bank investigator at 18, but continued to go to school nights, nine years later earned his law degree from Brooklyn's St. John's University. In 1938 Rowley joined the Secret Service, went to the White House in a year, and became the agent in charge in 1946. His toughest assignment was Ike's trip to Korea but this month Rowley is thinking ahead to the Big Four conference. Plans already call for an Air Force fighter and air-sea rescue escort for the Columbine, and Rowley will never be far from the President until he returns to U.S. soil.

The Assassins. Like his predecessors, President Eisenhower has been irritated by the surveillance of the Secret Service, until recently, when he read The Assassins, a chilling account of the seven attempts on the lives of Presidents, by the New York Herald Tribune's White House Reporter Robert J. Donovan. Shocked, Ike made some inquiries of his own, discovered some disturbing statistics.

From the time he took office until this April, he learned, the Secret Service has investigated 3,912 threatening letters and other contacts, and the figure is running abnormally high (401 threats in the first four months of 1955--well above the average). Last year 84 persons were arrested as dangerous to the President, 80 were convicted and sent to prisons or insane asylums. In the same period guards picked up 118 mentally disturbed persons at the White House gates (one pleasant-faced young man recently told a guard that he was assuming the presidency and would review the troops on the White House lawn in 15 minutes).

Impressed by the danger, Ike stopped complaining about the Secret Service. When the service insisted on closing a tourist observation tower atop Cemetery Ridge on the Gettysburg Battlefield whenever he is at the farm, he made no objection. A marksman, standing on the tower with a high-powered rifle, could shoot anyone on the Eisenhower farm.

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