There is no doubt that lax – almost non-existent – security precautions led to the attempted assassination of presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Just the night before that day, July 13, I was watching former political rallies online, and I began to think it’s just a matter of time before some deranged person shoots a political candidate somewhere, sometime.
I’ve always been hyper-conscious of assassinations. I vividly remember when President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. It’s as if it happened just yesterday. I can recall with precise immediacy hearing the news on the radio in our living room (I’d skipped school that day), the overcast weather, even the smell of the kerosene stove in our south St. Cloud home.
In 1995, I visited friends, the Luis and Juana Moreno family, in Fort Worth, Texas. Their son, Luis Jr., and I spent an afternoon at Dealey Plaza in nearby Dallas where JFK was killed. It was so haunting to be there, visiting the upper floor of the Texas School Book Depository building from which Lee Harvey Oswald aimed a rifle at the president’s head and pulled the trigger, literally blowing off part of Kennedy’s skull. I stood there looking out the assassin’s window down onto the street where the horror happened. And I kept thinking, WHY wasn’t this building scoured by Secret Service agents or local police before the president’s motorcade passed just beneath it?
Later, standing on the “Grassy Knoll” embankment very near the street where Kennedy died, I kept thinking WHY weren’t people cleared from this area by security before the motorcade passed by?
I remember just as vividly the assassinations of Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, as well as the attempted assassinations of George Wallace, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II.
WHY didn’t security agents check or clear out the hotel across the Memphis street from the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was staying; or WHY did agents warn King not to step out onto the hotel’s balcony on which he was shot.
On May 13, 1981, during a tour of Europe, my train pulled into a station in Rome when I looked out the window and saw a news-stand poster practically screaming with the announcement that the Pope had been shot. I soon learned some Turkish malcontent had shot Pope John Paul II while he was mixing with a massive crowd in St. Peter’s Plaza in his Fiat “Popemobile.” He survived; he later even forgave, in person, the would-be assassin. But I kept thinking at the time, WHY does security allow the Pope to greet up close such throngs of people? Later, wisely, the Popemobile was modified with bullet-proof glass.
Just about every assassination or assassination attempt can be attributed to faulty security measures. The attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Penn. was no exception. Apparently, the Secret Service agents were responsible for securing the perimeter around the rally stage but not beyond that perimeter. And yet, there were some kind of low buildings just 130 yards from the stage. The gunman, a 20-year old, climbed onto one of the roofs from which he fired his AR-15-style rifle at Trump, missing a lethal shot by less than an inch. But his bullet(s) slammed into a firefighter who was in the bleachers, killing him as he was trying to protect his wife and two grown daughters. Two attendees were wounded.
WHY did the Secret Service agents not check that roof? WHY did they allow Trump to take the stage when they’d heard earlier there was a person talking and acting suspiciously in the rally crowd? WHY wasn’t there instant communication between Secret Service and local law enforcement, especially after some in the crowd were pointing to a man sprawled on a rooftop?
Days later, on July 23, under fire from Congress members, Secret Service Director Kimberly A. Cheatle resigned. We need not wonder WHY.
