Retired Secret Service agent remembers years with presidents, families

By VINCE DEVLIN of the Missoulian

GREAT FALLS - The boy spent his third birthday at his father's funeral, and left the world with one of its most famous images: As his father's flag-draped casket passed by, John F. Kennedy Jr. raised his right arm and saluted.

You probably know the photograph, but you may not know the story behind the salute. It involves a substitute teacher in Great Falls named Lynn Meredith.

Meredith is 83 years old now, and lives with his wife of 54 years, Rose, in a modest home on the west side of Great Falls. You can hardly make a move in their living room without knocking over a picture of one of their 13 grandchildren.

But one wall is reserved for photographs of American presidents and vice presidents. Long before he filled in in the classroom, you see, Lynn Meredith's job was to protect - to take a bullet for, if necessary - presidents and their families.

A Secret Service agent for 28 years and an employee of the agency for 32, Meredith's career spanned eight administrations, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, and for a decade he was assigned to the White House Protective Detail.

He traveled the world with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, "lucked out" and was assigned to Vice President Hubert Humphrey during the Johnson administration, and guarded then President-elect Richard M. Nixon in 1968.

For the 1,000 days of President John F. Kennedy's administration - and 10 months after the assassination - Meredith was special agent in charge of the Kennedy children.

He wasn't in Dallas when Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. On that horrific day, he gathered up Caroline and John Jr., who didn't know their father was dead, and ushered them out of a shell-shocked White House and to a Washington D.C.-area park to play.

Three days later, before the president's funeral at St. Matthew's Cathedral, Jacqueline Kennedy pulled Meredith aside.

"Mrs. Kennedy told me John would never last through the whole funeral," Meredith says. "He was only 3 years old. She asked me to take John and keep him entertained."

Meredith led the young boy to a room elsewhere in the church, where members of the military, who had helped escort the president's body to the cathedral, waited to take it on to Arlington National Cemetery for burial.

How to keep the boy occupied? Meredith, a World War II Navy veteran, had an idea.

With help from the servicemen in the room, "we taught him how to salute," Meredith says. "He kept wanting to do it with his left hand and we had a heck of a time getting him to use his right."

After the funeral, John Jr. rejoined his mother and sister Caroline. As the casket passed by them, Jacqueline Kennedy bent over and whispered something in her son's ear. The children would not be going on to Arlington for the burial, and it was their last chance to say goodbye to their father.

As Mrs. Kennedy straightened up, John Jr. stepped forward, raised his right hand, and delivered his famous salute that Meredith had taught him minutes earlier.

Kennedy was his favorite president, and Meredith admits he didn't vote for him.

"I don't really have a very good voting record," he says with a laugh. "I did vote for Ronald Reagan both times, but I've usually been on the losing side."

He voted for Nixon, then vice president, over the young senator from Massachusetts in 1960, Humphrey in '68, Gerald Ford in '72, Al Gore in 2000.

Meredith prefers his presidents come with experience, and figures vice presidents come with the most.

"The office ages people, it really does," he says. "I figure if they've been around the White House, they have an idea of what they're getting into."

Meredith was a schoolteacher in Tillamook, Ore., in 1950 when he decided he wanted to try something else.

"I was still in my 20s, and figured if I was going to, now was the time," he says.

He drove to Portland, visited a job service, and spied an opening at the Portland Secret Service field office.

"I didn't even know what the Secret Service was," he says. "I thought it was the FBI."

The opening was for a clerk-stenographer - a secretary, basically - but it sounded interesting.

Plus, "at my interview, they told me the current chief of the Secret Service had started as a clerk," he says. "So I figured there were opportunities to move up the ladder."

There were. Within two months, his bosses told him there was a need for clerk-stenographers in the Washington, D.C., office. Was he interested?

"I'd been around the world in the Navy," Meredith says. "But I'd never been there. After just five months in Portland, I transferred to D.C. and was assigned to headquarters in the Treasury Building."

The Secret Service was created by Congress in 1865 to deal with counterfeiters, and became a part of the U.S. Treasury Department. After the assassination of William McKinley in 1901 - the third American president assassinated in 36 years - Congress asked the Secret Service to add presidential protection to its duties.

Over the years, it has come to include presidents, vice presidents, their families, former presidents and first ladies, visiting foreign heads of state, and prominent presidential and vice presidential candidates.

In Washington in the 1950s, the Secret Service offered on-the-job training for employees interested in becoming agents, and Meredith signed up. It was during this period that Meredith got his first taste of life on the White House Protective Detail, and he spent five months there during Truman's last year in office.

Meredith was sworn in as a special agent in 1955, and in 1958 returned to the White House for the final years of Eisenhower's presidency.

"The thing I remember most about Eisenhower was his fondness for golf," Meredith says. "I think he'd have rather played golf than be president. Every year after the Masters golf tournament, the president would go to Augusta (Ga.) to play, and every time I see the Masters on TV, I remember walking that course with the president."

The exposure on golf courses always worried the agents, some of whom dressed as golfers, loaded rifles into golf bags and prowled the course while the president played.

The Eisenhower years took Meredith to New Delhi, London, Tokyo, Paris and Moscow. He visited Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Scotland and Germany with the president.

Meredith spent a week in Leningrad in the spring of 1960 setting up security for an Eisenhower visit that never took place. Just before the president was set to leave for the Soviet Union, the Russians shot down an American U-2 plane piloted by Gary Powers, heightening Cold War tensions.

Eisenhower, Meredith says, was "friendly, tolerant of the Secret Service, and knew the agents by name. But he was very much the military type, and probably regarded us as corporals or privates."

He often told Meredith and the other agents, "Don't worry about me, but don't let anything happen to my grandchildren."

During the 1960 presidential election, Richard Nixon had Secret Service protection because he was vice president, but John Kennedy did not. The agency's role did not spread to cover presidential candidates until the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

It was only fate that had Meredith assigned to the Secret Service team that traveled to Hyannis Port, Mass., that election night to await the outcome. If JFK won, they would immediately take charge of protecting the president-elect and his family.

If Nixon won, they would head home without even seeing Kennedy.

In the closest election since 1916, there was no clear-cut winner until 4 a.m., "when that Chicago mayor (Richard Daley) got the election weighted toward Kennedy," Meredith says.

The agents immediately left their hotel, headed for the Kennedy compound and knocked on the door.

Joseph P. Kennedy, the president-elect's father, answered the door and said, "We're sure glad to see you; we've been inundated by tourists."

Presidents accept Secret Service protection with varying degrees of appreciation, Meredith says.

"It's ironic that the two presidents who most tolerated and believed in protection while I was in the Secret Service are the only two who were shot," Meredith says, referring to Kennedy and Reagan.

Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, was openly hostile toward his Secret Service detail. As vice president, Meredith says, LBJ tried to get agent Bill Duncan fired when a helicopter didn't appear at the precise time to whisk him away from Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral.

"President Kennedy called Johnson and told him to lay off the Secret Service agent, that it had not been an intentional error," Meredith says. "Kennedy always told us, 'You guys don't want anything to ever happen to me, because then you'd have to work for Johnson.' "

To Diane Leslie Meredith, with very best wishes.
John Kennedy, Nov., 1963

The autographed engraving of the White House hangs in the Great Falls home of Diane "Dee Dee" Burke. It is one of the last things President Kennedy signed before his death.

On Nov. 11, 1963 - Veterans Day - Meredith accompanied the president to Arlington National Cemetery, where Kennedy placed a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. JFK then walked around the cemetery grounds, commenting at one point, "This would be a nice location for a presidential grave."

That afternoon, after he got off duty, Meredith roamed the White House halls, passing out cigars to staffers and agents. Rose had given birth a few days earlier to a daughter they had named Diane Leslie but called "Dee Dee."

He had decided against seeking out the president to offer one - the Kennedys had lost a 3-day-old son named Patrick Bouvier Kennedy just three months earlier, and Meredith knew how hard JFK had taken the baby's death.

But as he passed the White House swimming pool, located between the West Wing and the presidential living quarters, the president climbed out of the water, wrapped a towel around himself and said hello to the Secret Service agent.

There stood Meredith, cigars in hand.

"Mr. President, I would be honored if you would accept a cigar to celebrate the birth of my new daughter," Meredith told him.

"It was a 10-cent Roy Tan," Meredith says with a laugh. "He told me, 'I didn't know you and your wife were expecting,' and congratulated me and thanked me for the cigar. I'm sure he never smoked it. He liked Cubans, which you could still get back then. I can still see him getting on the elevator in that towel, holding the cigar. It was the last time I saw him alive."

The day after the funeral, Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's secretary, called Meredith and told him, "I think I have something here you would be pleased to receive."

Sometime between the chance encounter at the swimming pool, and Kennedy's departure on Nov. 19 on the fateful trip that would take him to Dallas, the president had autographed an engraving of the White House for the Merediths' new baby girl.

"It was just the kind of thing he did," Meredith says. "When the Kennedys would go to Palm Beach for Christmas, they made sure all the Secret Service agents got to bring their families along."

The Kennedys would also host a Christmas party for the staff and agents who had to spend the holiday wherever the first family did. Rose Meredith remembers one where their oldest daughter, Linda, got upset because Caroline Kennedy kept holding Meredith's hand.

"Linda kept shooting Caroline these looks that said, 'Hey, that's MY dad,' " Rose says.

The Meredith children actually wore hand-me-downs from the Kennedys. Maud Shaw, nanny to Caroline and John Jr., would send the clothes home with the special agent.

"You became a part of the family," Meredith says. "You were around them all the time."

He remembers Kennedy always borrowing money from the agents when the collection plate was passed on Sundays at church, because presidents never carry money on them.

"But we were always reimbursed," Meredith says.

One of his favorite stories came one summer when the first family was vacationing at Hyannis Port, and out on Nantucket Sound in the Kennedy yacht, called the Marlin.

"The president had this beautiful miniature sailboat that was his pride and joy," Meredith says. "He'd put it in the water behind the Marlin and tow it along."

Meredith was several hundred yards from the yacht, alone in a Navy jet boat, when two would-be pirates in a motorboat shot up behind the yacht, grabbed the sailboat out of the water and took off for shore.

"I took off in hot pursuit," Meredith says, "but they probably had a half-mile head-start on me."

He watched the two men land on shore. When Meredith got there, they were nowhere to be seen, but a tourist told him the two had headed toward a nearby motel.

The agent took off running and the men, aware they were being pursued by the Secret Service, ducked into the motel. When he arrived the men were nowhere to be found - but the sailboat was sitting, unharmed, on the front porch.

Meredith returned to his jet boat and radioed senior agent Floyd Boring on the president's yacht: The sailboat was safe.

"The president was very grateful, and asked that I be commended," Meredith says.

Much has changed since he served in the Secret Service, Meredith says. On his last full-time protective assignment, with President-elect Richard Nixon, Nixon would walk between his office and apartment in New York City every day at lunchtime - something that would never be allowed now.

Presidential motorcade routes are no longer published until the day of an event, unlike 1963, when Kennedy's route through Dallas was publicized days in advance. No windows can be open in buildings along the route. Presidents don't enter and exit their limousine on streets, as Reagan did, when there is access through an indoor or underground parking garage available.

After Nixon was sworn in, Meredith returned to the Washington, D.C., field office - the Secret Service has offices in every state and many more around the world - to work counterfeiting and other cases. In 1970, he was transferred to head the Montana office, now in Billings but then located in Great Falls.

"I think they figured since I was from Oregon, I could find my way around Montana," Meredith says. "I'd never been here before. I expected more trees."

He continued to work protective details when presidents and others visited the area. After he retired in 1983, he returned to his original career, and has been a popular substitute teacher in the Great Falls school system.

"I can't believe how fast 32 years went by," he says of his Secret Service days. "It was an interesting job. In a way, you lead somebody else's life. Your life is dictated by the people you protect."

You are on the edge of history as it is made.

And sometimes, in a room of a church, keeping a 3-year-old boy occupied before his father is buried, you inadvertently help make history.

Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or by e-mail at vdevlin@missoulian.com