YET EVEN AS MIKE THREW himself into the many unique challenges of protecting a wartime commander in chief, events continued to bring new, and often previously unimagined, dangers. Some were unintentional. Soldiers at the front lines, for example, thought it would be respectful to send FDR souvenirs from their hard-fought campaigns, and Mike had to be sure to intercept these ill-considered gifts as soon as they reached the White House postal drop. On several unsettling occasions, these mementos turned out to be still active German artillery shells or grenades. When Mike watched as they were detonated by the army ordnance team at its base just across the Potomac, he couldn’t help but imagine what might have been if the well-intentioned package (What were these soldiers thinking? he wondered) had made its way to the Oval Office. He’d be unable to sleep soundly for nights on end in the aftermath, the boom of the explosions filling his nightmares.
There was also the unforeseen—and very demanding—problem of dealing with Winston Churchill. Keeping the British prime minister in good spirits when he came to stay at the White House just weeks after Pearl Harbor was, the president ordered, one of Mike’s new responsibilities. It was a task that left Mike, as hard-drinking an Irishman as anyone he’d encountered, he’d proudly boast, “open mouthed in awe.” “It was not just the amount” of brandy and scotch that the PM consumed with “grace and enthusiasm,” Mike recounted with an almost reverential admiration, “but the complete sobriety that went hand in hand with his drinking. Winston Churchill was the very best drinker that crossed the White House threshold in my memory, and I am including in that estimate the White House Correspondents, Inc. Collectively, that is.”
Yet while the role of Churchill’s occasional drinking companion was a gesture of American hospitality that Mike accepted with some relish, he was less enthusiastic about the added burden of having to protect another great man. Especially since, as wide-eyed experience had led him to complain, “the English do not take personal security very seriously.” Too often, in his expert appraisal, the Brits let their prime minister wander about Washington more or less on his own. He cringed when he thought about all the opportunities there’d been for an assassin to get off a clean shot at the easily recognizable figure.
FDR was taken aback by this laxness, too. As Churchill was winding up his whirlwind June 1942 stay at the White House, the president summoned Mike to the Oval Office. With an uncommon brusqueness that at once put Mike on high alert, he gave the agent his new marching orders.
“Mike, Churchill is going home on the twenty-seventh. I am seriously worried about security. I want you to do everything possible to assure his safety.” And that was how Mike came to save the prime minister’s life.
Churchill was to fly off by plane, first stop Bermuda, and so Mike came up with a cautious plan. He’d have the PM bundled into a government car, which would then hightail it to the Anacostia Naval Air Station, just a three- or four-mile trip. The engines of a private plane would already be running, and the PM would be safely up and away twenty minutes after leaving the White House. Only, the powers that be at the British embassy in Washington refused to go along with such a circumspect departure.
“That sort of thing isn’t necessary, Mr. Reilly,” a snooty British diplomat pooh-poohed. “There is a British Overseas Airways base at Baltimore and if he flew from there it would be quite good for the workers’ morale, you know.”
Morale was the last thing on Mike’s apprehensive mind. The British, however, would not budge. They refused to share his anxiety. “Absolutely nothing to worry about,” was the often-repeated and always definitive official response to Mike’s earnest warnings.
On the day of Churchill’s departure, Mike did what he could to add precautions to what he was convinced was a fundamentally imprudent enterprise. He sneaked the PM, accompanied for this leg of his send-off by the president, out of the White House using the interconnecting tunnels that led to the Treasury Department building. (“I am going along with you, Winston, only to make sure that you don’t steal any of Henry Morgenthau’s gold,” FDR joked, a remark that the man leading the bullion-depleted British Empire might not have found quite as droll as his host intended.) From there, an unmarked car, following a carefully chosen route through Washington’s back streets and Maryland’s country roads, drove Churchill to the BOAC terminal in Baltimore.
It was only as the car was approaching the hangar that Mike saw a baggage handler grappling with a uniformed BOAC guard at the door to the prime minister’s plane. They were fighting for control of a pistol.
Mike leaped from the car and ran toward the two combatants. In the course of his mad dash he was trying to determine whether to shoot to kill, or if there was any preemptive blow he could inflict on the baggage handler—when he suddenly realized he had focused his attentions on the wrong man. The squat, burly fighter wearing overalls, he now recognized, was Agent Howard Chandler; Mike, as an extra touch of security, had instructed members of the Secret Service to disguise themselves as field employees. It was the wild-eyed BOAC guard who was the assassin.
“This jerk wants to shoot Churchill!” Chandler yelled to his chief as together they succeeded in wrestling the man to the ground. Applying the solid force of all his weight, Mike kept him pinned down while Chandler yanked the gun out of the guard’s hands. A flock of agents, previously concealed about the field, hurried over to cuff the assassin and lead him off. “I noticed this guard—he’s American by the way—standing near the entrance to the plane,” Chandler, still trying to catch his breath after his exertions, reported to his boss. “I sort of eased up behind and beside him and he was saying, ‘I’m going to kill that bastard Churchill. I’m going to kill him.’” Next thing Chandler knew they were grappling, but if Mike hadn’t shown up, he conceded, it could have been anyone’s contest.
Mike walked slowly across the tarmac to the prime minister’s car, hoping to regain some calm, or at least enough discipline so as not to betray the commotion that continued to explode inside him. “Everything is fine, sir,” he informed Churchill. But whether either of them was convinced by this small optimism was anyone’s guess. All Mike could definitively remember was the prime minister’s final, resigned words before he boarded the plane: “Mike, there are an awful lot of bastards in this world.”
Which, Mike would come to agree, was an insight any presidential bodyguard should take to heart.
BUT OF ALL THE UNEXPECTED, as well as unprecedented, dangers the war wreaked on Mike’s duties, there was one that left him with more shivery thoughts than any prior event. It was the president’s decision to meet with Churchill in Casablanca at the tail end of January 1943.
Nearly three months earlier, just a day after the successful Allied invasion of North Africa, a heartening time when the gloomy war dispatches had abruptly turned more hopeful, Mike was summoned to an eight a.m. meeting with the president. FDR was sitting up in bed, sipping the coffee he made a point of brewing himself, and he was grinning widely. Mike assumed the Boss’s good mood was further evidence that the invasion had gone as well, or perhaps even better, than planned. But he quickly learned that was only part, and at the moment a small part, of the president’s buoyant mood. FDR was about to deliver a stunning bit of news, and, with an impish joy, he looked forward to his bodyguard’s predictable reaction.
“Mike,” he said, “I have to go to Africa.”
“Africa, Mr. President?” Mike dumbly repeated—while at the same time he could not have been more surprised if the president had announced that they were going to the moon. And he was thinking: When FDR had wanted to go to a ball game across town at Griffith Stadium, it was a wartime excursion that had kept him fretting for days as he put in motion all the defenses against a large inventory of potential catastrophes. Africa?
“But there is grave risk,” Mike blurted out. Then, remembering his place, he explained weakly, “Human beings and machines being what they are.”
“Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff are going and our Chiefs of Staff will be there, too,” the president went on with a generous patience. “Mike, there are many reasons why I must go.”
And so it was settled. FDR would go, and Mike would lead the advance security team.
US naval surface patrols and rescue units fortified by seaplanes and blimps would monitor the route over which the Boss would fly—the first transatlantic presidential air trip—to Bathurst, South Africa, the initial leg of the journey. But this gave Mike little confidence as he looked down warily at the slate-gray sea from the narrow window of the converted B-24 ferrying him and the others who were paving the way for the president. German submarines remained active in the Atlantic, and their sharp-eyed antiaircraft gunners had time after time zeroed in on Allied bombers and transport planes. The ocean had swallowed up the remains.
When Mike landed at Casablanca, Lieutenant General Mark Clark promptly greeted him with more frightening news: “The bid and ask price on murder amongst the natives was so close to ten dollars, American money, that there was never much haggling when somebody wanted somebody else done in.” And there was a good likelihood there’d be plenty of offers. Casablanca, according to the alarming army intelligence reports, “was crawling with Nazi agents.” Hordes of potential contract killers and dedicated enemy assassins, however, were not the only threats. The skies above the suffocating, dust-swept city held danger, too. Two weeks before Mike’s arrival the Luftwaffe had rained its bombs down on the native quarter. Hundreds of civilians were killed in a single merciless raid.
It was an agitated Mike, his nerves drawn taut by his frightful days spent reconnoitering the inhospitable town, who watched the president’s shiny C-54 land as scheduled at 6:20 p.m. on January 12, at Medouina Airport, Casablanca. The aircraft taxied to a deserted part of the field, and Mike hightailed it up the ramp and into the plane.
“Mike, I had a wonderful trip,” the president said in greeting.
The Secret Service agent could not be bothered with small talk. On edge, he abandoned all pretense of courtesy and, without prelude, swiftly jumped to the heart of the matter. “Please get your business over as fast as you possibly can,” he found himself nearly begging the commander in chief. “Otherwise some of your finest generals will have to be retired with ulcers.” “Even my cast-iron stomach has taken to quivering,” he added plaintively.
FDR listened, and when at last he spoke it was with sympathy. “Mike, I’ll get this over as soon as I can,” he promised. In the next breath, though, his words carried the hard steel of a presidential reprimand: “Now stop worrying!”
But Mike couldn’t stop. For the remainder of the three-week trip across fourteen thousand miles, much of the journey bringing the crippled president close to active foreign battle zones, the only small solace was Mike’s growing realization that the fears pounding in his imagination would either be everything or they would be nothing. And if they were everything, it was probably too late for him to do anything.
When the president was finally back safely in the White House, Mike sternly told himself that he would never, never allow the president to put himself at such risk again. Not on his watch.
LATER THAT YEAR, IN MID-AUGUST, Mike had been enjoying a respite from the muggy Washington summer as he accompanied the president to balmy Quebec for a meeting with Churchill. Then he stumbled on some disconcerting news. Without trying, Mike had learned that the Boss and the PM had sent a joint message to Joseph Stalin: “At this crucial point in the war” they wanted the first joint meeting of all three of the Allied leaders.
With that the cooling summer breezes whistling in from Hudson Bay might as well have been transformed into a force 10 storm. Mike was rattled. He quickly began to conjure up all the far reaches of the globe where this hazardous wartime conference—the three commanders of the Allied armies in a single location!—might take place. Churchill and FDR had blithely ignored all the military warning, not to mention simple common sense, by meeting in Casablanca, a city teeming with Nazi spies, a city only a short bomber’s flight from enemy bases. He shuddered to imagine where the three leaders would in their collective recklessness decide to convene. He wondered whether he could once again summon up the skill and attention that would be required to protect the Boss against all the large dangers such a foreign conference would create.
But no sooner had his raging concerns turned his world akilter than, benevolently, he heard further news that restored his equilibrium: FDR and Churchill had asked Stalin to meet them in Fairbanks, Alaska. On American territory. A city near American military bases. The Boss wouldn’t need to travel over oceans, or through foreign lands. A conference in Alaska wouldn’t involve outrageous risks, and certainly none for which Mike couldn’t prepare.