Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President Read Free Page A

across the backside.
    Each day we diligently studied reading, writing, arithmetic, and American history as it actually occurred, with no one lecturing, for example, that Pearl Harbor was the fault of the United States. The Supreme Court had yet to order religion removed from public schools, so we recited the Lord’s Prayer during morning devotional, along with Bible verses and the Pledge of Allegiance. No one refused to join in any of these activities, and there were no complaints from any parent about the curriculum of hard academics, God, and patriotism.
    At recess, we cultivated healthy competitive spirit by playing a variety of violent and sometimes injury-causing games, including tackle football with no pads and dodge ball, now banned in many schools. While almost everyone received a bloody nose and got scraped up from time to time, not everyone received trophies for every sporting activity. Those who lost in dodge ball or other sports did not seem to suffer permanent physical injury from the bloody noses or a lack of self-esteem.
    Political correctness and a phobia of anything gun-related had yet to seize the country, and I recall one very interesting show-and-tell day in the sixth grade. One of my classmates brought to school a fully automatic .30-caliber M2 carbine provided to him by his father, a police captain. The captain had procured the weapon from the armory of the Gainesville Police Department for his son’s show-and-tell. The school was not put on lockdown, and everyone, including the teacher, enjoyed the presentation on the history and functioning of the weapon. At the end of the day many pedestrians and people in vehicles watched unconcerned as my eleven-year-old friend walked across the school grounds with his carbine slung over his shoulder on his way home.
    In addition to the challenging academic curriculum, we also trained for the likelihood of nuclear war.
    During the early 1960s, especially after the Cuban missile crisis, everyone, including the school systems of America, was concerned about a seemingly inevitable thermonuclear war with Russia. Unlike many schools in the early 1960s, my grammar school did not practice the insane act of “duck and cover,” which had students hiding from thermonuclear destruction under their desks. Desks provided no more cover from a nuclear explosion than they would a falling light fixture. Instead we practiced evacuation drills.
    The idea was that if we were all to be vaporized, maybe some of us could at least make it home and die with our families or in our own homes and yards. Traveling the great circle route, it would take an ICBM about twenty minutes to travel from the Soviet Union to its designated detonation area over the United States. That at least gave us some time. Better to be on the move and die rather than huddled like rats under a desk. I vividly recall that on at least one occasion, upon the given signal, all students formed up into groups and walked home. It was a useless exercise but a lot more exciting than duck and cover, and we got most of the day off from school.
    Guns played a large role in my upbringing, and I always seemed to have an affinity for understanding their function as well as a natural talent for using them. My father advised me very early in life to “never point a gun at anything you do not intend to shoot.” Later the marines would modify that lesson to “never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to kill or destroy.” At the age of eight, with my Daisy BB gun in hand, I roamed our neighborhood with other gunslingers for hours on end. We tested our skills by pushing our Daisys’ maximum effective range to their utmost limits. It was not unusual to see a group of boys walking down the street in our neighborhood with their BB guns, and on some days we sported actual firearms, usually .22 rifles. Other than the bird population being thinned a bit, no damage was done as a result of our possessing these weapons, and no