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presidential trip.
    The moment the President made a commitment to go somewhere, Behn’s work was under way. In the case of Dallas, he followed procedure by pulling a PRS (Protective Research Section) file on the city, and this card, in Secret Service headquarters, would list any persons in the area thought to be potentially dangerous. All persons who were psychiatrically homicidal were listed; all cranks who wrote threatening letters; all persons who had been involved in political riots or arrested and detained for political violence.
    Every street the President planned to traverse in each city had to be “sanitized” long in advance by agents. Every name on the PRS list had to be checked for whereabouts and security. Every building Mr. Kennedy might step into had to be screened and searched. The day before the President arrived, men had to be posted at every entrance and exit to each of those buildings. Through Chief James J. Rowley of the Secret Service, liaison had to be established with other governmental investigativeagencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA so that, if they had any information which might augment the safety of the President, it would go into Jerry Behn’s hopper.
    The agencies worked well together. So well, in fact, that Chief Rowley often sent some of his Secret Service men to the FBI to take short courses in investigative procedures and the newer and more bizarre devices of detection. In late October 1963, the word that went out from Behn’s office was “San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas.” The PRS file didn’t have much material. The FBI and the CIA had very little.
    The name of Lee Harvey Oswald did not come up. Nor would it. He was a defector who had gone to the Soviet Union and had returned with a wife and child. The State Department had a file on him, but it was a file of insolent correspondence, closing with the department’s lending him money to come home. The Navy Department had a short dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a onetime Marine who, after fleeing to Russia, had been court martialled and his honorable discharge changed to a dishonorable discharge. The young man had protested to the Secretary of the Navy, Mr. John Connally, but the DD was allowed to stand. The FBI was aware of him, but only as a “Marxist” who appeared to be “clean.” He had never attended a Communist Party meeting, never consorted with Reds, never tried to get employment in a sensitive defense area, appeared to have considerable trouble with his marital life, and bounded from one cheap laboring job to another.
    Most of the people Behn had to worry about were emotionally disturbed. A history of assassins is a glossary of persons sick and obsessed. Lee Harvey Oswald never got drunk, never wrote threatening letters, and once told his wife that if the President was killed, he would be replaced by another man who “thinks the same and will keep up the same program.”
    What worried Gerald Behn was that the Secret Service has no authority over the actions of the President. They had the responsibility but could not make the decisions. Word had already come over the teletype that it was raining in Fort Worth but that Mr. Kennedy did not want the bubbletop on and asked that the Secret Service men remain on the follow-up car. The first part created no anxiety in the White House. The second part did.
    President Kennedy was becoming increasingly irritated with the Secret Service. Behn recalled that the Chief Executive had told him, forcefully, to keep his men away from the lead car. On another occasion, in the midst of a motorcade, he had excitedly waved off the men who trotted beside the car. It had reached a stage where Behn and his assistant, Floyd Boring, were no longer popular with the President. He saw them as the leaders of the intruders. Sometimes he almost bumped into an SS man outside his office door. He felt that he was seeing