Tragedy still sore spot for ex-agent
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
November never fails to stir up Frank Slocum's worst memories. Even after 40 years, he can't escape them.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
They don't bother him as much as they do other retired U.S. Secret Service agents. But they can set his upper lip to quivering, and if he doesn't stomp them back, he'll cry.
Frank Slocum, a former Secret Service agent, displays "The White House," which President Kennedy and his wife autographed.
Such is the legacy of President John F. Kennedy, assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald four decades ago today. With pinpoint precision, it reaches through time to jar Slocum, a 77-year-old Makaha resident.
Slocum, who once headed up the Honolulu office of the Secret Service, protected five presidents during his 20-year career. And while Slocum wasn't in the doomed presidential motorcade in Dallas that morning — he was in Los Angeles working criminal cases — he was there that afternoon, standing on the sixth floor of the Texas school book depository.
He remembers looking out the window and thinking how easy it would be for a sniper to make a good, clean shot. There were so many questions, he says, so much confusion.
"We didn't know what to think," he says. "There were so many things being said. The only thing we knew for sure was that the president had been shot."
For Slocum, it doesn't matter that he wasn't there. He knew everyone who was and shared their angst and anger at what happened. Slocum had protected Kennedy on other assignments. He liked him. All the agents liked him.
"He was very personable," Slocum says.
There was no finer example of that than the previous Christmas Eve, when Slocum was in Palm Beach, Fla., on a detail to protect the president and Mrs. Kennedy. Over the objections of several agents, Kennedy called them all into a room to thank them.
"He said, I am with my family tonight and because I am with mine, you are not with yours and Mrs. Kennedy and I want you to know how much this means to us," Slocum says.
As a memento, the president gave them a signed edition of "The White House," a history book edited by Mrs. Kennedy. Slocum still has the book, its spine a bit tattered, but the couple's autographs still clear.
The emotional measure of their loss could not really be weighed by the Secret Service agents until days later. Those agents assigned to remain in Texas, Slocum among them, huddled around a television set in a Johnson City motel to watch the Kennedy funeral.
"We had lost a popular president," he says. "We were feeling maybe it could have been avoided. Did we do something wrong?"
That funeral, with all its enduring images, was well-done, he says. And this is where it gets tough for Slocum, where he has to stomp on his feelings.
"We started to cry," he says.
To be sure, there were moments the Secret Service was proud of, high among them that one of their own, agent Clint Hill, had rushed up from the trailing limo to protect Mrs. Kennedy from being shot. Hill did not share that pride, Slocum says, because the president was dead.
"It really bothered him," Slocum says. "Could he have done something else? He was seen pounding his fist on the car. It was a horrible time. A horrible time."
Much has been said and written about the assassination and Slocum rejects most of it. Tell it straight, he says.
"This other stuff — more assassins and cover-ups — that's just unfortunate," Slocum says. "When will they let it go?"
The assassination changed a lot about the way the Secret Service did its job, Slocum says. Protecting the president had always been a priority, but the agency often worked without adequate money, equipment and personnel, he says.
"Prior to the assassination, we had hand-me down equipment," he says. "After the assassination, everyone wanted to make sure it never happened again. We got equipment, cars, anything. We got more agents. We got more authority."
In the aftermath, Slocum and another agent wrote a thick manual on presidential route security. Among their suggestions: no open windows.
Four years after the assassination, Slocum was sent to Honolulu as the special agent in charge of the Secret Service office in Hawai'i. Pages and pages of his thick scrapbook detail his time here, many of them with photographs. He is the man in the background looking the other way, looking for another presidential assassin.
There have been none. One was enough.
"Was there something we could have done?" Slocum says again, and not for the last time. "I don't know if there was."
Reach Mike Gordon at 525-8012 or mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.
