(take anything he says with huge grain of salt:) Retired Secret Service agent talks about day of Kennedy assassination

(take anything he says with huge grain of salt:) Retired Secret Service agent talks about day of Kennedy assassination


By TEGAN HANLON

TEGAN HANLON The Dallas Morning News

Staff Writer

As a Secret Service agent assigned to the presidential detail on Nov. 22, 1963, Mike Howard was a busy fellow.



Soon after President John F. Kennedy and his wife departed from their Fort Worth hotel for Dallas that morning, Howard and other agents faced a monumental duty — meticulously collecting the half-used cologne, scraps of paper, bars of soap and even left-behind pieces of thread from the Kennedys’ hotel suite into two trash bags.



“By the time we got everything into those bags we heard over the TV that there had been a shot fired in Dallas,” Howard, 82, recalled Monday afternoon at the Carrollton Senior Center. The retired agent spoke there during an event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.



Immediately after the shooting, Howard’s duties quickly changed. Soon he would be questioning suspects and in time, he would guard the family of Lee Harvey Oswald.



But first he had to get to Dallas.



After hearing of the shooting, Howard got into the Tarrant County sheriff’s new Ford Crown Victoria. The car could go as fast as 150 mph, which Howard said he thought was “kind of funny — until we got in and took that drive to Dallas.”



As the speedometer hit 130 mph, Howard gripped the passenger seat as he, the sheriff and other agents sped to Parkland Hospital, where police and media vehicles had filled the parking lot. But by the time they arrived, the president was dead.



Many of the more than 120 audience members who packed the center to hear Howard on Monday could also recall where they were when they heard about Kennedy’s assassination.



Ronnie Donald had just left a geology exam at Arlington State College, now the University of Texas at Arlington. “I walked out, and usually the campus is busy, but there weren’t any students around,” said Donald, 69.



He asked a campus police officer what was going on.



“I was shocked,” the Dallas resident said. Donald headed to the student union and found his peers glued to the TV.



Meanwhile Howard, a Secret Service agent from 1960 to 1974, had received two phone calls. One was from headquarters in Washington, D.C. The other was from Lyndon Johnson. Authorities had a suspect in the shooting — Lee Harvey Oswald — and Johnson wanted Howard to help protect Oswald’s wife, Marina, and their two children.



“He said, ‘Mike, I don’t care what you do, you don’t let anything happen to these people,’” Howard recalled. He said Johnson, who had been sworn in as president at Love Field while aboard Air Force One, told him that there were rumors someone wanted to kill Oswald’s family by dragging them through the streets of Dallas.



“He said, ‘I don’t want that to happen. It’s not their fault that it happened,’” Howard said. “I said, yes sir, whatever you think, sir.”



By the next year, Howard was on a protection detail for the Johnson family, the assignment he held until he retired for medical reasons. He accompanied the president’s daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, to school while she was in college.



On a trip to New York City, Howard said, he shielded the 19-year-old from a group of angry girls who wanted to attack her for dating popular actor George Hamilton.



“People try to get close to their children,” Howard said about the girls, who carried sulfuric acid. “It can be very touchy. You have to be very careful.”



Howard, who was born in Nocona, now lives on a ranch near Prosper. It wasn’t his intent to protect presidents and other prominent leaders. It just happened.



“I was in the military police, so that got me started and I just kind of liked it,” he said. “So, as time went by, I just kind of stuck with it.”


The tall tales of Mike Howard
















4/26/64 It was charged here [San Francisco] yesterday that a Dallas Secret Service agent deliberately "planted" a false story about the assassination of President Kennedy.



























New York attorney Mark Lane .. charged that the phony story was "leaked" to a Ft. Worth reporter on 2/9 to take press attention away from the appearance of Oswald's mother before the Commission on the following day.





















[Story refers to Negro janitor alleged to have seen Oswald shoot.]





















5/9/64 Mark Lane ... charged the Secret Service with deliberately planting a false story in the press ... According to Lane, the ... falsification concerned an article in the 2/10 issue of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram ... "The story broke the same day Oswald's mother was to appear as the first witness on behalf of Lee Oswald. It was obviously calculated to prevent press coverage of any witness who was going to raise doubts about Oswald's guilt." National Guardian





















[Story given by Mike Howard, Secret Service, to Thayer Waldo, reporter for the Star-Telegram: a Negro janitor, looking out of a window on the same floor Texas School Book Depository, heard first shot, saw Oswald and was prepared to identify him. AP account of Star-Telegram story filed Chronology, 2/9, 813 to 1143 pcs.]





















See Secret Service 2/13/64 – AP, 131 aes, Sterling Green





















5/9/64 Mark Lane, in a statement to the Guardian 5/4 ... said he has learned that a second rifle, not the one attributed to Oswald, was found on the roof of the Texas School Book Depository building the day the President was murdered.





















[Lane describes meeting between Thayer Waldo, reporter for Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, and Mike Howard, Secret Service agent.] ... At one point during their meeting, Waldo asked Mike Howard whether there was any truth to the story that another rifle was found on the roof of the school book building, a story that had previously been denied. Mike Howard replied: "Yes, we found a rifle on the roof, but it was dropped by a Dallas police officer earlier in the day and he forgot to pick it up." National Guardian