Metropolitan Police Department
ROADRUNNER
The Washington HiltonJohn Hinckley checked into the Park Central Hotel in Washington, D.C., on a Sunday. The next day, Monday, March 30, 1981, he wrote a letter to actress Jodie Foster describing his plan to assassinate President Reagan to impress her with his “historical deed;” after which, he left his hotel room and took a cab to the Washington Hilton Hotel at Connecticut Avenue and T Street. Reagan was scheduled to speak to a labor convention there that afternoon.
At 1:30 p.m., Hinckley. stepped forward out of a crowd of television reporters and fired six shots from a Rohm R6-14 revolver. The bullets from Hinckley’s gun struck Ronald Reagan in the left chest, Press Secretary James Brady in the left temple, D.C. Police Officer Thomas Delahanty in the neck, and Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy in the stomach. Hinckley was arrested at the scene and transported by the Secret Service to D.C. Police Headquarters at 300 Indiana Avenue, NW.
By Tuesday, November 18, 1986, 5½ years later, John Hinckley was a patient at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a mental hospital in Southeast D.C. Shortly after 7:00 PM that Tuesday, Ronald Reagan again traveled from the White House to the Washington Hilton to give a speech, this one at the Ethics & Public Policy dinner. It wasn’t the president’s first trip back to the hotel where he had been shot. The Washington Hilton was a favorite presidential speech-making location in Washington. It was, however, my first ROADRUNNER.
The MotorcadeMost presidential travel was accomplished by helicopter. Marine One, as the presidential helicopter is designated, would land in the south lawn of the White House. A D.C. Fire Department engine company would be standing by discretely off to the west just in case the helicopter crashed or otherwise caught fire. Being the hometown of the presidency, however, the president did travel by car fairly often within the city. These motorcades would necessarily involve MPD.
The United States Secret Service is mandated by statute to protect the president and vice president. It was to that agency that primary planning and responsibility for presidential motorcades fell. MPD, however, was instrumental in the execution of those plans and provided traffic control, crowd control, a secure route, and backup manpower for the Secret Service.
Motorcades were typically manpower intensive events. The motorcade itself consisted of a motorcycle escort from MPD’s Special Operations Division (SOD). There would then be a lead escort vehicle and a tail vehicle. There would be an SOD lieutenant in charge of the detail. Additional manpower would be assigned to posts at the destination site and at traffic posts between the White House and the destination site. The presidential trip to the Washington Hilton in November 1986 had a detail of 20 officers at the Hilton itself and another 29 officers assigned to traffic posts along the motorcade’s route.
There would be a Secret Service follow-up car immediately behind the president’s limousine which carried the heavy armament that would be available to the agents should an emergency develop during the trip. On details protecting the president, some Secret Service agents carry Uzi submachine guns, but they are required to keep them hidden unless there is immediate danger.
Motorcade CommunicationsThe Communications Division would assign a dispatcher to handle the motorcade. This dispatcher would clear the SOD channel while one of the communications supervisors would send a digital message to the other dispatchers advising them that SOD had a ROADRUNNER working. The other dispatchers would then advise their district’s patrol units to stay off the SOD channel, e.g., “All units 5D, SOD has a ROADRUNNER detail working. SOD channel is restricted to ROADRUNNER traffic only until further notice.”
The SOD lieutenant assigned to the motorcade would advise communications when the motorcade was 10 minutes away from departure, again when departure was imminent, and finally when the motorcade was leaving the grounds of the White House. The Secret Service follow-up car would keep their operations center advised of the motorcade’s progress, and the SOD lieutenant would keep the MPD dispatcher informed of its progress on the radio channel that had been cleared for everything but motorcade radio traffic.
Hands Across America
Sometimes presidential details could pop up unexpectedly. I was working the SOD channel for the Hands Across America Detail on Sunday, May 25, 1986. Hands Across America established a human chain of some 26,000 people who joined hands at a specific time in a line that extended 29½ miles through the District of Columbia. This line effectively split the District in half. About 300 MPD officers were assigned to this detail.
At one point, President Reagan decided to join the human chain. The Secret Service routed one link of the chain onto the South Lawn of the White House where Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Reagan joined hands with the other participants. When Mitch Snyder, a local homeless advocate, heard of the president’s participation, he decided to organize an impromptu march on the White House to protest D.C. and Federal government policies dealing with the homeless. This meant that in addition to the officers assigned to the Hands Across America detail, the police department also had to activate a civil demonstration detail and get officers into place to prevent the demonstrators from actually entering the White House grounds and disrupting the hand Across America activity.
Antiabortion RallyEvery year on January 22 there is a massive anti-abortion demonstration in Washington to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision which was announced on that date in 1973. In 1987 Vice President Bush participated in the rally. This participation meant that not only did MPD have to prepare and mobilize for a very large march and rally, it also had to integrate a vice presidential motorcade in the plans.
These demonstrations are always potentially more disruptive than a lot of those which take place in the nation’s capital because of the participants’ avowed intention of disrupting the abortion clinics that operated within the District and because of their intention to demonstrate on the grounds of the Supreme Court.
I recall having a list of abortion clinics in Washington at the dispatch console that year along with the MPD teams assigned to each to monitor and make sure the demonstrators did not violate any laws while protesting at the clinics. We had departmental wreckers available to tow any cars that might be used to block clinic driveways or roadways in the area of the clinics.
The U.S. Supreme Court has its own police force and that agency had informed MPD that no demonstrators would be allowed on the grounds of the Supreme Court building. Since the court’s police department is very small, their number was supplemented by an MPD Civil Disturbance Unit (CDU) platoon. They jointly formed a police line at the entrance to the Supreme Court grounds. Any demonstrator crossing that police line was arrested by the Supreme Court Police.
The 1987 Washington SumitIn December 1987 Washington, D.C., hosted a summit meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. This was history in the making as the two leaders would meet and agree to a treaty to dismantle certain categories of strategic weapons.MPD dedicated 3 radio channels for 3 days to work nothing but the summit detail. There was a separate channel for the detail to secure the area between the White House, the Soviet Embassy on 16th Street, and the Madison Hotel, where the Soviet diplomatic party would be staying. Another channel was dedicated to nothing but motorcade security, and this would include not only presidential motorcades but also motorcades for Gorbachev, Mrs. Gorbachev, Mrs. Reagan, and the former presidents and their wives who would be in town for the historic treaty signing. A third channel would handle event security details.
I was one of the dispatchers assigned to the team handling communications for the Reagan-Gorbachev summit. I vividly recall the sergeant who discussed the upcoming detail during a preshift roll call. He made it clear that nothing — absolutely nothing — was going to happen to Mr. Gorbachev from the time his plane sat down at Andrews Air Force Base outside of D.C. in Maryland and from where he would motorcade into the city until his plane safely took off again from that same spot 3 days later. What happened before or after his plane was at Andrews and he was in D.C. wasn’t our concern, but by god nothing was going to happen to the man while he was in Washington.
Gorbachev would see Washington from the inside of an armored Soviet Zil limousine, flown in for his safety in a secure cargo plane. While in town, he would travel from one heavily guarded site to another in a protective cocoon fashioned by a half-dozen law enforcement agencies — including his own KGB — in the most well-secured Washington in history.
Nothing was to be left to chance. Sealed manhole sat above sewers, and the sewers themselves were searched by special teams. Bomb-sensitive dogs were all around, sniffing even the television camera that would be placed on top of the Washington Monument. A dozen black Soviet limousines were imported for the occasion to transport a Soviet entourage protected, in the language of the Secret Service, by “360-degree security.”
Security would be so tight that President Reagan would not get his long-held wish that Gorbachev see America. Indeed, the Soviet leader, who Reagan believed would be greatly affected by the sights, was scheduled to see less of Washington than the typical tourist from Akron. Other than his trip from Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George’s County, Gorbachev’s announced movements would be bounded by 22nd Street on the west and his own 16th Street embassy on the east. One proposed jaunt — to the U.S. Capitol — was canceled in some kind of political disarray.
Instead of the grandeur of the Reflecting Pool or a real Washington neighborhood, Gorbachev was to see America’s inner sanctums, places such as the Oval Office where few Americans can venture.
Nor was Washington to see him. Except for his speeding car, the best view of the general secretary was to be on TV. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course, since Gorbachev would order his limousine halted a couple of times to shake hands with Americans walking by on the sidewalk.
The 1987 summit was different from the city’s superpower summits of the past. There would be no trip from the airport with the president in an open Lincoln, as there was for Nikita Khrushchev in his 1959 visit to Washington. In 1973, Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon greeted school children on the White House lawn — but in 1987 if anything like that occurred, the kids would have to be routed through metal detectors.
It was quite a different world from 1973. Anwar Sadat had been assassinated. The pope and the president had been shot.
The preparations for Reagan’s 1985 inauguration were the most security-conscious in the city’s history and included 9,000 law enforcement officers from a range of agencies. The 1987 summit was even bigger, and the preoccupation with security was more intense.
More than 100 Secret Service agents attended to a myriad of details, from securing the buildings along planned motorcade routes to checking the backgrounds of employees at the Madison Hotel. Before the Soviets actually moved into the Madison, Secret Service teams swept through the hotel “turning it inside out” — checking for bombs and any suspicious items. Then they controlled access completely, aware of everything going in or out, “including the garbage.”
The agents also looked at the hospitals to be visited in the event of an emergency. They checked the backgrounds of doctors and other staff members.
When the time came, it actually went smoothly. We shut down Suitland Parkway during rush hour the day Gorbachev arrived at Andrews Air Force Base and motorcaded into the city. This is a major commuter route and closing it caused all sorts of rush hour traffic problems. Not only was the parkway closed down, but all the overpasses and bridges were cleared of people and traffic until the motorcade had passed. Traffic was stopped in both directions on the parkway and on the Southeast-Southwest Freeway.
Gorbachev stayed at the Soviet Embassy, a few block north of the White House on 16th Street. His limousine would not fit through the opening between the stone pillars at each end of the driveway so they literally chipped stone off the pillars to make the car fit.
There were helicopters flying over the motorcade routes, countersnipers stationed on downtown rooftops, plainclothes police officers looking out for trouble among the demonstrators, battalions of officers stashed discreetly in government buildings as a reserve in case of trouble, and formations of Secret Service agents surrounding their assigned protectee inside secure buffer zones. The entire operation was coordinated by command center deep inside the White House.
Hundreds of MPD, Park Police, Secret Service Uniform Division, U.S. Capitol Police, and other officers ended up standing for hours in the cold and never saw any of the world leaders. The same could be said of the dispatchers assigned to the detail. The closest I came to any of the principles was when the Secret Service called to say they were out of escort vehicles and Mrs. Carter needed an escort to the formal dinner after the treaty signing. I didn’t have anyone to send, either.
