The Inevitable Limits of Security

By Frank Trippett

As soon as there is life," says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "there is danger." Likewise, as soon as there is danger, there is the urge to ward it off. This most fundamental of human impulses is not really remarkable, except when it turns into a compulsive wish for absolute safety. The question is whether the widespread preoccupation with security is on the verge of leaving reasonableness behind.

Today's popular feelings of insecurity often resemble an obsession. "As a result of our fear," says one major study of American attitudes toward crime, "we may soon be living in armed for tresses--both at home and within ourselves." Government and private efforts to guard against violence are steadily becoming more elaborate and conspicuous, especially in the U.S. Not every principality has gone to the extremes of Chicago, where Mayor Jane Byrne has more personal bodyguards (17) than most national heads of state, and yet evidences of extraordinary concern have been steadily multiplying.

The signs range from the universal electronic frisking that is now so familiar at all airports to the continual expansion of civil-police systems. The craving for safety also accounts for the swift growth of the private-guard industry, the spread of restrictive cautions like visitor-monitoring in apartment buildings, the proliferation of courses in self-defense and antiterrorism tactics, the preoccupation in households with locks and alarms, the deployment of attack dogs and the epidemic sales of private handguns. Actor Roy Rogers was only typical when he recently took a stand against handgun restrictions in California: "They'll have to shoot me first to take my gun. I wouldn't feel safe if I didn't have a gun in my house." Increasingly, corporations, and especially multinationals whose executives travel to turbulent countries, do not feel safe without security experts on their payrolls.

Bodyguards have even become a sort of status symbol. Affluent communities like the star-studded Malibu colony in California hire private sentinels to augment whatever protection they get from local police. Aides to Playboy Enterprises Chairman Hugh Hefner boast that his personal-security arrangements approach presidential class. Eight security men were on hand when Actor Robin Williams recently turned up in New York City for the opening of The World According to Garp. Said the Washington Post's "Ear" column in a midsummer rundown of fashionable Ins and Outs: "Bodyguards are deeply In." The security binge is not, however, a matter of mere style. It is taken seriously almost everywhere, but nowhere more seriously than among the leaders of the world, or at least among those responsible for protecting them. When the Prime Ministers, Premiers and Presidents of the West congregate in one of their summit junkets, one of the biggest attendant stories is about the formidable apparatus of guards and safeguards. At Versailles, where this year's economic summit convened, more than 2,000 sentinels (police, soldiers and such) were mobilized, plus hundreds of other security experts and agents brought along by the seven major participants. At moments it seemed that security instead of economics was the name of the summit game. Given the variety, sophistication, scope and sheer quantity of safeguards put in place in recent years, one might conclude that the world has been made safer. No such conclusion seems to be warranted, though; witness the unflagging zeal of the continued quest for safety. Added precautions never seem to reduce feelings of insecurity very much, or for long. This may not be as odd as it seems at first. After all, while no strategy is ever entirely reliable in forestalling trouble, any safety measure can be counted on absolutely to keep people mindful of the possibility of threats. Result: feelings of anxiety instead of serenity.

The White House provides an illustration. While the security apparatus that has evolved there should assure Americans that their President is fully protected, it actually reminds everybody that danger is constantly at hand. The system has turned the President into a fleetingly visible leader who, even as he leaves a press conference held inside the White House, is surrounded by guards. Presidential security, provided by numbers that are kept secret for security reasons, is sufficiently large to give Ronald Reagan's entourage, when the President travels, something of the air of an imperial expedition. Hundreds go along when the President flees to Barbados or his California ranch for a vacation. On this summer's junket to England, after the Versailles summit, Reagan security was so zealous that his managers insultingly proposed having White House food tasters monitor the Windsor Castle meal that the President was to share with Queen Elizabeth and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The presence of the White House guards was heavyhanded enough to incite one Member of Parliament, John Wheeler (also director of the British Security Industry Association), to say, "Very frankly, your President was surrounded by a bunch of gorillas."

An overabundance of caution on behalf of a President who has already been shot once is understandable. Yet such are the inherently unforeseeable dangers that presidential security is supposed to foresee and guard against that an overabundance of security cannot guarantee perfect safety any more than a mere abundance can. Governments in other parts of the world, while fully conscious of risks to leaders, seem to be much more aware than the U.S. of the impossibility of trying to predict and thwart all possible dangers. The result is security arrangements that sometimes seem downright casual by contemporary U.S. standards. In West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt is customarily assigned only three bodyguards, and he conducts press conferences whose audiences are not put through any security screening. In Venezuela, President Luis Herrera Campins in three years has made some 250 trips from Caracas to smaller interior towns where, as political custom demands, he wanders among the populace, listening and letting himself be surrounded by children and old women; a few bodyguards go along, but advance security checks are unknown. In India, while hundreds of guards form the official security structure in New Delhi, Indira Gandhi, once herself the target of an inaccurately thrown knife, begins her day each morning by holding an open session on her office lawn for anyone who wishes to speak to her, and goes about in a non-bulletproof car escorted by one security car and a motorcyclist. In Taiwan, President Chiang Ching-kuo ventures out regularly with only two or three guards.

Pope John Paul II preferred his security to be as unobtrusive as possible before he was shot last year and, in spite of the heavier security since installed around him, still insists on relative freedom of movement. Away from the Vatican, amid crowds, he keeps breaking through his security cordons to press the flesh of those who turn out to see him. When he did so in Fatima, Portugal, last spring, a man disguised as a priest lunged toward him with a bayonet. "This is not the first attempt on the life of the Pope," the Pontiff said later, "nor will it be the last."

An attitude of resignation in the face of imponderable risks is not unusual among top leaders; sooner or later, most realize, anyone in high office can turn into a target for an infinitude of reasons, or for no good reason at all. In the 19th century Abraham Lincoln abjured heavy protection both because he was fatalistic and because the notion of a palace guard offended him. And a century later John F. Kennedy said, "If anyone wants to do it, no amount of protection is enough. All a man needs is a willingness to trade his life for mine." Such a view, chilling though it may be, fits reality. When human violence is able to strike the famous, it is not always or even usually because of the absence of security. When John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, the President's sole bodyguard had stepped out for a drink, true; but it is also true that when Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy, 28 Secret Service agents and some 600 police had been deployed to protect him. The limits of even the closest guarding were never made clearer than in the fatal shooting of President William McKinley as he took part in a reception line. Assassin Leon Czolgosz had to go through two columns of soldiers and police to reach McKinley, who, even as the shots were fired, was closely surrounded by four detectives, four soldiers and three Secret Service agents.

It is only the backward look that makes past assassinations and other security breaches seem preventable. But hindsight tends to overlook the fact that the one thing common to all such assaults is that they were utterly unforeseeable. Reality leaves security planners in the position of those generals who used to spend their careers planning to fight the previous war: plans to forestall assassinations like previous ones doubtless exist in abundance in security offices all over the world. What no security organization on earth can possess is the plan to ward off what is utterly beyond predicting--a John Hinckley landing as randomly as a fallen leaf outside a Washington hotel, a death squad popping out of the very middle of a military parade to put an end to Egypt's Anwar Sadat.

This summer's Buckingham Palace caper is now long enough past to be pondered as a wry lesson in the limits of security.

Here was a case of an unlikely culprit with inscrutable motives intruding into a royal fortress by climbing a fence, entering unlocked windows, shinnying up a drainpipe and passing through electronic surveillance gear that failed to work. He completed his visit to the Queen in her boudoir while police failed to respond promptly to either automatic or telephone alarms. Afterward, authorities tightened security, then soon recorded two further breaches of it. Enduring lessons: culprits are always unlikely, their motives are always murky, every fence is climbable, somebody always leaves some window open, mechanical systems will never be perfectly reliable, authorities can never be absolutely counted on to respond speedily to emergencies, and, finally, tightened security systems can often be breached just as easily as loosened ones.

It would be callous or worse to scoff at efforts taken anywhere to make people safer. The important and powerful will always have to be given special protection because they face special risks. Moreover, nobody should have trouble understanding why the U.S. is more anxious about security matters than other parts of the world: the U.S. is in fact more dangerous than other countries. In 1980, according to Handgun Control in Washington, murders by handgun alone killed eight people in Canada, eight in Britain and 11,522 in the U.S. Such facts, never mind the history of frequent assassination attempts, dictate that ordinary people, as well as Presidents, must move about with considerable care.

To see the limits of the utmost care, however, is not to scoff. It is to realize that those who meticulously plan for safety are rational people caught up in the task of trying to anticipate the will-o'-the-wisp quirks of irrationality. To suppose it can be done without failures is to trade in rationality for some false sense of security.

--By Frank Trippett

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