Washington Post Article honors Bob Faison

In memoriam: Robert R. Faison, 1929-2011

 ASSOCIATED PRESS/ASSOCIATED PRESS - As U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's highly guarded car rounds the corner taking him on "L" street and then to the Capitol building he lost balance, but regained it with the help of Mrs. Edmund Brown, wife of California governor, Sept. 17, 1964, in Sacramento, Calif. Secret Service agent Robert Faison is at far left.

After several years of struggling with recurring cancer, it became obvious to Faison that he was nearing the end of his fight. He recognized the signs, having lost both a wife and son to cancer; his eldest son, Gregory, succumbed to the disease in 1997. Though Faison’s health was declining, he was reluctant to relinquish his love of traveling, so Faison and his wife embarked on a jazz cruise to the Caribbean in early 2011. But Faison wasn’t strong enough to tour the islands as they had so many times before, and they had oxygen delivered to the cabin. Their new limitations led Faison and his wife to a difficult conclusion.

“I realized then, and I think he realized, that that was going to be our last cruise together,” Jacquelyn says. After their return, Faison turned his energies to a subject he had long tried to avoid: himself. He set to work on his own obituary.

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As Faison saw it, he was the only one who could tell his story, since no one knew the details as he did. He worked quietly from their family room, sitting at the round table at which he regularly toiled over the bills and balanced their accounts. Using a yellow legal pad, he began to reconstruct the facts of his life. “Robert R. Faison,” he began, “affectionately known as Bob, was born in Montclair, New Jersey on August 12, 1929. ...”


For weeks he worked on a draft. He wrote about the small Southern town where he was raised (Seaboard, N.C.), and the cousin who took him in and treated him as her own; the university where he graduated from with honors (North Carolina A&T), and the prestigious fraternity that he was an active member of for 51 years (Alpha Phi Alpha). He wrote of his pride in being promoted to chief warrant officer, and acknowledged the church he and Jacquelyn had joined after leaving Silver Spring for retirement in Palm Coast, Fla. He remembered those he loved and lost, and those who were left behind to “cherish his memory.”

Regarding his profession, he wrote, “He was the first African American permanently assigned to the White House and had the pleasure of serving six U.S. presidents during his career and traveled to more than 30 countries until he retired in 1995.”

A month before he died, Faison presented the legal pad to Jacquelyn, who was surprised but relieved. The draft was so thorough that she typed it verbatim, and used it in the programs at two of the three of the services held in his honor. The only addition she made was one her husband, so modest and matter of fact, would never have included. Robert Faison “was the epitome of a gentleman, loving, kind and always good-natured.”

After several years of struggling with recurring cancer, it became obvious to Faison that he was nearing the end of his fight. He recognized the signs, having lost both a wife and son to cancer; his eldest son, Gregory, succumbed to the disease in 1997. Though Faison’s health was declining, he was reluctant to relinquish his love of traveling, so Faison and his wife embarked on a jazz cruise to the Caribbean in early 2011. But Faison wasn’t strong enough to tour the islands as they had so many times before, and they had oxygen delivered to the cabin. Their new limitations led Faison and his wife to a difficult conclusion.

“I realized then, and I think he realized, that that was going to be our last cruise together,” Jacquelyn says. After their return, Faison turned his energies to a subject he had long tried to avoid: himself. He set to work on his own obituary.

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As Faison saw it, he was the only one who could tell his story, since no one knew the details as he did. He worked quietly from their family room, sitting at the round table at which he regularly toiled over the bills and balanced their accounts. Using a yellow legal pad, he began to reconstruct the facts of his life. “Robert R. Faison,” he began, “affectionately known as Bob, was born in Montclair, New Jersey on August 12, 1929. ...”

For weeks he worked on a draft. He wrote about the small Southern town where he was raised (Seaboard, N.C.), and the cousin who took him in and treated him as her own; the university where he graduated from with honors (North Carolina A&T), and the prestigious fraternity that he was an active member of for 51 years (Alpha Phi Alpha). He wrote of his pride in being promoted to chief warrant officer, and acknowledged the church he and Jacquelyn had joined after leaving Silver Spring for retirement in Palm Coast, Fla. He remembered those he loved and lost, and those who were left behind to “cherish his memory.”

Regarding his profession, he wrote, “He was the first African American permanently assigned to the White House and had the pleasure of serving six U.S. presidents during his career and traveled to more than 30 countries until he retired in 1995.”

A month before he died, Faison presented the legal pad to Jacquelyn, who was surprised but relieved. The draft was so thorough that she typed it verbatim, and used it in the programs at two of the three of the services held in his honor. The only addition she made was one her husband, so modest and matter of fact, would never have included. Robert Faison “was the epitome of a gentleman, loving, kind and always good-natured.”
Robin Rose Parker is a writer living in Maryland. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.

Inspired by Clint Hill

Gainesville native helped protect 3 presidents while in Secret Service

Courage, Strength, and Dignity A Conversation with Caroline Kennedy | Parade.com

Courage, Strength, and Dignity A Conversation with Caroline Kennedy | Parade.com

Read this wonderful interview with Caroline Kennedy about the tapes her mother Jacqueline Kennedy made shortly after JFK's assassination. For even more insight into what Jackie Kennedy was really like, read MRS. KENNEDY AND ME By Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin. Available April 2012 (Gallery/Simon and Schuster).

Happy Birthday President Kennedy

On May 29, 1963 President John F. Kennedy celebrated his 46th birthday.  Sadly, it would be his last.

Mrs. Kennedy arranged a surprise birthday party on the yacht Sequoia for family and close friends.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.  May you rest in peace.

Secret Service Agent Haunted by JFK Assassination

http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/local_news/cleveland_metro/jfk-secret-service-agent-breaks-his-silence-on-assassination-of-president-48-years-ago

By Leon Bibb CLEVELAND - A former U.S. presidential secret service agent, who was with President John Kennedy the day the president was assasinated, now walks the quiet halls of the Western Reserve Historical Society, a Cleveland museum dedicated to the history of Northeast Ohio.
Paul Landis was in Dallas as part of the Kennedy secret service detail November 22, 1963, when bullets flashed through the sunlit Texas air, striking the president, killing him.

"I heard the gunshot," said Landis. "It came over my right shoulder."

Landis was within a few feet of the presidential limousine, the top of which had been removed at the president's request. Movies of that day show Landis and several other secret service agents trailing the limousine as each man watched for any unusual movement in the crowds of people who had lined Dallas streets to get a view of the nation's chief executive.

Landis said when he heard the first shot, his eyes turned toward where he thought the shot had originated. Still searching the crowd, there came another shot in quick succession.

"And when my eyes came back to the president again, it was a third shot and that  was the one that hit him in the head," Landis remembered.

Dressed in a blue sweater with an shirt underneath, Landis sat quietly in one of the rooms of the Western Reserve Historical Society, where he has worked as a security guard for many years. Without emotion, he told the story of how he had joined the Secret Service.

After a time on the force, he was transferred to duty at the White House, where his responsibilities included guarding First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and the couple's children, Caroline and John Jr.
Photographs in a book, "The Kennedy Detail," written by former JFK secret service agent Gerald Blaine, show the men of the security team assigned to the White House. Throughout, there are photographs of Landis with the Kennedy children or Mrs. Kennedy.

In one photograph, Landis is running alongside a galloping horse ridden by Caroline. On the book's cover is a picture of President and Mrs. Kennedy shaking hands with supporters at the Dallas Airport only moments before they rode in the motorcade toward Dealey Plaza, site of the fatal shooting of the president.

In the cover photograph is Landis, wearing sunglasses, in between the President and Mrs. Kennedy. All around there are smiles, including on the First Couple's faces. Minutes later, the smiles through Dallas and the rest of the United States, and much of the world would turn to grieving and mourning faces.

"We had a job to do and that was to protect the president or whomever we were assigned to and if you fail, you fail," he said.

Landis said he and the other agents were haunted by the assassination. He said he grieved inwardly for decades. Oddly, he said, agents rarely spoke of their inner feelings on the death of the president. There was no professional psychological counseling for the Secret Service agents who witnessed the murder of the president.

"No, that wasn't even thought of and heard of," said Landis, matter-of-factly. But the hurt was there in his mind and in his memory. "Very much so," he added.

It was Blaine's 2010 book that prompted the Secret Service agents from the 1963 White House to gather and tell their stories in support of each other. The Discovery Channel produced a documentary, "The Kennedy Detail," where each man told his story of the assassination and how it had impacted the life of each.

"Up until then, I never said much about the Secret Service or of working on the presidential detail in 1963," said Landis. "The conversation would always then turn to the assassination."

It was Blaine's book and the documentary, which provided a therapy for Landis.

"That's the best thing that's happened to me since the assassination," said Landis.
He added he is no longer haunted by the event that day, which many sociologists contend robbed American of an innocence. He now talks teasily of the Kennedy Detail and of what he saw and heard that November day in Dallas.

From that day, presidents were secured even more. Landis noted how heavily armed agents are these days, although their weapons are not easily visible under their jackets.

"I carried a .38 pistol," said Landis.

At Parkland Hospital, where President Kennedy was rushed, Landis sat in a hallway with Mrs. Kennedy. He said she stared into space and said nothing. The nation saw her that day, dressed in a pink suit with a matching pillbox hat, which she had helped make popular.

In the hospital, on the Air Force Once trip back to Washington, and in front of the television news cameras that captured her image as she left the presidential jet, the world saw the blood of President Kennedy on her skirt with trails of blood running along her legs.

She had cradled John Kennedy's head in the backset of the limousine as it sped from Dealey Plaza to Parkland Hospital.

At the WRHS, Landis' job is to walk its hallways and guard the items that are housed in the museum. One of the items there, ironically, is a Lincoln Continental convertible, similar to the car in which President Kennedy rode in that day in Dallas.

For Landis, memories of the assassination are never far away. Forty-eight years later, he said they surface at times. He is talking about that day which, he said, at times seems far away. Certainly, however, it was turning point in his life. He was guarding the president the day shots blasted through the air, fataling striking President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

A year later, Landis left the U.S. Secret Service.  He has lived quietly in a Cleveland suburb since 1975.

Daily Herald Article on The Kennedy Detail

Secret Service agents visit Naperville to discuss JFK’s death

By Marie Wilson

Daily Herald April 19, 2011

When conspiracy theories started to run rampant in the months and years after the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, the Secret Service agents who protected him made very few statements about them.

But when former Secret Service agent Jerry Blaine retired, he began reading some of the theories online, and ideas claiming presidential drivers or agents had a hand in the murder “got personal,” he said.

 

“What the agents decided to do is set the record straight and make sure we at least had a say in history,” Blaine said Saturday while discussing his book “The Kennedy Detail” at Anderson’s Bookshop in downtown Naperville. “It was not until June of last year that we sat down and emotionally discussed the assassination.”

Blaine joined co-author and former Naperville resident Lisa McCubbin and former Secret Service agent Clint Hill for the discussion and book signing attended by about 200 people.
Blaine described the hectic routine of his job as one of less than 50 men assigned to protect Kennedy and his family.

And Hill, one of the agents closest to Kennedy when shots were fired, told the assassination story from his point of view.

On what was a warm November day in Dallas, windows were open at the high-rises surrounding the streets where the president’s vehicles proceeded to a campaign stop, Hill said. He was scanning a building to his left when he heard an “explosive noise” from his right, which turned out to be the first gunshot fired from a sixth-story window by Lee Harvey Oswald.

After the first shot:
“What I saw was the president grabbing at his throat and moving to the left,” Hill said, speaking quickly, as though his words were memorized and well-practiced. “I knew he was in trouble and something was wrong.”

After the second shot:
Hill said he tried to “cover and evacuate,” a Secret Service technique that would have allowed his body to block those of the president and Jackie Kennedy.

After the third shot:
Hill saw a “gaping hole” in Kennedy’s head as blood, brains and bone sprayed out from the gunshot wound, covering his clothing as well as Jackie Kennedy’s.

“I assumed the wound was fatal,” Hill said.

In an era of what Blaine called “pre-technology agents,” grief counseling wasn’t available after the assassination. Neither was time to discuss the tragedy and its emotional effects.

“One thing you never got on the detail was sleep,” Blaine said. “After you finished 20-hour days, all you could do to wind down was talk to the guys you worked with. . . . We became like brothers because we spent our entire lives together. We were traveling 80 percent of the time.”

Writing “The Kennedy Detail” helped Blaine, Hill and the other agents McCubbin interviewed finally to speak about Kennedy’s assassination and find a bit of an emotional release, McCubbin said.
“It turned out to be a real healing process for these men writing this book,” she said.

Read more: http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20110419/news/704199973/#ixzz1LGzhetmH

View from Minneapolis: A Review of "The Kennedy Detail"

View from Minneapolis: A Review of "The Kennedy Detail"

Thank you to Tom, a newspaper executive at the Star Tribune and former Secret Service Agent for his personal feelings and review of THE KENNEDY DETAIL.