When millions watched Barack Obama give his history-making victory
speech in Grant Park on election night, one thing stood out starkly –
the bulletproof screen surrounding him. But just how serious is the
threat of assassination to the President-elect?
Shawn Adolf and his cousin Tharin Gartrell fancied that 28 August,
2008 would be a good day for the next president of the United States to
die. They had the guns – Gartrell was later caught with a Ruger Model
M77 Mark II bolt-action rifle with an attached scope and bipod, and a
Remington Model 721, also with a scope. They were believers in a
radical white supremacist ideology that gave them the motivation they
needed to risk their own lives, if necessary, to prevent a black man
from entering the Oval Office. (Or, as a friend reported Adolf as
saying: "No nigger should ever live in the White House.")
And they had at least the outlines of a plan. They checked into the downtown
Denver hotel where they believed Barack Obama was staying, and talked about
the ways they could try to gun down the Democratic nominee on the day he was
due to accept his party's nomination at an outdoor sports arena before an
adoring crowd of more than 70,000 people.
Like many assassins before them, both the successful ones and the idle
fantasists, Adolf and Gartrell took their inspiration from popular culture.
They considered hiding a rifle inside a hollowed out television camera – an
idea they borrowed from the Kevin Costner-Whitney Houston vehicle The
Bodyguard. (It is also similar to the way al-Qa'eda operatives posing as a
news crew assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan's
Northern Alliance, on 9 September, 2001, but it is far from clear whether
Adolf and Gartrell had any notion of this.)
They toyed with the idea of hitting Obama from as far away as 750 yards, using
one of their high-powered rifles; according to their friend Nathan Johnson,
who may or may not have been part of the plot, they had in mind the
conspiracy theory that President Kennedy was not shot by Lee Harvey Oswald
from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, but
rather by professional assassins stationed on the "grassy knoll"
above Dallas's Dealey Plaza.
None of these plans was ever remotely realistic, however. Adolf and Gartrell
may have had some fearsome weaponry, and a vague affiliation with a white
supremacist biker gang called the Sons of Silence, which disavowed them the
moment they were arrested. But they were also rank amateurs living in a
crystal methamphetamine-induced haze of paranoia and race hatred. (One can't
help thinking Adolf's name went to his head, at least a little, as he
fingered the swastika ring on his finger.) They had no clue how to
circumvent the security surrounding Obama – prosecutors who examined their
plans laughed them off as ludicrously naïve. And they couldn't even figure
out what every half-interested member of the press corps knew, that Obama
was not staying at the Hyatt Regency, the temporary HQ of the Democratic
National Committee, but at a different hotel altogether.
Four days before Obama's acceptance speech, Gartrell was pulled over for
drunk-driving in the Denver suburb ' of Aurora after a patrol officer
spotted his rented Dodge Ram truck swerving erratically, and the whole plot,
such as it was, fell apart almost instantly. Certainly, the officer found
plenty inside the truck to sound alarm bells – the two high-powered rifles,
a silencer, a bulletproof vest, camouflage clothing, and three fake
identification cards. But it was also clear that Gartrell was high on meth
as well as drunk. The truck contained enough drug-making equipment to be
considered a mobile meth lab.
Gartrell ratted out Johnson and Adolf almost as soon as he was taken in and
photographed for his singularly striking mugshot. (With his bleached blonde
hair, heavy silver earrings and pierced lip, he looks like the neo-Nazi from
central casting.) Johnson was in the room at the Hyatt Regency, and wasted
no time in talking himself – insisting he had no idea about any
assassination plot while almost simultaneously telling the world Adolf was
planning to "go down in a blaze of glory" and take Obama with him.
Adolf was a tougher proposition, the only one of the three with a serious
criminal record, including burglary, forgery, drugs and weapons raps. At the
time of his arrest he was wanted on eight outstanding charges and had
recently skipped out on a $1 million bail payment. He was staying at a
different hotel in the Denver suburbs. When the police arrived, he jumped
out of his sixth-floor room on to the roof of the hotel kitchen four floors
below, then jumped again to the ground, breaking his ankle as he landed. He
didn't make it far. He, too, was found to be high on meth. When asked why he
was wearing a bulletproof vest, he said he was convinced someone wanted to
kill him.
We will no doubt learn more colourful details about the trio of would-be
assassins when their trial begins this week. Intriguingly, though, they are
being prosecuted on drugs and weapons charges only. Their prosecutor, Troy
Eid, has said he is absolutely confident the "meth heads", as he
calls them, never posed a risk to Obama or anyone else.
Not everyone is happy with this decision. After all, marginal people have
hatched assassination plots before, and sometimes succeeded – one thinks of
John Hinckley hitting President Reagan in 1981. And Barack Obama was never
just another presidential contender; as the first African American to come
even close to the highest political office on the planet, in a country whose
history is spattered with the blood of racial animus, he is, by common
consent, a target several orders of magnitude more tempting than the average
for an extremist fringe of kooks, crazies, anti-government militia types, Ku
Klux Klan members and other white race warriors, all of whom tend to be
unforgiving in their ideological fervour, not to mention armed to the teeth.
He was granted 24-hour Secret Service protection just a few months into his
campaign, in May 2007, after his friend and fellow Illinois senator, Dick
Durbin, raised the alarm on his behalf. (Usually candidates receive that
protection far later in the election cycle, after they have their party
primaries sewn up.) We don't know exactly how hard the Secret Service has
had to work on his behalf, although we do know that two men from the old
confederate South – one from North Carolina, the other from Florida – were
arrested and charged with making threatening statements against him in July.
We know that effigies of Obama being lynched, or sliced through the head
with a hatchet, have popped up periodically around the country – one on the
campus of the University of Kentucky, another in Orange County, California
in the run-up to Halloween.
We also know that Obama's supporters have been almost maniacal in their desire
to prevent him sharing the tragic fate of the Kennedys and Martin Luther
King. On a couple of occasions during primary season, when security ' guards
at Obama campaign events stopped searching people's bags because of the
backlog of people trying to get in, sympathetic reporters, bloggers and
ordinary members of the public complained as loudly as they knew how.
Likewise, when someone at a Sarah Palin rally in Clearwater, Florida in
early October reacted to a mention of Obama's name by shouting "kill
him!", there was such a clamour on the internet that the Secret Service
made a rare public announcement saying it was launching an official
investigation.
How much of a risk of assassination does Obama face? The most immediate,
comfortable answer to that is: not much. The Secret Service has vastly
improved its procedures and protocols since the spate of political
assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s. No president would now be
allowed to drive at a snail's pace in an open-top car through the centre of
a major city, as John Kennedy did in Dallas on 22 November, 1963. The sheer
numbers of Secret Service members assigned to presidential protection has
increased dramatically since the attempt on Reagan's life – we don't have
exact figures on how much, but we do know that when one unhinged man toyed
with the idea of tossing a grenade at President Bush in Atlanta in 2005, he
never got remotely close enough to give it a real try.
The more worrying answer is that Obama will almost certainly inspire a large
number of assassination plots because of the colour of his skin, and that it
only takes one of them to be blessed with luck, proper organisation and a
little official incompetence to pose a serious threat. When asked how much
of a risk he faces, he has acknowledged that the color of his skin will be a
problem for some people. And he knows that Colin Powell, the only other
African American of significant stature in recent times to consider a run at
the White House, decided not to pursue the presidency in part because his
wife, Alma, feared for his safety.
"There's not any question he's under more threat than most politicians,"
said Mark Potok, one of America's leading researchers into hate groups who
edits a monthly Intelligence Report for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty
Law Center. "I think we are seeing a kind of perfect storm of
conditions that might well help white supremacist movements grow, and grow
rapidly.
"We have changing demographics, and the Census Bureau projection that
whites will lose their majority status in America by 2040. We have the
tanking economy, and now... a black man in the White House. This makes some
Americans feel they are losing their world – the sense that the country
their forefathers built is slipping away from them."
The number of racist hate groups tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Centre
has grown by almost 50 per cent during the Bush administration years, from
about 600 in 2000 to almost 900 now. In contrast to the 1990s, when the "angry
white man" phenomenon fuelled the militia movement and led to the
white-supremacist inspired Oklahoma City bombing, much of this new growth
has been triggered by virulent hostility to immigrants pouring in from
Mexico.
It is entirely possible, though, that the emphasis will change now that Obama
is about to enter the White House. Certainly, the neo-Nazi movement senses
an opportunity: to judge by the endless chatter on far-right websites, they
see a President Obama as the best recruiting tool they've had in years. "Obama
will be a signal, a clear signal for millions of our people," the
former Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader and erstwhile candidate for governor,
David Duke, wrote earlier this year in an essay he called A Black Flag for
White America. "Obama is like that new big dark spot on your arm that
finally sends you to the doctor for some real medicine. ... Obama is the
pain that let's [sic] your body know that something is dreadfully wrong...
Millions of European Americans will inevitably react with new awareness of
their heritage and the need for them to defend and advance it."
That logic suggests the far right is not, in fact, itching to pull the trigger
on Obama. Except that we are hardly dealing with rational people. The
neo-Nazi magazine National Socialist wrote a cover story in September
purporting to debunk the "myth" that Obama might be assassinated.
But the cover also showed a photograph of the candidate in the crosshairs of
a rifle (altered to look like a swastika) under the headline: "Kill
this NIGGER?" And the piece went on to suggest that Obama, backed by
Communists and Jews, planned to commit genocide against working white people.
Likewise, the "imperial wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, an Indiana
railway worker who calls himself Ray Larsen, denied any intent to attack
Obama when interviewed on television a few months ago. But he added: "If
that man is elected president, he'll be shot sure as hell."
If that doesn't have the Secret Service worried, it should. Some security
experts have already started drafting memos with ideas on how to keep Obama
better protected using state-of-the-art technology – for example, hand-held
TeraHertz scanners that would-be assassins could not spot. Martin Dudziak, a
Virginia-based security specialist who has worked on counter-terrorism
issues, pointed out glumly that it is unusually difficult to profile
would-be attackers. As he put it in a memo drafted in October: "There
are frankly and very unfortunately, a lot of people in the USA who have
deep-rooted 'phobic' hatred of an African American... being president. We
should not try to deny this sombre reality."
If the inept Denver plot was not warning enough, news of another planned
anti-Obama assault broke at the end of last month with the arrest of two
White Power advocates in Tennessee. Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman
didn't appear to be any more competent than Adolf and Gartrell. They had
grand schemes to kill more than 100 African Americans, and fantasised about
killing Obama dressed in white dinner jackets and top hats, but they
couldn't so much as rob a house – they gave up on their intended target
after spotting a guard dog out back and got picked up after shooting out the
windows in a church.
Still, they had some serious weapons: a sawn-off shotgun, high-powered rifles
and a couple of handguns. And Cowart appears to have been a founding member
of a hate group called the Supreme White Alliance. While their dreams of
killing Obama might have been fanciful, some of their other plans might not. "They
might well have shot up a black high school, or hurt a group of black
children," Potok said.
And it is entirely conceivable that other, more competent criminals will
follow them. Obama may not have appeared remotely daunted when he delivered
his victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park on election night, but it is
worth remembering that he was also speaking behind a bulletproof glass
shield. Such precautions, one suspects, will be the rule rather than the
exception over the next four or eight years.
"There is a boiling rage just beneath the surface," Potok added. "We're
talking about a minority, clearly, of whites. It's hard to say how large
that group of people is. But I think this represents the beginning of a real
white backlash in a certain quarter of the population."
