The President's Asylum: The Secret Service's Preven the De ten tion
Ingram, Timothy H.
The President’s Asylum: The Secret Service’s Preven the De ten tion by Timothy H. lngram The old man had been in the maximum security ward of the mental hospital because he had written...
...The agency has enormous discretion over whether to send to a mental institution or file criminal charges against any individual who threatens the life of the President, writes hate mail, utters an intemperate threat at a party, or asks crazy or persistent questions at the White House gates...
...He walked into the White House mail room and asked for his mail...
...Elizabeth’s in Washington, D. C. 4: is more than just another example of the ease with which someone can be lost in an asylum...
...A recurring comment from defense attorneys is that a busybody will report the threatening remark and Secret Service agents will hustle off the offender without really substantiating the context in which the crack was made...
...Like the agents who don’t want to be the ones to let the Lee Harvey Oswalds out of their grasp, the psychiatrists also have an understandable tendency to over-predict dangerousness...
...The statutory standard for involuntary commitment in the District of Columbia-and in many other states-is dangerousness, but that standard must be stretched pretty far to include some of the people the agency brings in...
...One doctor at St...
...Agent John Rodeschin of the New York office talked with Ballay, and according to Ballay, enticed him to return to Washington, where “Tricia wants to see you...
...The detectives refused to listen, and she threw a paper punch out the window...
...Its guidelines for files on potentially dangerous suspects include scraps of information on those making threatening, irrational, or abusive statements” about government officials, on professional gate-crashers, people who demand to see the head of an agency to redress “imaginary grievances,” rumors of threats to harm or even “embarrass” top federal officials, and the names of persons who take part in demonstrations...
...It can always be claimed that wider violence is being averted, thus proving the worth of present practice, even if assassinations still occur...
...This is where the agency is on shakiest ground-where there has been no hint of violence, and no verbal ~ to be dangerous merely because he shows up at the White House with some crazy idea or persistent desire to see the President...
...One purpose of the law is to avoid any harassment and disruption of presidential activities that frequent crank calls might cause...
...Some of those committed to hospitals by the Secret Service have actually threatened Presidents (three patients in the brick-and-barred criminal section at St...
...Louis, the computer will spew out a report of suspicious persons in the area...
...It’s usually just used to hassle...
...South Florida State Hospital, for instance, will place a “hold” or detainer, on any patient brought in by the Secret Service, and will check with the agency before releasing him...
...Former baseball ~ player Jackie Robinson recently ambled by the White House and requested to see the President about the black capitalism program, and his name was included alongside the 200,000 other “suspicious people...
...They’re crazy as hell, but harmless as flies...
...A person will go to a White House gate and tell the guard he wants to see the President...
...The fact that he had threatened the President was like a mark on the forehead...
...The psychiatrists who must decide whether or not to actually commit a White House case (after a period of observation that may last from 48 hours to three weeks, while the “patient” sits alone, and is kept in a drugged state) tend to look differently on a person admitted through the Secret Service than one who is picked up by somebody else-even if there has never been an intimation of any threat to the President...
...A doctor diagnosed it as a case of bad judgment...
...or “Has the control device in ’your head ever ordered you to hurt anyone...
...While the Secret Service frequently uses the courts, prisons, temporary lock-ups, and surveillance of suspects, it seems to prefer working through the mental hospitals...
...I regretted, but found it necessary, to contact several released White House cases to check whether, as I had been informed, agents continued to call them...
...It’s clear the only reason a lot of these people are brought here is because they made nuisances of themselves...
...If those objections are ignored, then the Service can follow the persistent action taken by one of its agents in a recent case...
...The case of John Ballay is fairly typical...
...It brings to attention the prevalent Secret Service practice of using mental institutions as holding tanks for security risks it wants off the streets-and other preventive procedures the agency follows in its desperate attempt to stop political assassinations...
...I attack, but where a person is thought I Show Up at 1600 1 One of the fastest ways to get into the mental hospital, in fact, is to show up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue without an appointment and continue to insist on talking to the President...
...It is easier to keep track of such people in hospitals...
...Psychiatrist John Chatel, head of the East Side Division of St...
...Ballay was released in March and returned to New York, only to reappear at the White House on June 7, a few days before Tricia’s wedding to Edward Cox...
...Most of the incidents are extremely difficult to verify...
...Normally, the person wants to give the President advice or to protest an unfair military discharge or failure to receive a pension...
...No matter how small the risk, if an agent could get that risk removed administratively, and easily, for any short period, he would take it...
...The following day, Watts was arrested by the Secret Service for threatening the life of the President...
...But it’s effective...
...A press spokesman for the Secret Service would not officially reply, other than inviting the writer to “use your imagination,” but did guardedly comment: “Sometimes agents will use expediency-but only if there’s no alternative, and only for the short time the President is in town...
...He was there for several days before doctors released him...
...Sheet, then I’ll just shoot him with my high-powered bow and A customer overheard the conversation, and the Secret Service arrested the man for threatening the President...
...But however nervous a full-blown paranoic may ~ make us, there is no empirical evidence indicating that he is more likely to commit a crime than any normal person...
...The great pitfall of any system of preventive detention is that it always appears effective, even when functioning dismally...
...As one staff psychiatrist at St...
...minds of guards and hospital psychiatrists...
...All of this is done without warrants or legal authority...
...A former assistant secretary of the Treasury, responsible for overseeing the Secret Service, acknowledged the practice of anticipatory lock-ups, saying that the civil liberties involved were outweighed by the imperatives of the moment...
...But where the law is invoked to guard against actual attacks on the President, it would seem that thc courts should require the prosecution to show that the defendant had intended to carry through on the threat...
...Under that wide interpretation, the government does not need to prove...
...A second agent, eavesdropping in an adjoining room, will be phoning to see if the person is on file at Secret Service, has an arrest record, or a history of mental disorder...
...Elizabeth’s likes to repeat what one of his patients told him: “The quickest way to see you is to go to the White House...
...What can be determined is that since the characteristics of violent people or potential President-killers are still largely a mystery, the Secret Service tends to concentrate its energies on dealing with people who publicly come to its attention-the 1 et t er- wri t er s , gate-crashers, and soap-boxers...
...Another woman claimed the President was a “wargoat,” and that she had come to attend a war crimes trial presided over by Spiro Agnew...
...The Court simply concluded that Watts’ statement was not a “true threat,” but just political hyperbole...
...Rodeschin would neither confirm nor deny whether he had issued the invitation from Tricia, but he did indicate that he had spoken to Ballay since his release, saying, “I think we’ve been in contact with him so much that he’s beginning to realize he’s not married to her...
...After that, there is no rebuttal...
...These were peremptory lock-ups made in advance of the President’s visit, which couldn’t be justified on any legal basis...
...Individual injunctions barring the Secret Service from continually hauling in and pestering the John Ballays of the country might be possible, though improbable...
...But there has been almost no outside scrutiny of the way the agency does its job-and the Secret Service shields itself by classifying everything and refusing to discuss its protective mission, its application of manpower, or its assassin profile...
...Joseph Henneberry tells this story about a man committed at Kentucky State Hospital, one of several asylums where Henneberry served as an assis tan t administrator before coming to St...
...Some mentally ill people are dangerous, others are not...
...Regardless of its chances to win convictions under the statute, the Secret Service often uses it as a warning to potential troublemakers...
...Many of the cases investigated by the Secret Service involve direct threats to the President from people who call up or write in to say that they have the gun and are ready to use it...
...Nobody denies the need for the agency, and the extra caution required for the horrendous, if not impossible, task of protecting the President...
...The criminal statute is broad enough to interpret even a written or spoken desire to “kill the President” as enough to warrant prosecution...
...Police also bring the mentally ill to hospitals, but the presence of the Secret Service has special impact...
...Eugene Stammeyer, a research psychologist who has made a study of White House cases, says, “The operating assumption is that if the Secret Service brings them in, they’re sick...
...Some of them will be put under surveillance, or perhaps be taken into custody until the President leaves...
...Elizabeth’s is part of the federal government...
...Elizabeth’s...
...Why does he owe you this money...
...I am not going...
...If not, he will be taken to the hospital...
...He will not be warned that what he says may be used against him in a subsequent commitment proceeding...
...Ballay again appeared at the White House, and was quickly hustled off for his third trip to St...
...two were specially treated as youth offenders...
...Elizabeth’s...
...An assistant U. S. attorney with 12 years’ experience says, “If we consider the man dangerous, we’ll sometimes strongly object to his being released...
...Around the time of President Nixon’s 1969 inaugural, two men sat talking in a hamburger stand, and as Kirby Howlett of the D. C. Public Defenders Service recounts it, one said: “Hey, man, why ain’t you working...
...Indignant about the war, the veteran told White House guards that if Agnew would step outside a minute, the two of them could settle matters...
...Again, he was sent to St...
...While the ink was drying on the signature, he was taken to St...
...David Acheson, former U. S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, head of Treasury’s law enforcement agencies until 1967, and now general counsel for COMSAT, was asked about the preventive lock-ups used by the Secret Service, and acknowledged that he had been troubled about the practice, but found “there was no ready solution” to get the same results “by the book...
...Likely the danger the guy represented was borderline or minimal, but was an illustration of the extreme sensitivity felt about the President’s safety...
...About the time Kennedy was in office, we started a reading program for the patients, and someone noticed the old man didn’t write, It turned out, after we did some checking, that someone drinking in a pub had signed the man’s name to this hate letter sent years before...
...and 20 of the cases are pending...
...Elizabeths, there are 21 people designated as “White House cases,” and 150 such cases may be brought in for observation or commitment during the course of a year...
...Some doctors at St...
...But one wonders at the lengths the agency will go to to snatch some unwary loudmouth...
...Of course, it takes two signatures to admit someone as an emergency patient-the arresting authority and the admitting psychiatrist...
...Elizabeth’s says, “They’re illegally committed...
...Who knows what they’ll do...
...Presenting himself as Tricia’s husband, Ballay told the guard he wanted Tricia to tell him that they were no longer married, and that he wouldn’t interfere with the upcoming marriage...
...The doctor could refuse, but I know of no case where one ever has...
...Elizabeth’s, a Vietnam veteran was recently carted off to the hospital for threatening the Vice President’s nose...
...They have a tendency to protect themselves from community outrage in those well-publicized cases where the headline reads: “Ex-mental Patient Runs Wild,” by overreacting and recommending commitment...
...Those of “protective interest” might be brought in by an agent and kept in a hotel room or in the Secret Service area office...
...Reportedly, if the person does not persist in his demands, appears to be sane, and has money or a bus ticket home, he will be allowed to leave...
...Calling on Tricia Beyond whatever benevolent interest the agency might have in getting disturbed people into treatment, the Secret Service tends to look on mental hospitals as easy, short-term repositories for people whom they consider to be suspicious or meddlesome...
...Elizabeth’s are under the impression that agency approval is necessary before discharging a White House case, and there are instances where civil patients are transferred to maximum security wards because of the White House label...
...Ballay, an Albanian refugee, began to believe he was a United States Senator and was married to Tricia Nixon...
...The Secret Service is principally interested in security and, like most of the rest of us, agents tend to believe mental illness and dangerousness are one and the same thing...
...No warrant is secured...
...The Secret Service is not only a powerful factor in influencing psychiatrists and mental hospitals to admit White House cases, but the agency often continues to harass people after they are released, and even uses deception to get them readmitted...
...But, of course, the Secret Service can’t do that, and wouldn’t begin to know about how to, and therefore it must attend to its assured clientele-the characters who approach it...
...As the agent tells it: “This woman was big, black, and had two children...
...Most of those arrested are now undergoing psychiatric observation to determine their competency to stand trial...
...In two cases, individuals refused to talk to me in the understandable anxiety that anything they might say could only call attention to themselves, and the perhaps correct paranoia that recommitment was always a possibility...
...It is in these situations that the greatest potential for abuse exists, because of the temerity of psychiatrists to question the judgment of the agency that protects the President...
...A woman wanted the President to stop the “gum chewing” in her head...
...Earlier this year, one young member of the Quaker Action Group’s antiwar Peace Vigil, which pickets along the sidewalk in front of the Executive Mansion, had requested friends to write him in care of the White House...
...The categorization of a patient as a White House case is not as intimidating to doctors today as it once was during the 1930s and 40s, but the subtle pressure is still there...
...A former U. S. attorney summed up the problem: “We always thought those pool hall and bar cases were semi-serious, with an accent on ‘semi’-but wouldn’t you look like a damn fool if he did kill the President, and we had dismissed the case...
...In a small bull session after the rally, according to an Army intelligence corps investigator who was there at the time, Watts said: “I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming...
...Acheson seemed to indicate that several suits may have been brought against the Secret Service, but “none that posed any great concern...
...In the District of Columbia, as in many states, anyone can be held for up to 48 hours for observation on the word of an agent and an admitting psychiatrist-and where the Secret Service is involved, psychiatrists usually go along without question...
...Ballay appealed the commitment, and Karen Moore, his attorney, says she spoke with Agent Rodeschin, and that he admitted having urged Ballay to return to Washington to visit Tricia...
...There are recurring reports that the Secret Service uses various preventivedetention methods when the President is scheduled to visit an area...
...The would-be bruiser was invited into the Secret Service’s White House office, told the Vice President would be happy to see him, and would he please repeat the challenge in writing...
...For example, if President Nixon plans to go to St...
...I don’t know what ever became of him...
...According to Howard Stahl, formerly a legal assistant to public defender attorneys at St...
...But the assumption is that if he is psychotic, he must be I This is understandable from the Secret Service point of view, but the dilemma is compounded when the admitting psychiatrist gives so much weight to the Secret Service label...
...So far, five indictments have been returned...
...The treadmill is quite simple to start into motion...
...Free my brain,” implored one man...
...You might say the Secret Service has carte blanche powers of placing people in St...
...Contact with the Secret Service becomes, in effect, a separate category of illness...
...I Often the deliberate caution of the agents is not counterbalanced by a truly independent evaluation by psychiatrists, especially since the Secret Service’s tendency is to group attention as potential assassins...
...In the civil section of St...
...Two weeks later, the hospital purchased a bus ticket for Ballay, and he was discharged and sent back to New York...
...Elizabeth’s, believes that she was the subject of an HEW experiment where people were constantly watching her and reading her mind...
...The fact that he has no appointment seems to be enough to raise a prethe...
...As is customary, the Secret Service was notified of his destination...
...Elizabeth’s...
...The hurdle is that these decisions are made in the agency, on the initiative of a single agent...
...five were dismissed by the court...
...The guys picked up don’t have the wherewithal to assassinate anyone...
...What will you do if he doesn’t give it to you...
...This is not to say that insanity and i I dangerousness are mutually exclusive...
...Assistant U. S. Attorney William Collins says, “If it’s a veiled threat, to get him off the street we might charge him, even though it wouldn’t stick, and then civilly commit him...
...In a similar case, Black Panther leader David Hilliard was arrested in 1969 on charges stemming from a speech he made at a November 15 peace rally in San Francisco, where he was quoted as saying “We will kill Nixon...
...The President’s Asylum: The Secret Service’s Preven the De ten tion by Timothy H. lngram The old man had been in the maximum security ward of the mental hospital because he had written a threatening letter to Harry Truman when Truman was President...
...Often profoundly delusional, he may be obsessed with the image of the presidency as his only remaining court of appeal...
...The civil commitment proceedings are loose enough that the Secret Service often uses hospitals as preventive-detention centers...
...I took her in, but the hospital psychiatrist didn’t think she was mentally disturbed and released her within a week or so...
...She came from Chicago to Washington on various occasions to attempt to visit lawyers, the Attorney General, the Vice President, and others, to have this stopped...
...She had made repeated threats toward one of our protectees...
...Probably died in there...
...It carries a five-year maximum sentence, and up to a $1,000 fine...
...When somebody phones the White House and directly threatens to kill the President, even though he might be joking or just wants to scare the authorities and bring attention to himself, he is and should be prosecuted...
...Seldom do they take it to trial...
...Elizabeth’s...
...His friend replied: “Oh, I’ll get a free ride with the welfare...
...The 1916 law making it a federal crime to “knowingly and willfully” threaten “to take the life of, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President,” is a unique statute, broadly interpreted, and widely abused...
...Ballay was finally released in November, 197 1, five months after his last admission to the mental ward...
...Hanging up on authorities who call to test your wits is something else...
...She had terrorized everyone on the block, once swinging a knife...
...Few people give credence to the claims of a crank, and the only other witness, the Secret Service, isn’t talking...
...If it ordered you to arrest the President, or to shoot him, would you obey...
...Assassinations have extracted a fearful toll in the last decade...
...There was no way to get the same kind of thing done through judicial hearings and proceedings, having to show cause...
...An exchange with the postal clerk ensued, and the protester was taken to St...
...Elizabeth’s...
...A majority of the courts have interpreted the statute to mean that the making of the threat-the saying of the words-is the crime...
...A Paper Tiger The White House cases may need psychiatric help, and some of them may even require commitment, but the snag is the informal web of arrangements between doctors and the Secret Service...
...The White House cop will attempt to dissuade the person and send him on his way with assurances that the President will give full and immediate attention to his urgent message...
...He was taken to St...
...It took her in again...
...Elizabeth’s, says: These cases are rarely refused admittance...
...The issue is how the Secret Service uses these powers, what kind of people it investigates and puts away, and whether the rights of those people are adequately protected...
...The Supreme Court reversed the conviction, but did not decide on the question of whether the statute as applied impinges on the right of free speech...
...The point is, diagnosing a person as psychotic, for example, says nothing about the kind of psychosis he has, whether he is dangerous or not...
...At the very least, a visit will result in your name being filed in the Secret Service computer...
...those confined have no way of showing they would not have committed the predicted act if free...
...In the words of- one former agent: “It’s illegal as hell...
...Are you going to tell the boss “NO...
...Elizabeth’s have made threats) but you don’t have to threaten anybody to end up in the mental ward courtesy of the Secret Service...
...He was transient and otherwise without a permanent address...
...Last year, a federal judge dismissed the indictment after the government refused to disclose the content of wiretaps involving Hilliard, and recently the government dropped its case against Hilliard because of the Supreme Court decision...
...The agency focuses on these people in good part because of the criteria it uses to gather intelligence data...
...or to ask his help to stop “them” from persecuting him...
...If the President should come by in a parade, or be at a rally, who knows...
...the Justice Deparment has declined to prosecute two cases...
...Timothy Ingram, formerly with public television’s “The Advocates, ” is a Washington writer...
...The agency treats every report of a threat with deadly seriousness, and probably would be negligent if it did not...
...A 25-year-old insisted he could not be killed, and therefore should be the one to negotiate with Hanoi...
...This coaxing might go: “You say you work for the President and want to collect back payment owed you as his special IRS agent...
...She was adjudged dangerous enough to commit because of an incident in Chicago two years ago, when she had gone to a police station to complain about the conspiracy against her...
...Illegal, But Effective Aside from arresting people for an actual threat, the Secret Service can also put suspicious people in temporary custody for a day or two while the President is in town...
...These people will be checked out...
...the person is just brought in for “questioning...
...Many more involve crude remarks made by drunks at barstools, political hyperbole, or outraged rhetoric from people who accuse the President of “butchery or savagery” and vow that “somebody should put him away...
...They are not going to make me kill my black brothers...
...As one special agent put it: “We talk to him not as an agent, but as a friend...
...If the agency went out and committed or arrested all the people in the country with the same characteristics as those who happen to show up at the White House gates, prisons would turn into large cities...
...The statute is just being used as a vacuum sweeper...
...Faced with irrational behavior, they don’t know what to expect next, so they play it safe and expect the worst...
...If a psychiatrist decides that a patient is sane and harmless, and can be released, and the Secret Service still has doubts, the agency can always get him readmitted to the hospital, at least for a few days...
...Hilliard was in jail for a week, then released on $30,000 bail...
...As one Justice Department attorney says: “They may be no more than nuisances...
...Courts have recently begun to change their stance on these cases, especially after a 1969 Supreme Court decision which struck down the conviction of Robert Watts, an 18-year-old, who was arrested after a rally at the Washington Monument in 1966...
...An unnoticed part of that price has been paid by some of the people from whom the President was supposedly being protected...
...Again, she was released, so I took her in once more...
...It becomes difficult, in all this, to decide why a particular patient is actually being held, especially one who has not made any violent overtures toward the President...
...But you can’t take chances on them...
...And what can you expect...
...By then the old man was too far institutionalized to be released and function on the outside, but at least he got some grounds privileges, and out of maximum...
...While care should be taken not to render the agency’s protective practices useless by making them all public, the day-to-day operations of its field men, its handling of citizens, its intelligence gathering, and its competence, badly need review...
...A Separate Illness The Secret Service spends much of its energy monitoring White House cases and letter-writers largely because there are no reliable guides to predict violence...
...Magnolia Alexander, currently a resident of St...
...Elizabeth’s, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and committed...
...There have been 34 arrests for threats to the President during the first eight months of this year...
...If the person insists, looks disheveled, or sounds bizarre, a Secret Service agent will be summoned to interview him...
...He appeared at the White House gates in January, 1971, saying that he had come to claim his “permit” as a senator from Illinois...
...If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ...
...that the person actually intended to carry out the threat or had any ability or intention to harm the President...
...With overcrowding making it nearly impossible to get psychiatric help in some states, a few people have learned to hop a bus and come to Washington when they feel a breakdown nearing...
...Theodore Christensen, a former public defender who handled a number of Pre si dent-threat cases, complains: “It’s a hassle...
...Predictions of dangerousness are self-fulfilling...
...The Secret Service, in the matters of safeguarding the President, is accountable to no one-except the President, and nominally to the Secretary of the Treasury...
...Well, with Nixon in, baby, you’ll have to get a job...
...If I sound cynical about it, I am...
Vol. 4 • October 1972 • No. 8
