Should the White House be Painted Black?
Should the White House be Painted Black?
At thirty-one, Mike Reilly found himself in charge of the safety of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the leader of a nation at war. Following is an excerpt from Night of the Assassins by Howard Blum that describes how he took on this monumental task.
The weight of his new responsibilities landed on his broad shoulders with a sudden, nearly crushing force. “It was something to give a man,” he’d admit without embarrassment, “cold shivers in the daytime and nightmares in bed. It did both.”
The Boss was no longer just “a high priority target” for the mentally unsound. At any moment the president could be, Mike imagined with a fresh shudder of dread, in the sights of “a regiment of Axis assassins.” Mike understood it would be his job “to outwit them.” And he knew they were a real threat.
Should the White House be painted black?
But would that be sufficient? Perhaps engineers also needed to alter the course of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. Even if the mansion were camouflaged, an enemy pilot could still follow these waterways; the building was, any map made clear, a measured mile from their confluence. It would be an easy bit of navigation.
Maybe, then, the only secure alternative was to relocate the president’s residence, find a home and office for him further inland, away from the dangerous geography of the East Coast.
Such was the heightened anxiety in the uncertain days after America went to war that these precautions against aerial bombing attacks, as well as other similarly impulsive suggestions, were discussed with an earnestness that, only in retrospect, seems fantastic.
Yet at the time the challenges were unprecedented. FDR was the first president who had to be protected against enemy nations who had aircraft that could fly across oceans to drop payloads of bombs or platoons of paratroopers from the sky above Washington.
There were remote-controlled devices that, in the hands of spies or fifth columnists, could be detonated from a distance to blow up bridges, railroads, even buildings. And, if all the jittery rumors buzzing through the city were to be believed, the Nazis had high-powered rockets that could be shot off from faraway locations and strike with lethal accuracy.
Secret Service head Mike Reilly's over-active imagination was grinding out one horror after another and yet he knew, however preposterous they might seem, he could not afford to be contemptuous of any of them: too much was at stake.
Guided as much by his fears as any firm military expertise, he threw himself into the multi-faceted task of making sure the White House was put on a wartime footing.
His worrying and imagining of worst-case scenarios kept him prepared. When world leaders Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, conducted a secret meeting in Tehran in 1939, they discovered Hitler's plot to send in paratroopers and wipe out the Allied leaders in one fell swoop. Reilly's quick thinking saved their lives, and possibly ensured the future of the free world.
Night of the Assassins is a suspenseful true-life tale about an impossible mission, a ticking clock, and one man who stepped up to the challenge and prevented a world catastrophe.
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