He Is Other
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
This belated impulse to write about the Stranger, so many years after his advent, was not inspired by the vain hope of adding anything new to the millions of words already written. Rather, it came about after a lecture to my students — I teach history at a small private college in North Carolina — on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Stranger’s appearance and realizing with as much shock as dismay that most of them had barely heard of him, or had any ideas about the historical implications of his arrival beyond the most cursory received notions in the public domain. This, I hope, explains why I’ve included so much basic information about the story and its aftermath, which will be more useful to readers of the generation born after the event than those of us who lived through it.
The date was June twenty-eighth in the year we all know. The President’s informal press conference, it will be remembered, had just ended and the President himself, casually dressed for a weekend at Camp David, was walking across the White House lawn toward the Presidential helicopter, accompanied by the First Lady and a squad of Secret Service agents.
He was waving to reporters and smiling as he had on so many other occasions, when he turned and found himself facing a man not part of his entourage who had seemingly materialized on the spot. He was a “strikingly ordinary man,” as one witness put it, shorter than the President by several inches, about thirty-five years old, with thinning brown hair and a round, clean-shaven face expressing such guileless enthusiasm at being close to the leader of the free world that the President, with the coolness under pressure that always characterized him, simply put out his hand and said, “Hello.”
Even as the Secret Service agents were rushing the man, who had somehow penetrated their vigilant circle of protection, he replied in a polite, well-modulated voice that people as far as a mile away swear they heard with perfect distinctness, as if he had been standing next to them: “Hello, you. Nice to go here. This here, or there?”
These are the only words he has ever been heard to speak. He put out his hand as if to shake the President’s outstretched hand, but his arm suddenly went up, and before the agents could stop him he had the President in a wrestling-style headlock. The First Lady screamed, and then the stranger and the President were buried under a flailing avalanche of Secret Service agents. Sunglasses flew off in the melee, guns left their holsters, coded instructions were shouted, TV cameras jerked in the grips of excited cameramen, and for twenty seconds blind panic was live on national television.
It soon became apparent that the Secret Service agents — there were at least five involved — were trying to dislodge the man’s grip but having inexplicable difficulty in doing so. For a man of medium height and build, he was amazingly strong, as evidenced by three burly agents’ being quite unable to loosen his hold on the President’s neck. Another agent had an arm around the man’s neck and was squeezing for all he was worth, and the fifth, perhaps to cover his embarrassment at being left out of the struggle, was searching him for weapons. “He’s clean!” he shouted in his partner’s ear.
The President, meanwhile, was bearing up bravely through this strange attack on his person. His hair was mussed, and he had been roughly jostled during the struggle, but the man’s grip on his neck was not a stranglehold, just a headlock, and he was essentially unharmed. He, too, was pulling at the arm around his neck, without success.
A struggle that should have been over in a few seconds had stretched into a minute, and the agents sworn to guard the President’s life now turned to more drastic methods. The agent whose hands were free began punching the man in the stomach, again and again, but although any one of the punches should have disabled him, his wistful smile never wavered.
The agent trying to wring the man’s neck had worn himself out in that exercise and was now hitting him on the head with the butt of his service revolver, shouting “Let go!” after each sickening crack. Finally he stopped and stared dumbfounded at the damaged butt of his gun.
Up until then, the Secret Service, the reporters, the First Lady — who had long since been hustled to safety — all believed, even in the panic and confusion of the moment, that they understood what had happened. A deranged man had somehow penetrated White House Security and tried to assassinate, or at least assault, the President.
It had happened before. The players in the drama, including the President himself, were already conditioned by past events to expect this sort of thing, and while they and the television viewers were shocked, dismayed, angry, they were also in a certain sense prepared for it. But instead of the familiar scenario — man hustled off in a car by an aroused hornet’s nest of agents, President taken to Walter Reed Hospital for examination, reporters telling and retelling the story to an anxious nation — the President of the United States was still in a headlock like the hapless victim of some neighborhood bully, forced to suffer this indignity until his tormentor gets bored and releases him.
The reporters and cameramen had been kept back by White House Security, and their view was obstructed by the mass of men surrounding the President and his assailant, but most thought, and said as much on camera, that the man had a gun or a knife to the President’s head and the Secret Service was negotiating with him.
So when the first gunshot was heard, followed by four more in rapid succession, many feared the worst. But shock followed shock as the man emerged from the densely-packed wall of suited men with the ease of one stepping through a beaded curtain, still holding the President in a headlock and dragging him along with him.
It was now clear that the man had no weapon and had not shot the President. Apparently no one had been shot. The man was now ambling over the lawn “like a tourist,” veteran journalist and eyewitness Sandy Barr said later. Oblivious to the crowd and cameras following his every move, and the small army of Secret Service with pistols pointed at him, he would walk a few paces, stop, stare at a tree or a shrub with the rapt expression of a child, then move on, the President in tow.
It is safe to say that the Secret Service, in their long and distinguished history, had never been in a more embarrassing position. In front of the entire world, a lunatic had abducted the President. Their reputation and credibility depended on what they did about it. After a hurried conference, during which the man stood gazing in apparent awe at the clouds passing swiftly across the sky while the President repeatedly punched him in the kidneys, an agent armed with a high-powered rifle strode purposefully toward them.
Millions watched the gun being leveled at point-blank range at the back of the man’s head, heard the crack and saw the heavy recoil and then the President flinch. Journalists, so fond of dramatic simplifications, like to refer to the moment just after the rifle was fired as the moment the world changed forever.
What actually happened was: nothing. The man’s head did not explode. He did not crumple to the ground or release his hold on the President. He didn’t even seem to hear the gun’s roar. He continued to stare at the sky.
When the evidence of the senses leads the mind to an impossible conclusion, the first reaction is to seek an even more fantastic “plausible” explanation. To believe that a trained marksman could have missed a target a foot away, or that the gun used in the defense of the President’s life would be loaded with blanks is to indulge in the wildest fantasy. But millions of people doubtless thought that it had to be one or the other.
The alternative — that a high-powered rifle had had no effect on a man, ergo, he was not a man — was unthinkable at this early stage of the affair. But while acceptance of the situation came more slowly for some than for others, it came to everyone eventually.
Sandy Barr, in his somewhat sensational but highly informative book, Before and After the Stranger, writes of the “suffocating silence” that followed the rifle shot. “The realization of what had just happened literally knocked the wind out of me,” he recalls. “For the space of thirty seconds no one moved or said a word.” The marksman still stood behind the man with his rifle pointed, and only the quivering barrel betrayed his nervous state.
It was the President himself who broke the spell. In a high, cracked voice so unlike his familiar modulated tenor, he yelled, “A little help, please!” The Secret Servicemen, momentarily frozen like everyone else by a situation that their rigorous training had not prepared them for, were galvanized by the awful sound of panic in the voice of their Commander-in-Chief, and rushed to his aid.
The man, or whatever he was, had for some minutes been standing completely still, staring straight into the afternoon sun. It was as if, in contemplating his surroundings, he had forgotten about the head securely locked under his arm. Perhaps his abduction of the President had been the merest whim, and he might just as capriciously release him.
In any case, he seemed heavier than his size suggested, since the combined efforts of a dozen large men were insufficient to move him one inch from his position. Someone fetched a crowbar and tried to loosen his grip while three agents holding the President by the waist and legs pulled as hard as they dared: to no avail. The man’s skin, to all appearances quite human — warm, supple, covered with fine hair — had the remarkable property of dulling the sharpest knife. A power saw was applied to his wrist for a full five minutes. When it was turned off, they discovered that the teeth were entirely worn away, while the skin of the wrist was not even red.
A blowtorch was equally ineffective; the hottest flame could not even singe his hair. Through it all the man did not move or blink an eye. Deciding to take advantage of his open-mouthed expression, doctors poured massive doses of chloral hydrate down his throat. When that seemed to have no effect, they tried strychnine, cyanide and sulfuric acid. But there were apparently no physical laws that applied to him, since he did not appear in the least discomfited by any of these deadly compounds.
Meanwhile, a storm of reporters, military men and government officials of every stripe were gathering on or near the White House lawn. As the sun dipped behind the trees and shadows lengthened, more and more newsmen could be seen holding microphones and speaking in front of TV cameras, and many veteran journalists, Sandy Barr among them, sensed that the story of the century was unfolding.
In spite of the hasty press conference called by the White House spokesman, in which he asserted with a stridency approaching desperation that nothing more or less than an abduction of the President had taken place by an unidentified man, speculation was freely flying by sundown that an “extraterrestrial” had committed the outrage.
No reporter had been allowed beyond the fence, and the area around the President and his abductor had become an armed camp. High-intensity lights were strung up all over the lawn, and helicopters landed and took off with increasing frequency, as experts and scientists of every discipline were flown in to offer their suggestions.
At around eight p.m., Mimi Trueblood, one of the President’s favorite reporters, was allowed through the cordon of police and military personnel to conduct a brief interview with the President. He was sitting on a stool beside his abductor, his body twisted to one side, and although clearly in an uncomfortable position, assured Ms. Trueblood that he was “A-okay,” and patiently awaiting “a resolution to this misunderstanding.”
He told her he’d managed to eat and drink a little, that he was leaving speculation about the nature of his assailant “to the experts,” and praised the Secret Service in the highest terms. “No security force in the world could have handled a crisis of this unprecedented kind with more energy and resourcefulness, and please quote me exactly, Mimi.”
When Ms. Trueblood asked whether the Stranger — and this was the first time the term “Stranger” was used to describe him — might have misinterpreted the President’s extended hand as an attack, he agreed and jokingly added: “Maybe he thought I wanted to wrestle him.” The President ended the interview with the statement, addressed as much to the Stranger as Ms. Trueblood, that he had the highest hopes of a meaningful dialogue being established “between this gentleman and the United States Government.”
To the credit of those trying to free the President, they did not let the strangeness of the situation deter them from attacking the problem with a variety of practical stratagems. After every attempt to kill or disable the Stranger had failed, they turned to the engineering problem of moving the arm just enough to free the President’s head. At first two tow trucks were brought in. Cables were attached to each wrist and the winches turned on. The front wheels of one truck rose off the ground as its driver watched in amazement, and then the other winch stripped its gears with a terrible grinding screech.
As for the Stranger, a mountain could not have stood more immovably while those thousands of pounds of opposing force were applied. Fearing with good reason that the cables might snap and kill someone nearby or even the President himself, the leaders of the hastily-assembled “rescue committee” ordered the experiment terminated.
A small but extremely powerful hydraulic jack was then placed between the Stranger’s wrist and his stomach. This, too, failed, as well as the sledgehammer wielded by a strong man that bounced harmlessly off, respectively, the toes, knees, elbows and head of the Stranger. They sealed his head with a plastic bag packed with dry ice, tried diamond drills, lasers, and knives sharp enough to cut tissues in midair.
It wasn’t so much the patent ineffectiveness of every human agency that caused morale, by midnight, to drop to its lowest ebb; it was the incredible fact that the Stranger seemed not just indifferent, but entirely unaware of these efforts. By two a.m. the rescue committee had reluctantly admitted defeat.
Kept abreast of events from the safety of the White House, the First Lady, at her own insistence, came out to make a personal appeal to the Stranger to release her husband. Who can forget the poignance of that unrehearsed moment in television history? Brusquely refusing to keep a safe distance, she strode forward and grasped her husband’s hand, and looking straight into the Stranger’s unseeing eyes, tearfully begged for his release, “not just for myself and our children, but for our dear Democracy, whose Head — for reasons known only to yourself — you cruelly hold hostage. Let him go, I say, free my husband and my President so that he may go on with his life and his work, which are indivisible.”
Of the hundreds of millions of people who witnessed it on television, perhaps only the Stranger himself was unmoved by her appeal. For a long, silent interval the First Lady waited for some response, then at last, mastering her disappointment, she vowed to remain by the President’s side.
At 6:23 a.m. the Stranger began to move again. One exhausted reporter speculated that the light of dawn had awakened him from his “dormant state,” prompting him to choose an easterly direction, but it was obvious by now that neither he nor anyone else in the media or the government had the faintest idea what was happening or how to deal with it. Even at this early stage of the crisis, the leveling power of the Stranger was being felt worldwide.
The rescue committee, which by now had swollen to include not only White House Security and all branches of the military but also the FBI, CIA and NSA, found itself forced to break camp and go on the march. The Stranger and his prisoner wandered out into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and began a meandering walk eastward down the middle of the quickly-cleared street, surrounded by thousands of people arranged in concentric circles of importance, the First Lady and her retinue comprising the inmost circle, followed by top Brass and security personnel, then a few big-name journalists and cabinet members, on out to the small army of reporters and the ever-burgeoning crowd of gawkers.
It must have been a strange sight to those bystanders as yet unaware of the news, as if the President had taken to the streets to lead a dawn protest march and then experienced the sudden rage of a mercurial mob. By this time a wheelchair had been provided for the President to sit in, but he soon found the twisted position too uncomfortable and gave it up to walk with his abductor, occasionally smiling and waving at well-wishers.
During this oddest of all Washington parades, the Stranger never altered his childlike expression, though his eyes, observers noted, tended to shift back and forth in their sockets with unnatural speed, as if he were loathe to miss a single sight along the famous avenue. He maintained a moderate pace and neither tightened nor loosened his hold on the President’s head.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Greene
