Golf and Presidential Assassinations

Golf and Presidential Assassinations

The recent unpleasantness at Trump’s Mar-A-Largo golf course reminded me of a similar incident involving President Reagan at Augusta National.

On October 22, 1983, Reagan was playing at Augusta National with Secretary of State George Schultz and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan. Charles R. Harris, a local man, crashed his pickup through the gates of Augusta and stormed the pro shop.

According to the San Francisco Examiner, Bill Walker, teen in an arcade across the street, saw the truck crash the gates: “I was just playing a game and looked out th edoor and it went through the fence. It hit the gate, went over it and kept going.”

Another witness interviewed by the Examiner, Wallace Taylor, said that the truck “stopped, made a right turn, bumped the gate, backed up and rammed the gate.” He said that he watched the truck head up the road, then threw his own car in reverse and backed up 100 yards through traffic to where a policeman was stationed and told him “Hey, a truck just knocked that damned gate down.”

In the pro shop, Harris fired a shot into the floor, while taking several hostages: David Fisher, Reagan’s personal aide; Lanny Wiles, white House advance man; Robert Sullivan, club chauffeur; Kris Hardee, golf shop employee; Louise Cook, club secretary; Jim Armstrong, Augusta general manager; and David Spencer, assistant golf pro.

Another golf pro and an unidentified women hid in a locked room in another portion of the shop during the incident.

“This is no joke,” Harris said. “Somebody could get killed.”

Richmond County Sheriff J.B. Dykes said that Harris initially asked for “whiskey and food.”

According to Atlanta Journal Constitution reporting at the time, Harris was upset over the death of his father earlier in the year, the ending of a twenty year marriage and his recent job loss.

Harris demanded to speak to the President, and Fischer was dispatched to make that happen. Reagan’s group was on the 16th green.

Fisher was reported to have told Harris: “if you let me go, I’ll see what I can do” to get the President to talk to him.

Reagan made five or six attempts to contact Harris via radiophone (this was 1983, so cell phones weren’t a thing). Harris repeatedly hung up before Reagan could speak.

At one point, Reagan got him on the phone. NBC news, which was monitoring the phone radio traffic reported that Reagan said “Hello, this is the president. This is Ronald Reagan. I understand you want to talk to me. This is the president. If you are hearing me, will you please tell me and we can have that talk you want.”

Harris hung up without responding.

Reagan was then escorted to the Eisenhower Cottage.

Harris was convinced to release the hostages one by one. The last, Armstrong, “bolted from the room” according to the Associated Press. Harris surrendered two hours later, reportedly at the urging of his brother and mother.

The entire incident lasted two hours and eleven minutes.

Secret Service spokesman Jack Smith said that the incident occurred outside the perimeter established for the President’s security. Reagan was 600 yards from the pro shop.

During the incident, Nancy Reagan was at the Racing Hall of Fame in Aiken, S.C., She was taken to a Holiday Inn in Augusta for security.

After the incident, Harris was taken to jail, where he collapsed. He was taken to a local hospital for treatment.

Ultimately, Harris was charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment and criminal damage. He pleaded guilty and ultimately served three years in prison.

Why Has This Been Forgotten?

The incident has probably been forgotten because it happened more than forty years ago, and because of three adjacent events:

• That same day, millions of people around the globe were involved in an orchestrated protest against the deployment of missiles in Germany.
• The next day, 241 Americans and 58 French military personnel were killed by Islamic Jihad suicide car bombs while on a peacekeeping mission in Beirut.
• On October 25, forces from the US and six Caribbean nations landed in Grenada to suppress a coup in Grenada (that day now is celebrated by Grenada as its “Independence Day”)

The Memory Hole of the 1970s and 1980s

Actually, it is not surprising that few remember the Augusta incident (I mentioned it to a couple of friends and they looked at me like I was from Mars). The entirety of the 1970s and early 1980s seems to have been memory-holed. People who say we currently are living in the worst times ever either are too young to remember the 1970s or have buried the memory.

Those were tumultuous times of domestic unrest, mass protests in the streets and civil uprisings. Kent State happened in 1970. Wounded Knee was in 1973. Twelve thousand were arrested in Washington, DC around the May Day protests in 1971.

Police had shootouts with domestic terror groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army (which famously kidnapped Patty Hearst). Klan members and communists had a shootout in North Carolina. There were the Weathermen, The Black Liberation Army, The May 19th Communist Organziation, and more.

There were domestic terror bombings – 2,500 bombings in 1971-1972 alone. Check out that number. Two Thousand Five Hundred. Schools had “secret codes” to let teachers know that a bomb threat had been made. In my school, it was “would Alfred Nobel please come to the office.” Nobel, of course, invented dynamite. “Secret codes” is in quotes because, everyone, including the students, knew what it meant.

Throughout my career as a teacher, I have reflected on the fact that over my entire life, school violence has been on my mind: first with bombings, then with shootings.

Airplane hijackings were so numerous that “take me to Cuba” became a joke on late night comedy shows. It wasn’t funny, though. There were hundreds of hijacking attempts in the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1972 alone, there were 305.

Cults, such as the Manson Family, the Jonestown Cult which ended in a mass murder suicide via “Kool Aid” in 1978 (thus, “drinking the Kool Aid”), the “Moonies,” the “EST” people, the “Scientologists,” the “Church of Satan” and others scared the populace. There was a “Satanic Panic” in the early 1980s. I had classes in school and church on how to not join or get abducted by a cult.

The Cults coincided with a weird interest in UFOs, Ancient Astronauts, Pyramid Power, the zodiac, astrology, witchcraft, psychic channeling of Atlantis, altered consciousness and body states, crystals and cryptids. You could find books on all of these on the racks of every grocery and drug store (I know because I bought a bunch).

Kidnappings were often on the news: in California a bus of 26 schoolkids were kidnapped. Newspaper heiress Patrica Hears was kidnapped by the domestic leftist terror group the Symbionese Liberation Army. John Paul Getty III got his ear cut off.

The first “missing child” on the milk cartons was in 1979.

Serial killers were seemingly on the rise, with murderers such as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, The Son of Sam, The Zodiac Killer, the Hillside Strangler and the Houston Mass Murders dominating news.

It’s no wonder that films like “Dirty Harry” and “Death Wish,” which celebrate vigilantism became popular. People were scared.

Economic Woes

The economy was terrible as well, with high inflation and interest rates. Inflation hit 12% in 1980. Mortgage rate were 16% in 1981. President Carter said the US was suffering from “malaise.” The US was undergoing “deindustrialization,” which led to high unemployment (9% in 1975). It got a new name “Stagflation” — high inflation and unemployment, which previously had been thought to not coexist. The US was going to be “bought by the Japanese,” who were economically eating our lunch.

In a golf related twist, a Japanese investor bought Pebble Beach in 1990. Japanese investors bought Rockefeller Center in 1979.

Nixon imposed wage and price controls. They failed and backfired.

Gas prices spiked. Between 1969 and 1979, the price doubled. In 1973, and again in 1979, there were shortages that led to blocks-long lines. Rationing was imposed, with odd and even days for purchases. If your license plate ended in an odd number, you could buy on odd days; even, even days. The “double nickel” speed limit was imposed to save fuel. Daylight saving time was imposed year round to attempt fuel savings.

President Carter wore a sweater on a national address and told us to turn our thermostats down.

Over all of this, we were constantly reminded of the imminent nuclear vaporization, the Malthusian “population bomb,” poisioned rivers and air, and the coming ice age.

Kids who graduated from high school in the 1970s had to worry not only about college or a job, but also the draft. Retrospectively, it ended in 1973, but we were still worried about it in the early 1980s because of the Soviet threat.

More Asassinations

And then there were the notorious assassination attempts.

In addition to the Augusta incident, Reagan had previously (barely) survived an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981. While entering a limousine, a deranged individual obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster fired at the President at close range with a pistol. Reagan was hit by a bullet’s ricochet, which punctured a lung and caused serious internal bleeding. He was close to death, but was stabilized at nearby George Washington University Hospital and obviously survived.

Also in 1981, the Secret Service had serious allegations of a Libyan assassination squad that caused them to assign more guards and upgrade the armor on vehicles.

While it was not an assassination attempt, Reagan was involved in another incident in which a police motorcycle officer crashed in Reagan’s motorcade. The NY Journal News reported that “Reagan left his car and went to the officer’s side, consoling him while they awaited an ambulance.”

Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in three weeks in 1975. Would-be assassin Squeaky Fromme was a Manson cultist; the second, Sara Jane Moore had hoped to spark violent revolution.

Presidential candidate George Wallace barely survived an assasination attempt in 1972; he was paralyzed for life. George Moscone and Harvey Milk were assassinated in San Francisco in 1978. Congressman Leo Ryan was killed by the aforementioned Jonestown cult. Porn publisher Larry Flynt was paralyzed in an assassination attempt in 1978.

Of course, all of these were in the wake of the terrible year of 1968, which was a recent event at that point.

Thankful For 2024

Writing all of this reminds me that I should be thankful for the world I am living in today. In spite of all people complain about, it is an objectively better time.

This is not to say, however, that we children of the late ’60s and ’70s had it worse than anyone.

My parents were Depression kids, who lived through WWII, the turmoil of the ’60s and then still had to go through the ’70s. My mother is still with us. She has definitely seen worse.

My grandparents were born into a world without electricity or cars and where wells and outhouses were the norm. That world did not have antibiotics, routine vaccinations against killer childhood diseases or many other things that make our lives better. In 1900, thirty percent of all deaths occurred in children less than five years of age. One was lucky just to make it to six. Child labor was routine. Most people lived in rural areas. If you were in manufacturing, you worked an average of 53 hours a week in often inhumane conditions. Most people did not complete high school. Per capita income (adjusted for inflation was $4,200). There was no such thing as benefits.

And let us not forget the “Great Influenza” of 1918 – 1920.

My grandparents lived into the 1980s.

My great grandparents were born in the Civil War era, and lived through the age of Robber Barons, several economic depressions such as the “Panic of 1873,” the “Long Depression,” the “Depression of 1882 – 1885”, the “Panic of 1893,” the “Panic of 1896,” and the Panics of 1907, 1910-1911. All of those were the result of the instability prior to the establishment of the Federal Reserve.

My great great grandparents on my father’s side were Cherokee who lived through the Trail of Tears and raised their families in horrific conditions on Indian reservations in the west. I’ve seen an early 1900s photograph of the family’s reservation “homestead.” It’s not good.

Native Americans were not granted citizenship until 1920. Like African Americans, though, that didn’t mean they were treated anything like equally.

The further back one goes, the worse it gets.

So here’s to living in the best time in all of human history to be alive.