Robert Bouck - USSS Keeper of the Secrets and the Evidence

The Sagacity to Uncover Secrets And the Integrity to Keep Them

By Parricia Sullivan

[BK notes: Bouck is important for running the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service that kept taps on threats to the president and the watch comes into play in the Inheritance - a newly published book on the artifacts and evidence that was kept in the possession of JFK's longtime secretary Mrs. Lincoln. After I copied this from the WP on line - I lost the link and can't find it now. If you can please send the link to me Billkelly3@gmail.com]

May 9, 2004

Robert Inman Bouck epitomized discretion.

He knew the ins and outs of the White House like few people do. He kept secrets, personal and political, without a qualm. It was the code of the Secret Service, Bouck's employer for 30 years.

"A lot of things he did, I didn't know he was doing," said his wife of 67 years, Marjorie Bouck.

"Some things he would talk about, but he would not talk about the private lives of the presidents at all, he really didn't. He didn't even tell us," said James Bouck, one of his sons.

He protected six presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon, but he had a special affection for President John F. Kennedy and his family, and the assassination "just devastated him," said his wife. The subsequent years were "the worst couple years of his life," she added.

Bouck, who died of congestive heart failure April 27 at age 89, was the special agent in charge of the protective research division at the time and was in Washington on Nov. 22, 1963. Upon hearing the news, he immediately removed a secret reel-to-reel tape recording system that he had installed at Kennedy's request in July 1962.

Kennedy left the machine running when he left the room during the Cuban missile crisis. The tapes, a television documentary later reported, recorded members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff cursing what they considered the president's weak-minded proposal to blockade Cuba without invading it.

Bouck also oversaw the chain of evidence from Kennedy's assassination after it arrived in Washington. He testified before the Warren Commission and a congressional investigative committee that he turned over boxes of evidence to Kennedy's personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, at the National Archives. At the time, he said that one of the containers held remains of Kennedy's brain.

The brain was discovered to be missing some years later, and because of this discrepancy, Bouck's name still turns up on conspiracy-theory Web sites.

As important as the Kennedys were to him, Bouck had an enviable career before 1960. A Michigan farm boy, he studied police science at Michigan State, married his college sweetheart and joined the Secret Service in 1939. He was rejected for active duty in the Army during World War II because of high blood pressure.

Yet he traveled the world as an advance man for President Dwight D. Eisenhower and then accompanied him on the official trips to Europe, China, India, Pakistan, Africa and South America. He was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Potsdam Conference in 1945, where Allied leaders determined the future of postwar Europe. He was at the Allied Commission on Reparations in Europe in 1945 and was at the Geneva Convention in 1955.

Bouck also completed the advance trip to arrange for Eisenhower's 1960 trip to the Soviet Union, which was canceled after an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia.

In 1957, he was described as the "electronics ace" of the Secret Service in an article in The Washington Post, a description that a former colleague endorses.

"He knew the mechanical gadgets, the electronic devices you use to supplement human intelligence," said H. Stuart Knight, the director of the Secret Service from 1972 to 1982, who called Bouck a mentor whom he admired for his character, professionalism and integrity. "He was head of training when I went there. He was an example you aspire to emulate. That's part of the culture of the Secret Service.

"He was a leader."

Bouck was on a presidential trip to Moscow when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev greeted a throng of visitors. Bouck did not want to shake Khrushchev's hand, so he kept moving to the back of the crowd.

Khrushchev spotted him, pursued him, and finally thrust his hand between two people, forcing Bouck to acknowledge the host.

Another time, Bouck was at a meeting at Winston Churchill's home when the British prime minister and famous amateur painter interrupted the proceedings to call for his paints and a ladder. He climbed up to one of his pieces and dabbed a bit of paint on a hanging painting.

Bouck also told his family about a time in Bermuda when Churchill, worried that the ocean was too chilly for swimming, asked a well-known aide to dip his top hat to test the water's temperature.

After 30 years of protecting presidents, Bouck retired in 1969. He had a second and third career with the Federal Reserve and with central banks of several foreign countries. But there's little doubt how Bouck defined himself.

One of the few mementos that Bouck kept, his son said, was a receipt, signed by Robert Kennedy, for the president's Cartier watch that he returned to the family after the assassination.

Secret Service agent Robert Bouck got to know the White House and the business of six U.S. presidents intimately in his 30 years of work.