“Here is a fine new word,” wrote an Iowa sports columnist in 1911. Back then, the slang term motorcade— a riff on cavalcade— described any kind of derring-do by a team of drivers. Before there was a highway system, auto enthusiasts tore off on thousand-mile safaris to prove the mettle of their horseless carriages. In 1912, representatives of Indiana car companies traveled the Midwest in a motorcade that drove into towns accompanied by a rain of confetti and a blast of organ music— pipes were hooked up to the fan shaft of one of the cars.
Theodore Roosevelt was an early adopter, riding in an electric car flanked by police officers on bicycles, but it took some time before the motorcade became synonymous with armored cars designed to move presidents from one place to another. You might put the turning point at 1933, when bullets whizzed past President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he delivered a speech from the back of an open car (the shooter, Giuseppe Zangara, was caught and executed). The Secret Service embarked on a plan to redesign presidential travel. By the 1940s, Roosevelt sped through cities in a limo nicknamed the Sunshine Special, outfitted with a siren, a bombproof undercarriage, and a bulletproof windshield. Today’s presidential motorcades include police cars, decoy limos, counterassault vehicles, and bomb squads.
Oddly enough, the military-style operation sometimes includes volunteer drivers with no training in security. “I was shopping in the farmers’ market when I got the call,” says Elson Trinidad, who met members of the Obama campaign while doing community work in Los Angeles and was asked to drive a van in the president’s August 2010 motorcade there. “I had to go through a background check. I must have passed, because a few days later they told me to wait at the Beverly Hills Hilton.” He found it strange, even dreamlike, to blow through traffic lights while surrounded by police cars. When a radio news report announced that roads were closed because of the presidential motorcade, Trinidad couldn’t help laughing: “I was thinking, I am the motorcade.”
Josh King, who hosts a show on Sirius XM Satellite Radio, served as the White House director of production for presidential events from 1993 to 1997.
When you worked with President Clinton’s team in the 1990s, did you ride in the motorcade? I was usually in Camera One, a vehicle where the sound person and the cameraman from the pool of television networks ride.
How do politicians take advantage of motorcades as a stage set? In 1995, in Northern Ireland, the motorcade suddenly came to a stop. Up about fifteen cars, Bill Clinton was pulling over to shake Gerry Adams’ hand. That’s how the President of the United States was able to have a meeting with the Sinn Fein leader in Belfast.
That’s very clever. President Nixon would always plan a “spontaneous stop” so that he could create a photogenic moment. It’s called an OTR, an Off the Record. It’s not on the official schedule, but the President knows about it, as does his trip director. It will often happen at a basketball court or an ice-cream stand. If the president is in a charitable mood, he might even buy a dozen cones for the press pool.
Rico says getting bought off for ice cream is pretty cheap...
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