THE SECRET LIFE OF BILL DUNCAN

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Once you know what he looks like, it’s impossible to not scour every photo looking for Bill Duncan.

That’s just it — there are hundreds, if not thousands, of photos.

It boggles the mind, actually, to think how many photos there are.

Not once was a camera purposefully focused on him, but Duncan nevertheless managed to get caught up in the frame, whether the photographers were swooning over Lancer or Lace, following Volunteer or just trying not to antagonize Searchlight.

“Like a photobomb, but looking away,” daughter Ronna Duncan said, using a term that didn’t exist when the photos were taken.

A “photobomb” in those days might have been perceived as a kind of lethal device brought into being by some warped mind in the KGB or our own CIA.

And that would have sent Duncan, a Greene County-raised special agent of the U.S. Secret Service, springing into action.

Duncan and his fellow Secret Service agents had code names for each of the “protectees,” as the agency calls them, in their care.

Lancer and Lace were President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, respectively.

Volunteer was President Lyndon B. Johnson, while Searchlight was President Richard Nixon.

In all, Duncan was tasked with the protection of five U.S. presidents, from Eisenhower to Ford, making him arguably the single-greatest — but also the most silent — witness to history ever produced by Greene County.

He was in Texas with Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and accompanied Nixon to China in 1972.

A lithe and intense native of Greenbrier Twp., Duncan died March 14 in Arizona at the age of 86, having lost his wife of nearly 66 years, Jefferson native Donna Mae Yepsen, in April 2020.

Both Duncans will be remembered on May 16 during a shared funeral service at the First United Methodist Church in Jefferson, the site of their wedding exactly 67 years to the day.

Few people on May 16, 1954, could have predicted what was in store for the young newlyweds — or for the nation as a whole:

The assassination of a president and the resignation of another. Civil rights and civil disobedience. The Berlin Wall. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the pervasive threat of thermonuclear annihilation. Vietnam. The Peace Corps and the Great Society. The successive assassinations of MLK and RFK, and the cities that burned in the wake. The moon landing and Woodstock.

In the middle of it all was a man who, despite his extended absences, always somehow made it to the Little League games.

How Bill Duncan managed to be both a dad to three active kids and a man who shouldered the awesome responsibility of protecting the leader of the free world was a feat worthy of far more appreciation than he ever got, according to Ronna Duncan.

“It was obvious to me he had an alternate life and he was trying to balance it,” Ronna Duncan, now 65, explained recently. “I really don’t know how he did it.”

Perhaps his Greene County upbringing played some part. Bill Duncan had personally known loss and loneliness after the death of his mom when he was 9.

Or perhaps in Donna Yepsen he chose the best possible partner for the kind of life that lay ahead.

In the days since her dad’s death, Ronna Duncan has heard from several of the agents who worked alongside him.

“I had one agent say, ‘He made the right choice,’” she said. “It takes an exceptional spouse and partner to accept that lifestyle.

“He was gone for months at a time.”

Despite the seeming appearance of stability — “I never felt like I didn’t have a father,” Ronna Duncan said — Bill Duncan’s daughter has concluded she may never fully know or understand him. In finally sorting through the tubs of mementos he kept under his bed, Ronna Duncan is only now beginning to piece together a more complete picture of a father who was the consummate stone-faced Secret Service agent.

“The Secret Service was who he was. It was his soul,” she said.

Personal letters written to Duncan from President Nixon are interspersed in the tubs with letters Ronna herself penned as a girl. There are ample photographs of presidents, all of which Bill Duncan photobombed like only a Secret Service agent could. And there’s a photo of Duncan, a slight smile visible on his face, walking with Tricia Nixon, whose marriage on June 12, 1971, took place in the Rose Garden.

But as Ronna Duncan put it, they call it the Secret Service for a reason.

A vow of silence

“He had unfaltering integrity that sometimes made him misunderstood,” she said, explaining that her father was often perceived by family back in Iowa as aloof or even rude at times.

“He was always aware people wanted to talk about things that he couldn’t talk about,” she said.

Personally, Ronna Duncan wishes now she’d asked more about Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 or about the final moments before Nixon’s resignation in ’74. But she also knows it would have been futile to even try.

Family in Iowa, however, only ever saw his integrity as icy, his unwillingness to dish an affront.

But you also can’t blame them. Bill Duncan led the kind of life you can’t help but wonder about. Here, after all, was a Greene County boy on the world’s biggest stage, and at such a transformative time in history.

The questions are simply endless.

Did he pat down Elvis before his Oval Office meeting with Nixon on Dec. 21, 1970? And once you go there, did he also pat down Marilyn Monroe before her rendezvous with Kennedy?!

Bill Duncan was conceivably the proverbial fly on every wall.

For that reason, Ronna Duncan is appreciative that Chuck Rochner, a retired Secret Service agent who worked with her dad during the Nixon years, has agreed to speak at the funeral in Jefferson on May 16.

“I asked him to speak to the man none of us ever knew,” she said.

Only here and there did fleeting glimpses of his alternate life come into view, like the time in early 1967 that he and Donna spent a weekend as guests of President Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson at the LBJ Ranch in Texas.

In a letter to her folks back home in Jefferson — reprinted with permission in the local newspaper — Donna wrote, “It was all so exciting and hard to believe it was happening to me!”

At one point, she marveled, they sat around watching movies with LBJ and the First Lady.

“The First Lady told all of us girls to wear slacks,” Donna wrote, “so here we had our picture taken in slacks! How about that?”

Ronna Duncan remembers holiday parties at the White House, and attending church once with President Nixon and his family.

“I remember meeting Mrs. Eisenhower,” she explained, “and thinking she was the queen. She was so regal in my young mind. It makes me wish I would have paid more attention to being 10, but who does?”

It also bears wondering: Has secrecy always been the Secret Service agent’s credo or did Bill Duncan’s silence stem in some part from the trauma of Nov. 22, 1963?

That was the day an American president was felled by an assassin for the first time since William McKinley, whose death in 1901 at the hand of a “deranged anarchist” forever altered the mission of the U.S. Secret Service, from an agency established to stamp out rampant counterfeiting after the Civil War to one tasked with the full-time protection of the president and vice president, their families, other top officials and major presidential candidates.

“It cut deep into my dad’s psyche,” Ronna Duncan said, “and stayed there.”

Bill Duncan wasn’t physically in Dallas when shots rained down on Dealey Plaza from a sixth-floor window in the orange brick warehouse known as the Texas School Book Depository.

But Bill Duncan was there nonetheless.

Promoted in 1960 from the Omaha field office to the White House detail, Duncan was assigned to protect then-Sen. John F. Kennedy, the suave young Democrat from Massachusetts, during that year’s election.

How Duncan had even come to join the Secret Service after a stint teaching high school in Sioux Center is now anyone’s guess, Ronna Duncan conceded.

A standout athlete in his high school days in Bayard, Duncan went on to excel in two sports — football and baseball — at Minnesota State University, Mankato (known then as Mankato State Teachers College).

Later inducted into MSU’s Athletics Hall of Fame, Duncan was an All-Conference running back in ’54, ’56 and ’57 who also pitched a no-hitter against Winona State his senior year.

Picked that year as the school’s athlete of the year, baseball coach Bill Morris sang Duncan’s praises to the student newspaper, saying, “Bill is a gentleman, a scholar and a great example of American manhood.”

Skip ahead four years to February of 1961, and the following item appeared on Page 1 of the Jefferson Herald: “Bill Duncan is bodyguard for president.”

At 25, Duncan was 18 years Kennedy’s junior, but Ronna Duncan said many of the agents felt a kinship to a president who was just 43 himself — making JFK still the youngest person ever elected president.

He had a young family.

They had young families.

“There was a connection there that presidents before or since haven’t had,” said Ronna Duncan, who had been born in 1955 at the Greene County Hospital in Jefferson during her dad’s summer break from college.

Whether Kennedy was truly the last president to be universally revered or merely came to be viewed that way after his assassination, there was no denying the allure of the Kennedys’ Camelot — when Jackie took CBS on a televised tour of the newly remodeled White House, 80 million Americans watched.

Then came the two-day, five-city tour of Texas in November of ’63.

Nov. 22, 1963

According to a first-person account in 2000 written by Jeb Byrne, former press secretary to the governor of Maine who served as advance man for Kennedy’s stop in Fort Worth on Nov. 21-22, security preparations for Fort Worth were handled by Duncan, whom Byrne recalled as a “lithe and intense 28-year-old lead Secret Service agent for the Fort Worth visit.”

The visit went as planned, with the Kennedys spending the night of Nov. 21 at the Hotel Texas. Original works by Van Gogh, Monet and Picasso were specially arranged for their suite.

Early on the morning of Nov. 22, President Kennedy first spoke briefly to a crowd of several thousand in the parking lot before returning inside the hotel to address a breakfast of the Forth Worth Chamber of Commerce.

Taking his seat at the head table, Byrne wrote, Kennedy beckoned Duncan, requesting that he go up and ask the First Lady, who was still readying herself in their suite, to come down.

And one more thing, Kennedy is said to have told Duncan: tell the orchestra to play “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” when Mrs. Kennedy enters the ballroom.

When the First Lady entered, she was attired in the wardrobe that would come to forever be seared into the world’s collective memory: the double-breasted pink wool Chanel suit with navy trim and pink pillbox hat.

Following the breakfast, the president’s motorcade left the hotel for Carswell Air Force Base. From there, it was only a 13-minute flight to Love Field in Dallas.

The time was 11:25 a.m. Nov. 22.

Duncan could breathe a sigh of relief as Air Force One disappeared from view in the Texas sky.

It was a Friday.

By 1 p.m., the president was dead.

In the years to come, it was a subject best left untouched, Ronna Duncan said, recalling the time a niece tried asking questions about the assassination for a college paper, figuring she wasn’t just anyone. But even after all that time, the emotions were too great for him.

“All the agents were so deeply impacted by the assassination on so many levels,” Ronna Duncan said.

It was only in the last two years of his life that Bill Duncan lowered his guard just enough.

“I met the man my mom fell in love with and married,” Ronna Duncan explained. “That’s a beautiful thing. I met him.”

His mind was as sharp as ever to the end, Ronna Duncan said, but he didn’t see the country coming back from the Trump years and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Trump drove him crazy,” Ronna Duncan said. “He was overwhelmed by the crazy of it. It was just a year of too much.”

Above all, he wanted to make sure his daughter understood their final wish to be buried back home in the Greenbrier Cemetery.

“Some of my dad’s last words to me were, ‘Remember Iowa,’” she said.

For Bill Duncan, life on the farm in Greene County was lonely, Ronna Duncan believes. When his mom died, his brothers were already old enough to be off starting families of their own, leaving 9-year-old Bill alone with a newly single dad, Dewey.

But it was always home nevertheless.

“He always knew he wasn’t a farmer,” Ronna Duncan said. “He knew there was more for him. He knew he needed and wanted more.”