While we wait, with bated breath and badly-combed-over ginger hair, to see the results of the upcoming US presidential election, it's worth remembering the iconic structure that protects the president's life and which is part bomb shelter, part hospital and all badass. No, not the White House, but the official presidential limousine; the vast, armour-plated Cadillac that is officially known as the Presidential State Car, but insiders know best as "The Beast."
In fact, calling it a Cadillac is something of a misnomer. It's actually built on the chassis of a Chevrolet Kodiak, which is what the Americans call a 'medium duty vehicle' - or what you or I would call a 'pretty hefty lorry'.
On top of that chassis is basically a giant, heavily armoured survival cell that is designed to protect the president's life in the event of an attack, as much as it is to whisk him in traditional Cadillac comfort from engagement to engagement. Mind you, if you think The Beast is impressive, you should check out the Chevrolet Suburban escort car that follows along behind it. Nothing much to be impressed by if it were a regular Suburban, but this one has a six-barrel 20mm rotary Gatling gun that pops up from the rear roof section, which can instantly convert most exterior threats to little more than vapour...
Of course, we all laughed, and pretty heartily too, a few years ago when The Beast became beached on a particularly unhelpful speed ramp in the grounds of the US embassy in Dublin during President Obama's state visit, but while the US Presidential limo has, of course, a long and distinguished history, it's surprising how equally chequered that history is.
President William McKinley was the first US president to so much as ride in a car, but he was assassinated in 1901. Perhaps future presidents should have taken note of this unfortunate confluence of presidential motoring and presidential death. There is also of course the conspiracy theorists' favourite footnote that while Kennedy was assassinated in a Lincoln Continental, a car made by the Ford Motor Company, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Ford's Theatre... We'll come back to Kennedy in a moment, but seeing as Honest Abe died 20 years before Karl Benz invented the car, we should probably just leave that particular slice of history well enough alone for now.
It was Theodore Roosevelt's administration that began the tradition of using an official state car (a Stanley Steamer, bringing alternative fuels to the White House about a century ahead of anyone else) and it was Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, who converted the White House stables into a garage, and ordered a brace of gorgeous Pierce-Arrows to be used for state occasions.
However, the whole armour plating thing doesn't come into the presidential equation until the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era. Roosevelt's Lincoln V12 convertible was the first purpose-built presidential limo, but following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the Secret Service got nervy about FDR riding about in an open car, so they dragged a 1928 Cadillac 314A, with heavy armour plating, out of government storage. It was this car that delivered FDR to the Capitol Building to deliver his famous "Day of infamy" speech. There was just the unfortunate fact, hanging in the air, that the armour-plated Caddy had once been the property of Al Capone... It had been seized by the Department of the Treasury when Capone had been put away for tax evasion, and Roosevelt would continue to use it until the Lincoln could be armoured with bullet-proof plates and machine guns for the Secret Service agents tucked into the doors.
Two specially built armoured Cadillacs would be used by Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower until we come to the most famous presidential car of all time, the 1961 Lincoln Continental, as tragically used by John F Kennedy in November 1963. We all know what happened that day, but interestingly (and rather gruesomely) the car was not destroyed after Kennedy had been killed riding in it. Rather, the interior was replaced, it was converted (sensibly, if rather too late) to a hard-top and continued to do service in the White House motor pool.
A later Chrysler Imperial LeBaron presidential limo was also nearly responsible for the untimely death of Ronald Reagan. When wannabe assassin John Hinckley opened fire, Reagan's Secret Service team reacted fast to get the president into the cover of the car, but the bullet that hit, and almost killed, The Gipper in fact ricocheted off the armour of the Chrysler, striking the president below the ribs. If the Chrysler had been a normal car, the bullet would just have passed right through it...
Of course, the US president is not alone in having official transport and not alone in that transport having cost its occupant their lives... When visiting the troubled city of Sarajevo in the summer of 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary probably thought he was being forward looking by touring the city in a car, rather than a horse drawn-carriage. The car, a Gräf & Stift 28/32 PS tourer was, as were most cars at the time, open-topped, allowing the people of Bosnia to see their ruler-in-waiting, but it left Franz, and his pregnant wife Sophie, horribly exposed to attack.
So it proved. Following an earlier, botched, attempt at assassination, the Archduke's motorcade took a wrong turning, and the driver stalled the car. As he tried to restart it, would-be revolutionary Gavrilo Princip saw his chance, raised a pistol and fired. The Archduke's death triggered a spiral towards war, and we are still dealing with the legacies, indeed still fighting anew some of the conflicts, of the First World War.
The Pope has been variously whisked around by Mercedes and Ford Transit-base 'pope-mobiles', but on his most recent visit to the US, the current Pope Francis actually travelled around in a humble Fiat 500L, surely the most down-to-earth state car of all time. It was recently auctioned off to the benefit of charity.
My favourite governmental story, though, concerns a Horch limousine. I found the car in question, a 1936 Horch 830 BL Cabriolet, in the Audi museum in Ingolstadt, incongruously wearing French tricolours mounted to its bodywork. Stranger still, that greatest (arguably) of French patriots, General, later president, Charles De Gaulle was once its owner. De Gaulle, driving around in a German car on official duties? Surely not?
But it turned out to be the case. The Horch had been the official car of Deitrich Von Choltitz, the Nazi governor of Paris in 1944. Now, Von Choltitz was hardly a cuddly or pleasant figure (although he was one of the few leading commanders to not be prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials), but he did, as far as De Gaulle was concerned, have one thing in his favour. When Hitler ordered that Paris should be razed to the ground as the allied armies approached in the summer of 1944, Von Choltitz disobeyed the order, and handed Paris over to the Free French authorities and De Gaulle, with hardly a shot fired. De Gaulle seized the Horch for his personal use, and while that was probably a case of simple convenience as much as anything else, De Gaulle kept and used the car for official occasions for more than a decade, and ascribed his affection for the old Horch to it being once the personal transport of the man who decided not to destroy Paris...