When you’re rich, you can have all sorts of things ordinary folks only dream about, like a fancy horse and country estate to keep it at.
The gal in the photo is Jacqueline Kennedy, and the horse is Sardar, gifted to her by Pakistan’s president during her goodwill tour of that country in April 1962.
Sardar was brought to the U.S. by military transport. USAF planes regularly flew to Pakistan, and rides were on a space-available basis (see current rules here). A horse takes a lot of space.
The horse got a ride; Rep. Walter McVey (R-KS) didn’t, and he complained about a horse having more pull in D.C. than him (see newspaper article here), which was true. That’s what he got for being in the minority party.
At the time, Democrats held 281 House seats, while Republicans held only 151. By the way, McVey lost his seat after one term as a result of horsing around with a secretary (details here). In those days, affairs disqualified people from politics. Trump was still a teenager then, and hadn’t committed his first adultery yet.
I digress. Smuggling the horse on a military flight was a covert operation, with a general in charge. It began when Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent (bio here), got a phone call from the general (they didn’t have text messaging or email in those days). Parenthetically, the general knew Mrs. Kennedy well; he had dated her before she married a future president. Hill eventually married an author who wrote about the Kennedys; the excerpt below is from her book at p. 122.
“I got an urgent message from General Godfrey McHugh asking me to call him on a secure line. ‘Clint,’ he said, ‘do you know anything about a horse that was given to Mrs. Kennedy by President Ayub Khan?’ ‘Yes, I sure do,’ I said. ‘Well, the president has tasked me with getting the damn thing back to Washington … he was adamant there be no publicity about this. I mean, he was so insistent, if anything comes out about this, there will be hell to pay.’ …
“’Understood. What can I do to help?’ I offered.
“‘I’ve got an Air Force C-41 in Lahore that’s going to bring the horse back. But we can’t have any paperwork that says there’s a horse on the plane. It’s coming back to the States for routine maintenance. We need as few people as possible involved, and President Kennedy told me I should keep you informed and advised if there were any problems.’
“’Yes, General, please do.’
“Once the horse was on the plane, there was one thing after another. The route had to be changed midair because … the country [where] they were planning to land for refueling wouldn’t let them open the doors for fear that a horse from Pakistan could be bringing in disease-carrying flies. I thought McHugh was going to have a nervous breakdown over this horse.
“There had already been so much publicity about Sardar that McHugh couldn’t avoid the U.S. Agriculture Department. But as soon as Ag got involved, they were insisting the horse had to go into quarantine in Philadelphia in some special kind of stable. McHugh finally convinced some high-ranking official at Agriculture that this was such a top-secret operation [and] the plane was going to land at Andrews Air Force Base no matter what and Agriculture would just have to send an official—who would be sworn to secrecy—to check out the horse. Once the horse arrived … he’d have to stay at a special stable at Fort Myer for at least fifteen days before he could be transported to the Kennedys’ rented house … in Middleburg, Virginia.
“When the plane finally landed at Andrews in the middle of the night, McHugh went out to meet the Agriculture inspector and to make sure the press didn’t get wind of anything. … I was with the Kennedys in Palm Beach, asleep in my motel room, when the phone rang. ‘Clint! It’s Godfrey. I’m here at Andrews with Mrs. Kennedy’s horse.’ ‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘Is he in good shape?’ ‘The horse is fine. But he’s not alone.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘There’s a man here that’s dressed like a maharajah of Jaipur—he’s wearing a red coat with medals and ribbons all over it and a damn turban on his head! When I asked him who the hell he was, he says, ‘I come with Sardar. President Ayub Khan’s orders. I cannot leave Sardar.’
“’And then,’ McHugh continued, in a voice that sounded like his veins were popping out of his neck, ‘“the inspector sees a bunch of hay in the compartment, and when the horse’s guard tells him that’s the only thing the horse will eat, the inspector goes berserk. ‘He tells us we’ve got to burn the hay, confiscate the horse’s water, and spray down the whole goddamn plane!’ I was trying not to laugh, but the image in my head of McHugh, an Air Force general, out there in the middle of the night on this covert equine mission, following direct orders from the president of the United States, … was hysterical.
“’Calm down, General,’ I said. ‘Just tell me this: Where is the horse now?’ ‘The horse and his guard are about to be transported to Fort Myer. The horse has to stay in a special stable for fifteen days before he can be let out. How the hell are we going to keep this quiet when there’s a guy with a turban walking around Fort Myer?’ ‘Look,” I said, ‘we’ll deal with any fallout if it leaks. Just make sure nothing happens to that horse.’”
For the rest of the story, get the book. (Quoted here under “fair use.”)