Robert Snow, a veteran Secret Service agent who served as a technical adviser on films including In the Line of Fire, The American President and Air Force One, died March 22, his family announced. He was 93.
Snow had retired after spending 33 years with the Secret Service when he was called on for his expertise during the making of Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire (1993), starring Clint Eastwood as a CIA agent haunted by the JFK assassination.
“In Taxi Driver and other films, we were portrayed as monosyllabic idiots who can’t complete a full sentence and [only] stand on the corners with dark glasses,” Snow told the Chicago Tribune in a 1997 interview. “Until In the Line of Fire, there was nothing to show what the Secret Service really did.”
He worked with Petersen and Eastwood again in the 1997 films Air Force One and Absolute Power, respectively, and on two X-Men movies, Bryan Singer’s franchise kickoff in 2000 and Brett Ratner’s The Last Stand (2006).
While advising on the Michael Douglas-starring The American President (1995), Snow said he came to admire director Rob Reiner for being “extremely well-informed and well-versed on the presidency.” He also noted that he was known as “the token Republican on the set.”
Snow worked on 17 Hollywood films, among them First Kid (1996), Murder at 1600 (1997), Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997), Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (1998), Andrew Fleming’s Dick (1999), Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days (2000), Chasing Liberty (2004) and Donald Petrie’s Welcome to Mooseport (2004).
He did note that he wasn’t always listened to.
“A technical adviser explains the way it really is, then a director will do as he damn well pleases,” he said. “You have to accept it and go about your business. They’re not making a documentary.”
Born on March 3, 1932, in Rochester, New York, Snow enlisted in the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps in 1950 during the Korean War, then graduated from Michigan State University in 1957.
He began his stint in the Secret Service in 1959 in Buffalo, New York, and moved to Washington to work in the counterfeiting division before serving in the White House during the Ford and Carter administrations and traveling overseas with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He retired at the mandatory age of 60 in 1993.
In an interview with THR’s Ryan Gajewski in July, In the Line of Fire producer Jeff Apple said he was inspired to do a Secret Service film based on seeing President Lyndon B. Johnson in person in Miami in 1965. “These guys jump out of the car with dark glasses and dark suits, and I was so amazed,” he said.
He reached out to Snow, then the assistant director of the Secret Service. Snow stayed with the project after he retired and spent nine months in California on the movie. He even got to portray a Secret Service agent in Singer’s X-Men.
Snow, who lived in Ashburn, Virginia, also was a volunteer for 24 years with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as its director of law enforcement liaison.
Survivors include his children, Tom, Dan, Karen, Barbie and Kathy; his 14 grandchildren; and his 11 great-grandchildren. His high school sweetheart and wife of 67 years, Marilyn, died in 2021 of ALS at age 87.
Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.
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