Robert W. Bates

Robert Wayne Bates (born May 1941) is a horticultural nurseryman in Forest Hill in south Rapides Parish, Louisiana, who was an agent of the United States Secret Service under U.S. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford Jr. He also provided security for Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower and former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.[1]

Bates was reared by a single mother in "a shotgun house with a dirt-floored kitchen."[1] He graduated from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. In 1965, he joined the Secret Service and was posted at the White House. He provided security for the Johnson and Nixon daughters while they were college students. He was with Nixon in the 1972 trip to China. He ended his Secret Service career in 1976 as the agent in charge in the field office in Shreveport in northwestern Louisiana. Bates described the people he protected as "just people, like you and me" who obtain high political office and must provide for the security of the nation.[1]

After his eleven years in the Secret Service, Bates relocated to Forest Hill, where he operates Robert Bates Nursery,[2] in the commercial nursery complex south of Alexandria.[1] One of Bates' fellow nurserymen in Forest Hill was the late Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Clyde C. Holloway, a Republican who earlier held Louisiana's 8th congressional district seat from 1987 to 1993, since disbanded.

On November 16, 1991, Bates was the Republican[3] candidate for the District 29 seat in the Louisiana State Senate. He lost to the incumbent Democrat Joe McPherson, then of Pineville. McPherson received 23,428 votes (56.8 percent) to Bates' 17,819 (43.2 percent).[4] Three other Democratic candidates, including state Representative Charles R. Herring of Alexandria and singer Jay Chevalier, had been eliminated in the primary election held earlier on October 19.[5]

In 2005, Bates was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield. Holloway defeated Joe McPherson in a special election in 2009 for the Public Service Commission. Holloway has not been inducted into the Hall of Fame.[6]