Winston Lawson was born in 1929. After studying history at the
University of Buffalo he worked as a wholesale carpet salesman. In
December 1951, he became a sales representative for Carnation, a company
manufacturing milk products. Lawson joined the US Army in 1953 and after basic training was sent to the CIC Counterintelligence School in Holabird, Maryland. Based at Lexington, during the Korean War he took part in the interviewing of prisoners.
In
1955 Lawson returned to the Carnation Milk Company and had various
sales or public relations jobs with them in Poughkeepsie. He applied to
enter the Secret Service in 1956 but was not accepted until October
1959. He did general investigative work in the Syracuse area, until
being transferred to Washington in March, 1961. Soon afterwards he was given responsibility for organizing the security for trips being made by President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. 
On 4th November Lawson was asked to prepare for the presidential trip to Dallas, Texas. This involved discussions with Kenneth O'Donnell (special assistant to Kennedy), Roy Kellerman and Jesse Curry (chief of police in Dallas). However, Curry always insisted that Winston G. Lawson
was the person who made all the major decisions. This included the
order that the proposed side escorts for the motorcade were to be
redeployed to the rear of the cars. 
In a statement he made later, Lawson commented:
"As the lead car was passing under this bridge I heard the first loud,
sharp report and in more rapid succession two more sounds like gunfire. I
could see persons to the left of the motorcade vehicles running away. I
noticed Agent Hickey standing up in the follow-up car with the
automatic weapon and first thought he had fired at someone. Both the
President's car and our lead car rapidly accelerated almost
simultaneously." Lawson remained a member of the Secret Service until he retired. He still works as a consultant on security issues. On the 40th anniversary of the assassination he gave an interview to Michael Granberry of the Dallas Morning News.: I must have thought a million times, what could I have done to prevent it?... From Love Field to Dealey Plaza, there were 20,000 windows. How could we possibly check them all?"
Granberry's article goes on to say: "When the president's day began at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, a persistent drizzle had forced the Secret Service to consider covering the motorcade's cars in Dallas with protective bubbletops. (Hours later, Dallas would end up sunny.) Though the bubbletops were not bulletproof, the metal and the contour of the covering, says Lawson, would have made it difficult for a bullet to do much damage, and might have kept a gunman from even firing in the first place. So he's asked himself a million times: Why couldn't it keep raining?" (spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk)
