In the President's Secret Service
By Ronald Kessler
Prologue
ALL EYES IN THE crowd were on the new president and first lady as they smiled and
waved and held hands, celebrating the moment. But the men and women who walked
along Pennsylvania Avenue with them never looked at the couple, only into the crowd.
The temperature was twenty-eight degrees, but the Secret Service agents' suit jackets
were open, hands held free in front of the chest, just in case they had to reach for their
SIG Sauer P229 pistols. On television as the motorcade proceeded, the world could
sometimes catch a glimpse of a man's silhouette on top of a building, a countersniper
poised and watching. But that was just a hint of the massive security precautions that
had been planned in secret for months.
The Secret Service scripted where Barack and Michelle Obama could step out of "the
Beast," as the presidential limousine is called. At those points, counterassault teams
stood ready, armed with fully automatic Stoner SR-16 rifles and flash bang grenades for
diversionary tactics.
If they spotted any hint of a threat, the grim-faced agents never betrayed it. It is the same
when they see what goes on behind the scenes. Because Secret Service agents are sworn
to secrecy, voters rarely know what their presidents, vice presidents, presidential
candidates, and Cabinet officers are really like. If they did, says a former Secret Service
agent, "They would scream."
Pledged to take a bullet for the president, agents are at constant risk. Yet the Secret
Service's own practices magnify the dangers to its agents, the president, the vice
president, and others they protect. These lapses could lead to an assassination.
1
Supervise
EVEN BEFORE HE took the oath of office, Abraham Lincoln was the object of plots to
kidnap or kill him. Throughout the Civil War, he received threatening letters. Yet, like
most presidents before and after him, Lincoln had little use for personal protection. He
resisted the efforts of his friends, the police, and the military to safeguard him. Finally,
late in the war, he agreed to allow four Washington police officers to act as his
bodyguards.
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a fanatical Confederate sympathizer, learned that
Lincoln would be attending a play at Ford's Theatre that evening. The president's
bodyguard on duty was Patrolman John F. Parker of the Washington police. Instead of
remaining on guard outside the president's box, Parker wandered off to watch the play,
then went to a nearby saloon for a drink. As a result of Parker's negligence, Lincoln was
as unprotected as any private citizen.
Just after ten P.M., Booth made his way to Lincoln's box, snuck in, and shot him in the
back of the head. The president died the next morning.
Despite that lesson, protection of the president remained spotty at best. For a short time
after the Civil War, the War Department assigned soldiers to protect the White House
and its grounds. On special occasions, Washington police officers helped maintain order
and prevented crowds from assembling. But the permanent detail of four police officers
that was assigned to guard the president during Lincoln's term was reduced to three.
These officers protected only the White House and did not receive any special training.
Thus, President James A. Garfield was unguarded as he walked through a waiting room
toward a train in the Baltimore and Potomac Railway station in Washington on the
morning of July 2, 1881. Charles J. Guiteau emerged from the crowd and shot the
president in the arm and then fatally in the back. Guiteau was said to be bitterly
disappointed that Garfield had ignored his pleas to be appointed a consul in Europe.
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, tried to find the bullet in the
president's back with an induction-balance electrical device he had invented. While the
device worked in tests, it failed to find the bullet. All other efforts failed as well. On
September 19, 1881, Garfield died of his wounds.
While the assassination shocked the nation, no steps were taken to protect the next
president, Chester A. Arthur. The resistance came down to the perennial question of how
to reconcile the need to protect the country's leaders with their need to mingle with
citizens and remain connected to the people.
In fact, after Garfield's assassination, the New York Tribune warned against improving
security. The paper said that the country did not want the president to become "the slave
of his office, the prisoner of forms and restrictions."
The tension between openness and protection went back to the design of the White
House itself. As originally proposed by Pierre L'Enfant and approved in principle by
George Washington, the White House was to be a "presidential palace." As envisioned, it
would have been five times larger than the structure actually built. But Republican
opposition, led by Thomas Jefferson, discredited the Federalist plan as unbefitting a
democracy. The critics decried what was known as "royalism"-surrounding the president
with courtiers and guards, the trappings of the English monarchy.
To resolve the impasse, Jefferson proposed to President Washington that the executive
residence be constructed according to the best plan submitted in a national competition.
Washington endorsed the idea and eventually accepted a design by architect James
Hoban. Workers laid the cornerstone for the White House on October 13, 1792. When
the building received a coat of whitewash in 1797, people began referring to it as the
White House.
Given the competing aims of openness and security, it's not surprising that the Secret
Service stumbled into protecting the president as an afterthought. The agency began
operating as a division of the Department of the Treasury on July 5, 1865, to track down
and arrest counterfeiters. At the time, an estimated one third of the nation's currency was
counterfeit. States issued their own currency printed by sixteen hundred state banks.
Nobody knew what their money was supposed to look like.
Ironically, Abraham Lincoln's last official act was to sign into law the legislation
creating the agency. Its first chief was William P. Wood, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, a friend of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and the superintendent of
the Old Capitol Prison.
One of the Secret Service's first targets, William E. Brockway was doing such a good
job creating bogus thousand-dollar treasury bonds that the treasury itself redeemed
seventy-five of them. Chief Wood personally tracked Brockway to New York, where he
was living under a pseudonym. Known as the King of Counterfeiters, he was convicted
and sent to jail.
By 1867, the Secret Service had brought counterfeiting largely under control and had
won acclaim in the press.
"The professional criminal never willingly falls in the way of the Secret Service," the
Philadelphia Telegram declared. "The chase is as relentless as death, and only death or
capture ends it."
With the agency's success, Congress gave the Secret Service broader authority to
investigate other crimes, including fraud against the government. In 1894, the Secret
Service was investigating a plot to assassinate President Grover Cleveland by a group of
"western gamblers, anarchists, or cranks" in Colorado. Exceeding its mandate, the
agency detailed two men who had been conducting the investigation to protect
Cleveland from the suspects. For a time, the two agents rode in a buggy behind his
carriage. But after political opponents criticized him for it, Cleveland told the agents he
did not want their help.
As the number of threatening letters addressed to the president increased, Cleveland's
wife persuaded him to increase protection at the White House. The number of police
assigned there rose from three to twenty-seven. In 1894, the Secret Service began to
supplement that protection by providing agents on an informal basis, including when the
president traveled.
It did not help the next president, William McKinley. Unlike Lincoln and Garfield,
McKinley was being guarded when Leon F. Czolgosz shot him on September 6, 1901.
McKinley was at a reception that day in the Temple of Music at the Pan-American
Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Long lines of citizens passed between two rows of
policemen and soldiers to shake his hand. Two Secret Service agents were within three
feet of him when the twenty-eight-year-old self-styled anarchist joined the line and shot
the president twice with a pistol concealed in a handkerchief. Bullets slammed into
McKinley's chest and stomach. Eight days later, he died of blood poisoning.
Still, it was not until the next year-1902-that the Secret Service officially assumed
responsibility for protecting the president. Even then it lacked statutory authority to do
so. While Congress began allocating funds expressly for the purpose in 1906, it did so
only annually, as part of the Sundry Civil Expenses Act.
As protective measures increased, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge that he considered the Secret Service to be a "very small but very
necessary thorn in the flesh. Of course," he wrote, "they would not be the least use in
preventing any assault upon my life. I do not believe there is any danger of such an
assault, and if there were, as Lincoln said, 'Though it would be safer for a president to
live in a cage, it would interfere with his business.'"
Unsuccessful assassination attempts were made on President Andrew Jackson on
January 30, 1835; President Theodore Roosevelt on October 14, 1912; and Franklin D.
Roosevelt on February 15, 1933, before he had been sworn in. Even though Congress
kept considering bills to make it a federal crime to assassinate the president, the
legislative branch took no action. Members of the public continued to be free to roam
the White House during daylight hours. In fact, back when the White House was first
opened, a deranged man wandered in and threatened to kill President John Adams.
Never calling for help, Adams invited the man into his office and calmed him down.
Finally, at the Secret Service's insistence, public access to the White House grounds was
ended for the first time during World War II. To be let in, visitors had to report to gates
around the perimeter. By then, Congress had formally established the White House
Police in 1922 to guard the complex and secure the grounds. In 1930, the White House
Police became part of the Secret Service. That unit within the Secret Service is now
called the Secret Service's Uniformed Division. As its name implies, the division
consists of officers in uniform.
In contrast to the Uniformed Division, Secret Service agents wear suits. They are
responsible for the security of the first family and the vice president and his family as
opposed to the security of their surroundings. They also are responsible for protecting
former presidents, presidential candidates, and visiting heads of state, and for security at
special events of national significance such as presidential inaugurations, the Olympics,
and presidential nominating conventions.
By the end of World War II, the number of Secret Service agents assigned to protect the
president had been increased to thirty-seven. The stepped-up security paid off. At two twenty P.M. on November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to force their way
into Blair House to kill President Harry S. Truman. The would-be assassins, Oscar
Collazo, thirty-six, and Griselio Torresola, twenty-five, hoped to draw attention to the
cause of separating the island from the United States.
The two men picked up a couple of German pistols and took a train from New York to
Washington. According to American Gunfight by Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge,
Jr., they took a cab to the White House. It turned out that the White House was being
renovated, and their target was not staying there. The building was in such poor
condition that Margaret Truman's piano had begun to break through the second floor.
From the cab driver, Collazo and Torresola learned that during the renovation, Trumancode-named Supervise-was staying at Blair House across the street. They decided to
shoot their way in.
Getting out on Pennsylvania Avenue, Torresola walked toward the west side of Blair
House, while Collazo approached from the east. They planned to arrive at the mansion
simultaneously with guns blazing, take down the security, and then find the president. As
marksmen, Torresola was by far the better shot; Collazo was engaged in on-the-job
training. But for the two men, fate would have its own plans.
Secret Service Agent Floyd Boring and White House Police Officer Joseph Davidson
were manning the east security booth. In the west security booth was White House
Police Officer Leslie Coffelt. White House Police Officer Donald Birdzell was standing
on the front steps under the mansion's canopy his back to the street, when Collazo came
up behind him.
Unfamiliar with the automatic pistol he carried, Collazo tried to fire. The gun clicked,
but nothing happened. Birdzell turned at the sound, to see the gunman struggling. Then
the pistol cracked. A round tore into Birdzell's right knee.
Leaving the east security booth, Agent Boring and Officer Davidson drew their pistols
and opened fire on Collazo. Hearing the shots, Secret Service Agent Stewart Stout, who
was inside Blair House, retrieved a Thompson submachine gun from a gun cabinet. He
had been standing post in a hallway, guarding the stairs and elevator leading to the
second floor, where Truman was napping in his underwear. Bess Truman-code-named
Sunnyside-as usual was out of town. She hated Washington.
Standing in front of the west security booth, Torresola whipped out his Luger and
pumped rounds into Officer Coffelt's abdomen. Coffelt slumped to the floor. Torresola
came around from the guardhouse and encountered another target-White House Police
Officer Joseph Downs, who was in civilian clothes. Torresola hit him three times-in the
hip, the shoulder, and the left side of his neck.
Then Torresola jumped a hedge and headed toward the entrance where wounded officer
Birdzell was aiming his third or fourth shot at Collazo. Spotting Torresola, Birdzell
squeezed off a round at him and missed. Torresola fired back, and the shot tore into the
officer's other knee.
In a last heroic act, Coffelt leaped to his feet and propped himself against his security
booth. He pointed his revolver at Torresola's head and fired. The bullet ripped through
Torresola's ear. The would-be assassin pitched forward, dead on the street.
The other officers and agents blasted away at Collazo. He finally crumpled up as a shot
slammed into his chest. Meanwhile, Secret Service Agent Vincent Mroz fired at him
from a second-floor window.
The biggest gunfight in Secret Service history was over in forty seconds. A total of
twenty-seven shots had been fired.
Having killed Torresola, officer Coffelt died in surgery less than four hours later. He
earned a place on the Secret Service's honor roll of personnel killed in the line of duty.
Collazo and two White House policemen recovered from their wounds. Truman was
unharmed. If the assassins had made it inside, Stout and other agents would have mowed
them down.
Looking back, agent Floyd Boring recalled, "It was a beautiful day, about eighty degrees
outside." He remembered teasing Coffelt. "I was kidding him about getting a new set of
glasses. I wanted to find out if he had gotten the glasses to look at the girls."
When the shooting stopped, Boring went up to see Truman. As Boring recalled it,
Truman said, "What the hell is going on down there?"
The next morning, "Truman wanted to go for a walk," says Charles "Chuck" Taylor, an
agent on his detail. "We said we thought it was not a good idea. The group might still be
in the area."
The following year, Congress finally passed legislation to permanently authorize the
Secret Service to protect the president, his immediate family, the president-elect, and the
vice president if he requested it.
"Well, it is wonderful to know that the work of protecting me has at last become legal,"
Truman joked as he signed the bill on July 16, 1951.
But it would remain up to the president how much protection he would receive. By their
very nature, presidents want more exposure, while Secret Service agents want more
security. As President Kennedy's aide Kenneth O'Donnell said, "The president's views of
his responsibilities as president of the United States were that he meet the people, that he
go out to their homes and see them, and allow them to see him, and discuss, if possible,
the views of the world as he sees it, the problems of the country as he sees them."
Yet there was a fine line between those worthwhile goals and recklessness.
2
Lancer
AT SEVEN AGENTS per shift, John F. Kennedy's Secret Service detail consisted of
about twenty-four agents, including supervisors. Before being hired, they were taken to
a range for target practice with a pistol and handed a manual. There was no other initial
training.
"On my second day on the job as an agent, they put me in the rear seat of the president's
limousine," says former agent Larry D. Newman. "A supervisor on the detail placed a
Thompson submachine gun on my lap. I had never seen a Thompson, much less used
one."
Over the next several years, Newman received a total of ten weeks of training,
consisting of four weeks on law enforcement procedures at the Treasury Department and
six weeks of Secret Service training. But he never could figure out why locked boxes of
shotguns were kept in the White House for the Secret Service, yet only the White House
police had the keys.
Newman was told to take a bullet for the president and keep his mouth shut about the
president's personal life. Human surveillance cameras, Secret Service agents observe
everything that goes on behind the scenes. To this day, Secret Service directors
periodically remind agents that they must not reveal to anyone-let alone the press-what
they see behind the scenes. Usually the directors cite a phrase about trust from the
commission book that agents carry with their credentials. The book says the agent is a
"duly commissioned special agent of the United States Secret Service, authorized to
carry firearms, execute warrants, make arrests for offenses against the United States,
provide protection to the president and others eligible by law, perform other such duties
as are authorized by law, and is commended as being worthy of trust and confidence."
Newman and other agents assigned to guard Kennedy soon learned that he led a double
life. He was the charismatic leader of the free world. But in his other life, he was the
cheating, reckless husband whose aides snuck women into the White House to appease
his sexual appetite.
Former agent Robert Lutz remembers a gorgeous Swedish Pan Am flight attendant who
was on the press plane that was following Kennedy on Air Force One. She seemed to
take a liking to Lutz, and he planned to invite her out to dinner. The detail leader noticed
that they were getting chummy and told the agent to stay away.
"She's part of the president's private stock," he warned Lutz.
Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowen
Besides one-night stands, Kennedy had several consorts within the White House. One
was Pamela Turnure, who had been his secretary when he was a senator, then Jackie's
press secretary in the White House. Two others, Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowen, were
secretaries who were known as Fiddle and Faddle, respectively. Wear already had the
nickname Fiddle when she joined the White House staff, so Kennedy aides applied the
name Faddle to Cowen.
"Neither did much work," says former agent Larry Newman, who was on the Kennedy
detail.
They would have threesomes with Kennedy.
"When Jackie was away, Pam Turnure would see JFK at night at the residence," says
former Secret Service agent Chuck Taylor. "Fiddle and Faddle were well-endowed and
would swim with JFK in the pool. They wore only white T-shirts that came to their
waists. You could see their nipples. We had radio contact with Jackie's detail in case she
came back."
One afternoon, Kennedy was cavorting in the pool with young women when Secret
Service agents on Jackie's detail radioed that she was returning to the White House
unexpectedly.
"Jackie was expected back in ten minutes, and JFK came charging out of the pool," says
agent Anthony Sherman, who was on his detail at the time. "He had a bathing suit on
and a Bloody Mary in his hand."
Kennedy looked around and gave the drink to Sherman.
"Enjoy it; it's quite good," the president said.
According to Secret Service agents, Kennedy had sex with Marilyn Monroe at New
York hotels and in a loft above the Justice Department office of then Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy, the president's brother. Between the fifth and sixth floors, the loft
contains a double bed that is used when the attorney general needs to stay overnight to
handle crises. Its proximity to a private elevator made it easy for Kennedy and Monroe
to enter from the Justice Department basement without being noticed.
"He [Kennedy] had liaisons with Marilyn Monroe there," a Secret Service agent says.
"The Secret Service knew about it."
If Kennedy was reckless in his personal life, he was also rash when it came to security.
Before his trip to Dallas on November 22, 1963, he received warnings about possible
violence there. United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson called Kennedy aide Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., and urged him to tell the president not to go to Dallas. He said he had
just given a speech in Dallas and had been confronted by demonstrators who'd cursed at
him and spat on him. Stevenson said Senator J. William Fulbright also warned Kennedy.
"Dallas is a very dangerous place," Fulbright told him. "I wouldn't go there. Don't you
go."
Nonetheless, Kennedy aide O'Donnell told the Secret Service that unless it was raining,
the president wanted to ride in an open convertible, according to the Warren
Commission Report, which was largely based on the FBI's investigation. If it had rained,
Kennedy would have used a plastic top that was not bulletproof. Kennedy-code-named
Lancer-himself told agents he did not want them to ride on the small running boards at
the rear of the car.
Shortly after eleven-fifty A.M., Kennedy's limousine proceeded from Love Field toward
a scheduled luncheon at the Trade Mart. The car made a gradual descent on Elm Street
toward a railroad overpass before reaching the Stemmons Freeway at Dealey Plaza. The
Texas School Book Depository was on Kennedy's right.
Only two Secret Service agents had gone ahead to Dallas to make advance preparations
for the trip. As is true today, the agency relied a great deal on local police and local
offices of other federal agencies. At the time, the advance protocol did not include an
inspection of buildings along the motorcade route, which was publicized in advance.
At twelve-thirty P.M., the president's limousine was traveling at about eleven miles per
hour. Shots resounded in rapid succession from the Texas School Book Depository. A
bullet entered the base of the back of the president's neck. Another bullet then struck him
in the back of the head, causing a massive, fatal wound. He fell to the left onto his wife
Jackie's lap. [that is bulls$*t, the head wound was from a shot in front of him,hence the massive wound in the back of his head.,where the bullet exited his head! DC]
Agent William R. Greer was driving the limo, and Agent Roy H. Kellerman was sitting
to his right. But neither could immediately leap to Kennedy's assistance, as would have
been the case if agents had been allowed to ride at the rear of the car. Making things
more difficult, the president's limousine had a second row of seats between the front and
rear seats, where Kennedy sat. The "kill shot" to the president's head came 4.9 seconds
after the first shot that hit him.
Greer had no special training in evasive driving. After the first shot, he did not
immediately accelerate or take evasive action. In fact, he momentarily slowed the car
and waited for a command from Agent Kellerman.
"Let's get out of here! We are hit," Kellerman yelled.
Agent Clinton J. Hill, riding on the left running board of the follow-up car, raced toward
Kennedy's limousine. He pulled himself onto the back of the car as it gained speed. He
pushed Jackie-code-named Lace-back into the rear seat as he shielded both her and the
president.
"If agents had been allowed on the rear running boards, they would have pushed the
president down and jumped on him to protect him before the fatal shot," Chuck Taylor,
who was an agent on the Kennedy detail, tells me.
Confirming that, Secret Service Director Lewis Merletti later said, "An analysis of the
ensuing assassination-including the trajectory of the bullets which struck the president indicates that it might have been thwarted had agents been stationed on the car's running
boards."
Taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital four miles away, Kennedy was pronounced dead
at one P.M. Agents throughout the Secret Service were devastated.
Once again, an assassin had changed the course of history. For the Secret Service, the
question was how well it would learn lessons from the assassination in order to prevent
another one.
3
Volunteer
IF SECRET SERVICE agents found Kennedy to be reckless, Lyndon B. Johnson was
uncouth, nasty, and often drunk. Agent Taylor recalls driving Johnson, who was then
vice president, with another agent from the U.S. Capitol to the White House for a four
P.M. appointment with Kennedy. Johnson-code-named Volunteer-was not ready to leave
until three forty-five P.M. Because of traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue, they were
going to be late.
"Johnson said to jump the curb and drive on the sidewalk," Taylor says. "There were
people on the sidewalk getting out of work. I told him, 'No.' He said, 'I told you to jump
the curb.' He took a newspaper and hit the other agent, who was driving, on the head. He
said, 'You're both fired.'"
When they arrived at the White House, Taylor told Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's secretary,
"I've been fired."
Lincoln shook her head in exasperation. Taylor was not fired.
After becoming president on November 22, 1963, Johnson had affairs with several of his
young, fetching secretaries. When his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, was away, the Secret
Service would take him to the home of one secretary. He would insist that the agents
depart while he spent time with her.
"We took him to the house, and then he dismissed us," Taylor says.
At one point, Lady Bird Johnson-code-named Victoria-caught him having sex on a sofa
in the Oval Office with one of his secretaries. Johnson became furious at the Secret
Service for not warning him.
"He said, 'You should have done something,'" recalls a supervisory Secret Service agent.
After the incident, which occurred just months after he took office, Johnson ordered the
Secret Service to install a buzzer system so that agents stationed in the residence part of
the White House could warn him when his wife was approaching.
"The alarm system was put in because Lady Bird had caught him screwing a secretary in
the Oval Office," a former Secret Service agent says. "He got so goddamned mad. A
buzzer was put in from the quarters upstairs at the elevator to the Oval Office. If we saw
Lady Bird heading for the elevator or stairs, we were to ring the bell."
Johnson did not limit himself to the women he hired for his personal staff. He had "a
stable" of women with whom he had sex, including some who stayed at the ranch when
Lady Bird was home, another former agent says.
"He and Lady Bird would be in their bedroom, and he'd get up in the middle of the night
and go to the other room," the former agent says.
"Lady Bird knew what he was doing.
One woman was a well-endowed blonde. Another was the wife of a friend of his. He had
permission from her husband to have sex with her. It was amazing."
"We had gals on my staff he screwed," says Bill Gulley who headed Johnson's military
office. "One ... showed up [for work] when she wanted to show up. I couldn't tell her to
do anything."
Johnson "would screw anything that would crawl, basically," says William F. Cuff,
Gulley's executive assistant in the military office. "He was a horny old man. But he had
a totally loyal White House staff. There was one common enemy everyone in the White
House had, and that was him [Johnson]. Therefore, everyone got along fine because they
were afraid of him."
Asked in a 1987 TV interview about her husband's rumored infidelities, Lady Bird
Johnson said, "You have to understand, my husband loved people. All people. And half
the people in the world were women."
Air Force One crew members say Johnson often closed the door to his stateroom and
spent hours alone locked up with pretty secretaries, even when his wife was on board.
"Johnson would come on the plane [Air Force One], and the minute he got out of sight
of the crowds, he would stand in the doorway and grin from ear to ear, and say, 'You
dumb sons of bitches. I piss on all of you,'" recalls Robert M. MacMillan, an Air Force
One steward. "Then he stepped out of sight and began taking off his clothes. By the time
he was in the stateroom, he was down to his shorts and socks. It was not uncommon for
him to peel off his shorts, regardless of who was in the stateroom."
Johnson did not care if women were around.
"He was totally naked with his daughters, Lady Bird, and female secretaries,"
MacMillan says. "He was quite well endowed in his testicles. So everyone started
calling him bull nuts. He found out about it. He was really upset."
Johnson was often inebriated. He kept bottles of whiskey in his car at the ranch. One
evening when Johnson was president, he came back to the White House drunk,
screaming that the lights were on, wasting electricity.
"He is the only person [president] I have seen who was drunk," says Frederick H.
Walzel, a former chief of the White House branch of the Secret Service Uniformed
Division.
"He had episodes of getting drunk," George Reedy, his press secretary, told me. "There
were times where he would drink day after day. You would think, 'This guy is an
alcoholic' Then all of a sudden, it would stop. We could always see the signs when he
called for a Scotch and a soda, and he would belt it down and call for another one,
instead of sipping it."
Johnson's drinking only fueled his outbursts.
"We were serving roast beef one time," says MacMillan. "He [Johnson] came back in the
cabin. Jack Valenti [Johnson's aide] was sitting there. He had just gotten his dinner tray.
On it was a beautiful slice of rare roast beef."
Johnson grabbed the tray and said, "You dumb son of a bitch. You are eating raw meat."
Johnson then brought the food back to the galley and said, "You two sons of bitches,
look at this. This is raw. You gotta cook the meat on my airplane. Don't you serve my
people raw meat. Goddamn, if you two boys serve raw meat on my airplane again, you'll
both end up in Vietnam."
Johnson threw the tray upside down onto the floor and stormed off.
A few minutes later, Valenti went back to the galley.
"Sorry about your dinner, Mr. Valenti," MacMillan said.
"Do we have any more rare?" Valenti asked.
"We have plenty of rare," MacMillan said.
"Well, he won't be back. He's done his thing. Don't serve me any fully cooked meat."
Gerald F. Pisha, another Air Force One steward, says that on one occasion when Johnson
didn't like the way a steward had mixed a drink for him, he threw it onto the floor.
"Get somebody who knows how to make a drink for me," Johnson said.
At his ranch in Texas, Johnson was even more raunchy than at the White House. At a
press conference at his ranch, Johnson "whips his thing out and takes a leak, facing them
[the reporters] sideways," says D. Patrick O'Donnell, an Air Force One flight engineer.
"You could see the stream. It was embarrassing. I couldn't believe it. Here was a man
who is the president of the U.S., and he is taking a whiz out on the front lawn in front of
a bunch of people."
A Secret Service agent posted to his ranch recalls that Johnson would take celebrities on
a tour of the ranch in a car that-unknown to them-was amphibious. As he approached the
Pedernales River, he would drive the vehicle into the river, terrifying his guests.
At six one morning, the agent was posted outside a door that led directly to Johnson's
bedroom.
"I'm looking at the sun coming up and listening to the birds, and I hear this noise," the
former agent says. "I turn around, and here's the most powerful man in the world taking
a leak off the back porch. And I remembered a saying down in Texas that I heard when I
first got on that detail: When LBJ goes to the ranch, the bulls hang their heads in shame.
This guy had a tool you wouldn't believe."
The former agent was present when LBJ held a press conference with White House pool
reporters as he sat on a toilet, moving his bowels. He had discarded his girdle, which he
wore to hide his girth.
"I just couldn't believe that this stuff was going on," the former agent says. "But this was
an everyday thing to the guys that were with him all the time."
After Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, an agent was told to wake Johnson in the
morning so he could meet with his press secretary.
"I tapped on his bedroom door," the former agent says. "Lady Bird said to come in."
"He's in the bathroom," she said.
"I tapped on the bathroom door," the former agent says. "Johnson was sitting on the can.
Toilet paper was everywhere. It was bizarre."
"If Johnson weren't president, he'd be in an insane asylum," former agent Richard Roth
says he thought to himself when he was occasionally on Johnson's detail.
Johnson kept dozens of peacocks at his ranch.
"One night at midnight, one of these peacocks was walking around," says David Curtis,
who was temporarily assigned to Johnson's Secret Service detail at his ranch. "It was a
moonlit night, and an agent picked up a rock just intending to scare the darn thing. He
lobbed it over in the direction of the peacock and hit him right in the head. The peacock
went down like a ton of bricks."
After an agent relieved him at his post, the agent told other agents, "Oh, my God, I've
killed a peacock. What do you think we should do?"
"The consensus was, there were so damn many of them around, no one would miss one,"
Curtis says. "Just drag him down to the Pedernales River and throw him in. So that's
what they did."
At the break of dawn, the day shift relieved the midnight people. One of the day shift
agents called the command post on the radio.
"My God, you've got to get out here!" the agent said. "Looks like a drunken peacock.
He's all wet. He's staggering from one foot to the other, feathers askew. He's walking
back up toward the house."
Somehow, the peacock had recovered and managed to drag itself out of the river.
Johnson never found out about the incident.
"Johnson was the grand thief," Gulley his White House military aide, says. "He knew
where the money was. He had us set up a fund code-named Green Ball. It was a Defense
Department fund supposedly to assist the Secret Service to purchase weapons. They
used it for whatever Johnson wanted to use it for. Fancy hunting guns were bought.
Johnson and his friends kept them."
All the while, Johnson fostered the image of a penny-pincher who was saving taxpayer
money. As part of an economy drive, Johnson announced he had ordered the lights
turned off inside the ladies' room in the press area.
When Johnson left office, Gulley says he arranged for at least ten flights to fly
government property to Johnson's ranch. O'Donnell, the Air Force One flight engineer,
says he flew three of the missions, shipping what he understood were White House
items back to the Johnson ranch.
"We flew White House furniture back," O'Donnell says. "I was on some of the missions.
The flights back were at seven-fifty or eight-fifty P.M. and early in the morning. ... I
think he even took the electric bed out of Walter Reed army hospital. That was a
disgrace."
Johnson's greatest achievement was overcoming Southern resistance to passage of civil
rights legislation, yet in private, he regularly referred to blacks as "niggers."
After Johnson died, Secret Service agents guarding Lady Bird were amazed to find that
even though their home was crammed with photos of Johnson with famous people, not
one photo pictured him with JFK.
4
Threats
EVERY DAY, THE Secret Service receives an average of ten threats against any of its
protectees, usually the president. Ironically, until after the Kennedy assassination,
murdering the president was not a federal crime. Yet in 1917, Congress made
"knowingly and willfully" threatening the president-as opposed to killing him-a federal
violation. As later amended, the law carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and a
fine of $250,000, or both. The same penalty applies to threatening the president-elect,
the vice president, the vice-president-elect, or any officer next in the line of succession.
To ensure that an attack on a protectee-called an AOP-does not take place, the Secret
Service uses a range of secret techniques, tools, strategies, and procedures. One of those
tools is the extensive files the Secret Service Protective Intelligence and Assessment
Division keeps on people who are potential threats to the president.
To most potential assassins, killing the president would be like hitting the jackpot.
"We want to know about those individuals," a former agent who worked intelligence
says. "Sooner or later, they will direct their attention to the president if they can't get
satisfaction with a senator or governor."
The Secret Service may detect threats anywhere, but those directed at the White House
come in by email, regular mail, and telephone. Upon hearing a threatening call, White
House operators are instructed to patch in a Secret Service agent at headquarters. Built
in 1997, Secret Service headquarters is an anonymous nine-story tan brick building on H
Street at Ninth Street NW in Washington. For security reasons, there are no trash cans in
front of the building. An all-seeing security camera is attached below the overhang of
the entrance.
Just inside is a single metal detector. On the wall in big silver letters are the words
"Worthy of Trust and Confidence." No mention of the Secret Service, not even on the
visitor's badge that the security officer issues. It is just when you get into the inner
sanctum that you see a wall announcing the United States Secret Service Memorial
Building, a reference to the thirty-five agents, officers, and other personnel who have
died in the line of duty.
Inside, around a central atrium, catwalks link the rows of offices behind glass walls. For
agents too pressed to wait for an elevator, open staircases within the atrium offer
vertiginous looks down during the climb to another floor. The hallways are lined with
candid photos of presidents being protected. A display commemorates those who have
died in the line of duty, with spaces left for more.
An exhibit hall features first chief William P. Wood's 1865 letter of appointment from
the solicitor of the treasury, a copy of Lee Harvey Oswald's gun, and examples of
counterfeit bills alongside real bills.
The nerve center of the Secret Service is on the ninth floor. Here, in the Joint Operations
Center, a handful of agents monitor the movements of protectees, whose code names and
locations are displayed on light panels on the walls. When a protectee arrives at a new
location, the agent who is assigned to intelligence and is traveling with him informs the
Joint Operations Center. When protectees make unexpected trips, agents refer to the new
assignment as a pop-up. Next to the Joint Ops Center, as agents refer to it, the Director's
Crisis Center is used to direct operations in emergencies such as the 9/11 attack.
When a suspicious call comes in to the White House and an agent at headquarters listens
in, the agent may pretend to be another operator helping out.
"He is waiting for the magic word [that signifies a threat to the president]," a Secret
Service agent explains. "He is tracing it."
The Forensic Services Division matches a recording of the call with voices in a database
of other threat calls. No threat is ignored. If it can locate the individual, the Secret
Service interviews him and evaluates how serious a threat he may be. Agents try to
differentiate between real threats and speech that is a legitimate exercise of First
Amendment rights.
"If you don't like the policies of the president, you can say it. That's your right," a Secret
Service agent assigned to the vice president's detail says. "We're looking for those that
cross the line and are threatening: 'I'm going to get you. I'm going to kill you. You
deserve to die. I know who can help kill you.' Then his name is entered into the
computer system."
Arrests for such threats are routine. For example, the Secret Service arrested Barry
Clinton Eckstrom, fifty-one, who lives in Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, after a Secret
Service agent, alerted that the man was sending threatening emails, saw him type the
following into an email he was sending from a Pittsburgh area public library: "I hate and
despise the scum President Bush! I am going to kill him in June on his father's birthday."
Eckstrom was sentenced to two years in prison and two years of supervised release.
If there is a problem at the White House, the Joint Ops Center can view the scene by
remotely controlling surveillance cameras located outside and inside the complex. Any
threatening letter or phone call to the White House is referred to the Secret Service.
Most threats are in the form of letters addressed to the president, rather than emails or
calls. Potential assassins get a great sense of satisfaction by mailing a letter. They think
that if they mail it, the president will personally read it.
If a letter is anonymous, the Secret Service's Forensic Services Division checks for
fingerprints and analyzes the handwriting and the ink, matching it against the ninety-five
hundred samples of ink in what is called the International Ink Library. To make the job
easier, most ink manufacturers now add tags so the Secret Service can trace the ink. The
characteristics of each specimen are in a digital database. Technicians try to match the
ink with other threatening letters in an effort to trace its origin. They may scan the letter
for DNA.
The Secret Service's Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division categorizes
individuals according to how serious a threat they may pose.
"There's a formula that we go by," says an agent. "It's based on whether this person had
prior military training, firearms training; a prior history of mental illness; and how
effective he would be in carrying out a plan. You have to judge these things based on
your interview with the subject, and then evaluate the seriousness of the threat."
Class III threats are the most serious. Close to a hundred people are on the list. These
individuals are constantly checked on. Courts have given the Secret Service wide
latitude in dealing with immediate threats to the president.
"We will interview serious threats every three months and interview neighbors," an
agent says. "If we feel he is really dangerous, we monitor his movements almost on a
daily basis. We monitor the mail. If he is in an institution, we put in stops so we will be
notified if he is released." If an individual is in an institution and has a home visit, "We
are notified," the agent says. "I guarantee there will be a car in his neighborhood to make
sure he shows up at his house."
"If a call comes here, if you get a piece of correspondence, any form of communication,
even a veiled threat, we run everything to the ground until we are certain that we either
have to discontinue the investigation or we have to keep monitoring a subject for a
prolonged period of time," says Paula Reid, the special agent in charge of the Protective
Intelligence and Assessment Division.
If the president is traveling to a city where a Class III threat not confined to an
institution lives, the Secret Service will show up at his door at some point before the
visit. Intelligence advance agents will ask if the individual plans to go out and, if so, his
destination. They will then conduct surveillance of the house and follow him if he
leaves.
Even if a Class III threat is locked up, an intelligence advance agent will visit him.
Nothing is left to chance.
"If they aren't locked up, we go out and sit on them," former agent William Albracht
says. "You usually have a rapport with these guys because you're interviewing them
every quarter just to see how they're doing, what they're doing, if they are staying on
their meds, or whatever. We knock on their door. We say, 'How're you doing, Freddy?
President's coming to town; what are your plans?' What we always want to hear is, 'I'm
going to stay away'"
"Well, guess what," an agent will say. "We're going to be sitting on you, so keep that in
mind. Don't even think about going to the event that the president will be at, because
we're going to be on you like a hip pocket. Where you go, we go. We're going to be in
constant contact with you and know where you are the entire time. Just be advised."
John W. Hinckley Jr., is still considered a Class III threat. In March 1981, he was found
not guilty by reason of insanity in the shootings of President Reagan, Reagan press
secretary James Brady, Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy, and D.C. police officer
Thomas Delahanty. Since then, he has been confined to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in
Washington. But Hinckley is periodically allowed to leave the psychiatric hospital to
visit his mother in Williamsburg, Virginia. If he visits Washington, his family notifies
the Secret Service, and agents may conduct surveillance of him.
In contrast to a Class III threat, a Class II individual has made a threat but does not
appear to have the ability to carry it out.
"He may be missing an element, like a guy who honestly thinks he can kill a president
and has made the threat, but he's a quadriplegic or can't formulate a plan well enough to
carry it out," says an agent.
Class II threats usually include people who are confined to a prison or mental hospital.
According to a virulent rumor in state prisons, if a prisoner threatens the president and is
convicted of the federal crime, he will be moved to a federal prison, where conditions
are generally more favorable than in state prisons. For that reason, the Secret Service
often encounters threats from prisoners. For example, in November 2008, Gordon L.
Chadwick, age twenty-seven, threatened to kill President George W. Bush while serving
a four-year state prison term in Houston for threatening a jail official. As happened in
Chadwick's case, a federal prison term for threatening the president is tacked on to the
state prison term.
After another state prisoner wrote a threatening letter to Bush, an agent arranged to meet
with him. After driving three hours to the prison, the agent asked him if he knew why
the agent was there.
"Yep. When do I go to federal prison?" the man said.
The prisoner added that he hoped to "see the country" and, since he was serving a life
term, this would be his best opportunity. When the agent explained that he would be
serving his state term first, the man said he had heard that threatening the president was
the way to be transferred to a federal prison.
"I could have strangled him," the agent says.
A Class I individual-the least serious threat-may have blurted out at a bar that he wants
to kill the president.
"You interview him, and he has absolutely no intention of carrying this threat out," an
agent says. "Agents will assess him and conclude, 'Yeah, he said something stupid; yeah,
he committed a federal crime. But we're not going to charge him or pursue that guy' You
just have to use your discretion and your best judgment."
In most cases, a visit from Secret Service agents is enough to make anyone think twice
about carrying out a plot. When Pope John Paul II visited Saint Louis in January 1999,
the Secret Service, which was protecting him, received a report about a man seen driving
a camper in the city. On the sides of the camper were inscriptions such as "The Pope
Should Die" and "The Pope Is the Devil."
Through the reported license plate number, the Secret Service tracked the man to an
address, which turned out to be his mother's home not far from Saint Louis. When
interviewed by Secret Service agents, the man's mother said her son was driving to the
mountains in western Montana near Kalispell to see his brother.
Norm Jarvis, the resident agent in charge, drove to the Kalispell area where the brother
was supposed to be living. The forested area is vast. Like many who live in the area, the
brother did not have an address. Jarvis hoped local law enforcement would know where
he could start looking.
"I was driving down the road, and lo and behold, coming the other way down the street,
is this camper," Jarvis says. "The Pope Should Die" and "The Pope Is the Devil" were
written on the sides of the vehicle. The man driving the camper fit the description of the
suspect. Jarvis could not believe his luck.
"I spun my car around and turned on my lights and siren," Jarvis says. "I got up
alongside him and waved him over."
With the man's wife sitting beside him, Jarvis interviewed the man, who said he had
been in mental institutions and was off his medication. The man had no firearms, and
Jarvis decided he was not capable of harming the Pope. Thus, he was a Class II threat.
Jarvis took his fingerprints and photographed him. He warned him to stay away from
Saint Louis during the Pope's visit, and he suggested the man get some help.
Jarvis called headquarters to report his contact with the suspect and the results of his
initial findings. Within a few days, he finished writing a report and called the duty desk
to say he was going to be sending it.
"They told me the guy had killed himself with his brother's pistol," Jarvis says. "His
brother reported that he was so shook up after talking to me that he decided to end his
life. He felt that he couldn't escape the devil; the devil was going to find him. And then
he shot himself."
5
Searchlight
IF LYNDON JOHNSON was out of control, the Secret Service found Richard Nixon
and his family to be the strangest protectees. Like Johnson, Nixon-code-named
Searchlight-did not sleep in the same bedroom with his wife. But unlike Johnson, who
consulted Lady Bird on issues he faced, Nixon seemed to have no relationship with his
wife, Pat.
"He [Nixon] never held hands with his wife," a Secret Service agent says.
An agent remembers accompanying Nixon, Pat, and their two daughters during a nine hole golf game near their home at San Clemente, California. During the hour and a half,
"He never said a word," the former agent says. "Nixon could not make conversation
unless it was to discuss an issue.... Nixon was always calculating, seeing what effect it
would have."
Unknown to the public, Pat Nixon-code-named Starlight-was an alcoholic who tippled
martinis. By the time Nixon left the White House to live at San Clemente, Pat "was in a
pretty good stupor much of the time," an agent on Nixon's detail says. "She had trouble
remembering things."
"One day out in San Clemente when I was out there, a friend of mine was on post, and
he hears this rustling in the bushes," says another agent who was on Nixon's detail. "You
had a lot of immigrants coming up on the beach, trying to get to the promised land. You
never knew if anybody's going to be coming around the compound."
At that point, the other agent "cranks one in the shotgun. He goes over to where the
rustling is, and it's Pat," the former agent says. "She's on her hands and knees. She's
trying to find the house."
Pat, he says, "had a tough life. Nixon would hardly talk. The only time he enjoyed
himself was when he was with his friends Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp, when they
would drink together."
Nixon often spent time with Abplanalp on his friend's island, Grand Cay in the
Bahamas.
"Just to give you an idea of his athletic prowess, or lack of it, he loved to fish," a former
agent says. "He'd be on the back of Abplanalp's fifty-five-foot yacht, and he would sit in
this swivel seat with his fishing pole. Abplanalp's staff would hook Nixon's hook and
throw the hook out. And Nixon would be just sitting there, with both hands on the pole,
and he'd catch something, and the staff would reel it in for him, take the fish off, put it in
the bucket. Nixon wouldn't do anything but watch."
During Watergate, "Nixon was very depressed," says another former agent. "He wasn't
functioning as president any longer. Bob Haldeman [Nixon's chief of staff] ran the
country."
Milton Pitts, who ran several barbershops in Washington, would go to a tiny barbershop
in the basement of the West Wing to cut Nixon's hair.
"Nixon talked very little," Pitts told me. "He wanted to know what the public was
saying. We had a TV there. But he never watched TV. All the other presidents did."
During Watergate, Nixon would ask Pitts, "Well, what are they saying about us today?"
Pitts would say he hadn't heard much news that day.
"I didn't want to get into what people were saying," Pitts said. "I'm not going to give him
anything unpleasant. He was my boss."
One afternoon, Alexander Butterfield, who would later reveal the existence of the Nixon
tapes, came in for a haircut just before Nixon did. Motioning to the television set,
Butterfield said to Pitts, "Leave that on. I want him [Nixon] to see what they are doing to
us."
But as soon as Nixon walked into the barbershop, "He pushed the button, and the TV
went off," Pitts says. "He said, 'Well, what are they saying about us today?' I said, 'Mr.
President, I haven't heard much news today, sir.'"
As the Watergate scandal progressed, "Nixon got very paranoid," a Secret Service agent
says. "He didn't know what to believe or whom to trust. He did think people were lying
to him. He thought at the end everyone was lying."
While Nixon rarely drank before the Watergate scandal, he began drinking more heavily
as the pressure took its toll. He would down a martini or a manhattan.
"All he could handle was one or two," a Secret Service agent says. "He wouldn't be
flying high, but you could tell he wasn't in total control of himself. He would loosen up,
start talking more, and smile. It was completely out of character. But he had two, and
that was that. He had them every other night. But always at the end of business and in
the residence. You never saw him drunk in public."
In contrast to the blustering in his taped conversations, Nixon in private seemed passive
and often out of it, although he did have a sense of humor. After spending a weekend at
Camp David, Nixon stepped out of his cabin with Pat to get into a Secret Service
limousine that would take them to Marine One, the president's helicopter.
"Secret Service agents were at the ready to move," says one of Nixon's agents. "The
agent who was driving was checking everything out, making sure the heater was
properly adjusted. Nixon paused to talk to Pat. The driver accidentally honked his horn,
and Nixon, thinking he was being impatient, said, 'I'll be right there.'"
At his San Clemente home, Nixon was watching television one afternoon while feeding
dog biscuits to one of his dogs.
"Nixon took a dog biscuit and was looking at it and then takes a bite out of it," says
Richard Repasky who was on his detail.
Nixon would walk on the beach wearing a suit, all his suits were navy blue-and dress
shoes. Even in summer, he would insist on having a fire burning in the fireplace. One
evening, Nixon built a fire in the fireplace at San Clemente and forgot to open the flue
damper.
"The smoke backed up in the house, and two agents came running," says a former agent
who was on the Nixon detail.
"Can you find him?" one of the agents asked the other.
"No, I can't find the son of a bitch," the other agent said.
From the bedroom, a voice piped up.
"Son of a bitch is here trying to find a matching pair of socks," Nixon said, poking fun at
himself.
One agent will never forget a reunion for Vietnam prisoners of war held outside Nixon's
San Clemente home.
"This POW did a series of paintings of Hanoi camp scenes," the former agent says. "He
was quite good. He presented Nixon with a big painting of POWs. Later that evening,
after everyone had left, Nixon was going back to his home. It was a warm night. His
assistant turned to Nixon and said, 'What do you want me to do with the picture? Should
I bring it in the house?'"
"Put that goddamned thing in the garage," Nixon said. "I don't want to see that."
The former agent says he shook his head and thought, "You smiled and shook hands
with these guys, and you couldn't care less. It was all show."
"Monday through Friday, Nixon would leave his home at twelve-fifty-five P.M. to play
golf," Dale Wunderlich, a former agent on his detail, says. "He would insist on golfing
even in pouring rain."
Occasionally, Nixon's son-in-law David Eisenhower, grandson of former president
Dwight Eisenhower, went with him. Agents considered the younger Eisenhower the
most clueless person they had ever protected. One day, the Nixons gave him a barbecue
grill as a Christmas present. With the Nixons inside his house, Eisenhower tried to start
the grill to char some steaks. After a short time, he told Wunderlich it would not light.
"He had poured most of a bag of briquets into the pit of the grill and lit matches on top
of them, but he had not used fire starter," Wunderlich says.
"Do you know anything about garage door openers?" Eisenhower asked another Secret
Service agent. "I need a little help. I've had it two years, and I don't get a light. Shouldn't
the light come on?"
"Maybe the light bulb is burnt out," the agent said.
"Really?" David said.
The agent looked up. There was no bulb in the socket.
"We did a loose surveillance, or tail, on David Eisenhower when there were a lot of
threats on the president, and he was going to George Washington University Law School
in Washington," a former agent says. "He was in a red Pinto. He comes out of classes
and goes to a Safeway in Georgetown. He parks and buys some groceries. A woman
parks in a red Pinto nearby. He comes out in forty-five minutes and puts the groceries in
the other Pinto. He spent a minute and a half to two minutes trying to start it.
Meanwhile, she comes out, screams, and says, 'What are you doing in my car?'"
"This is my car," he insisted. "I just can't get it started right now."
The woman threatened to call the police. He finally got out, and she drove off.
"He was still dumbfounded," the former agent says. "He looked at us. We pointed at his
car. He got in and drove off like nothing had happened."
Subsequently, Eisenhower bought a new Oldsmobile and planned to drive it from
California to Pennsylvania to see his grandmother Mamie Eisenhower, who was codenamed Springtime. In Phoenix, the car gave out. Eisenhower called a local dealership,
which said it would fix the car the next morning. After staying overnight in a motel,
Eisenhower went to the dealership where the car had been towed. The dealership told
him the problem had been fixed: The car had run out of gas and needed a fill-up.
Near the end of Nixon's presidency, his vice president Spiro Agnew was charged with
accepting one hundred thousand dollars in cash bribes. Agnew had taken the payoffs
when he was a Maryland state official and later when he was vice president. Agnew
pleaded nolo contendere and agreed to resign, leaving office on October 10, 1973.
What never came out was that the married Agnew, a champion of family values who
made no secret of his disdain for the liberal press, was having affairs while in office.
One morning in late 1969, Agnew asked his Secret Service detail of five agents to take
him to what is now Washington's elegant St. Regis hotel at 923 Sixteenth Street NW.
"We took him in the back door and brought him to a room on the fourth floor," says one
of the agents. "He asked us to leave him alone for three hours. The detail leader
understood he was having an affair with a woman."
The agents waited in Lafayette Park, two blocks from the hotel and across the street
from the entrance to the White House. They then returned to the hotel to pick up the vice
president.
"He looked embarrassed," the former agent says. "Leaving him in an unsecured location
was a breach of security. As agents, it was embarrassing because we were facilitating his
adultery. We felt like pimps. We couldn't look her [his wife] in the eye after that."
In addition to that incident, Agnew was having an affair with a dark-haired, well endowed female member of his staff. Agnew would not stay in hotels overnight unless
the Secret Service arranged for her to be given an adjoining room, a former agent says.
The woman was the age of one of Agnew's daughters.
Ironically, Agnew-who had a good relationship with his agents-expressed concern to
them early on about whether they would be telling stories about him to others. In fact,
while agents love to exchange stories about protectees among themselves, as a rule,
Secret Service agents are more tight-lipped with outsiders than CIA officers or FBI
agents. The reason the Secret Service insists that agents not reveal information about
personal lives of protectees is that those under protection may not let agents close if they
think their privacy will be violated.
While that is a legitimate concern, those who run for high office should expect a high
degree of scrutiny and to be held accountable for personal indiscretions that conflict
with their public image and that shed light on their character. Rather than expecting the
Secret Service to cover up for them, they should not enter public life if they want to lead
double lives. That is particularly true when one considers that a president or vice
president having an affair opens himself to possible blackmail. If a lower-level federal
employee was having an affair, he would be denied a security clearance.
"If you want the job, then you need to lead the kind of life and be the kind of person that
can stand up to the scrutiny that comes with that job," says former Secret Service agent
Clark Larsen.
"You just shake your head when you think of all the things you've heard and seen and
the faith that people have in these celebrity-type people," a former Secret Service agent
says. "They are probably worse than most average individuals." He adds, "Americans
have such an idealized notion of the presidency and the virtues that go with it, honesty
and so forth. In most cases, that's the furthest thing from the truth.... If we would pay
attention to their track records, it's all there. We seem to put blinders on ourselves and
overlook these frailties."
The poor personal character of presidents like Nixon and Johnson translated into the
kind of flawed judgment that led to the Watergate scandal and the continuing fruitless
prosecution of the Vietnam War when American security interests were not at stake.
Voters tend to forget that presidents are, first and foremost, people. If they are
unbalanced, nasty, and hypocritical, that will be reflected in their judgment and job
performance.
If a friend, an electrician, a plumber, or a job applicant had a track record of acting
unethically, lying, or displaying the kind of unbalanced personality of a Johnson or a
Nixon, few would want to deal with him. Yet in the case of presidents and other
politicians, voters often overlook the signs of poor character and focus instead on their
acting ability on TV.
No one can imagine the kind of pressure that being president of the United States
imposes on an individual and how easily power corrupts. To be in command of the most
powerful country on earth, to be able to fly anywhere at a moment's notice on Air Force
One, to be able to grant almost any wish, to take action that affects the lives of millions,
is such a heady, intoxicating experience that only people with the most stable
personalities and well-developed values can handle it. Simply inviting a friend to a
White House party or having a secretary place a call and announce that "the White
House is calling" has such a profound effect on people that presidents and White House
aides must constantly remind themselves that they are mortal.
Of all the perks, none is more seductive than living in the one-hundred-thirty-two-room
White House. Servants are always on call to take care of the slightest whim. Laundry,
cleaning, and shopping are provided for. From three kitchens, White House chefs
prepare meals that are exquisitely presented and of the quality of the finest restaurants.
If members of the first family want breakfast in bed every day-as Lyndon Johnson did, they can have it. A pastry chef makes everything from Christmas cookies to chocolate
éclairs. If the first family wants, it can entertain every night. Invitations-hand-lettered by
five calligraphers-are rarely turned down. In choosing what chinaware to eat from, the
first family has its choice of nineteen-piece place settings ordered by other first families.
They may choose, for example, the Reagans' pattern of a gold band around a red border,
or the Johnsons' pattern, which features delicate wildflowers and the presidential seal.
Fresh flowers decorate every room, and lovely landscaping-including the Rose Garden
and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden-adorns the grounds.
"The White House is a character crucible," says Bertram S. Brown, M.D., a psychiatrist
who formerly headed the National Institute of Mental Health and was an aide to
President John F. Kennedy. "It either creates or distorts character. Few decent people
want to subject themselves to the kind of grueling abuse candidates take when they run
in the first place," says Dr. Brown, who has seen in his practice many top Washington
politicians and White House aides. "Many of those who run crave superficial celebrity.
They are hollow people who have no principles and simply want to be elected. Even if
an individual is balanced, once someone becomes president, how does one solve the
conundrum of staying real and somewhat humble when one is surrounded by the most
powerful office in the land, and from becoming overwhelmed by an at times
pathological environment that treats you every day as an emperor? Here is where the
true strength of the character of the person, not his past accomplishments, will determine
whether his presidency ends in accomplishment or failure."
Thus, unless a president comes to the office with good character, the crushing force of
the office and the adulation the chief executive receives will inevitably lead to disaster.
For those reasons, the electorate has a right to know about the true character of its
leaders.
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