In the President's Secret Service
By Ronald Kessler
11
Stagecoach
AS PART OF an advance, the Secret Service reviews reports from the intelligence
community about possible threats. In 1996, former president George H. W. Bush was
planning to fly to Beirut, Lebanon. The itinerary called for him to land on Cyprus, then
helicopter over to Lebanon.
"The CIA informed us there was a threat on the former president's life," says Lou
Morales, an agent who was with Bush 41, as he is called, on the trip. "The informant
knew the itinerary of the helicopter flight and the time it was to take off. In fact, he was
part of the plot, which had been hatched by Hezbollah. They were going to shoot
missiles to take the helicopter down."
The Secret Service informed Bush, who insisted he wanted to go to Beirut regardless of
the risk. The Secret Service scrubbed the helicopter flight and instead drove him in a
motorcade at ninety miles per hour from Damascus to Beirut. As with most thwarted
plots against protectees, this one never appeared in the press.
Once agents have completed an advance, they recommend how many additional agents
will be needed to cover the president. The normal working shift consists of a shift leader
or whip and four shift agents. These are the "body men" around the protectee. Other
agents include three to four transportation agents, along with counter-surveillance agents
and a complete counterassault team of five to six agents.
Besides agents from the local field office, the additional agents for a presidential visit
come from the rest of the Secret Service's 139 domestic offices. They include forty-two
field offices in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago; fifty-eight resident
offices; sixteen resident agency offices; and twenty-three one-agent domiciles. These
offices are in addition to twenty overseas offices.
Prior to a presidential visit, agents are flown to the location on air force transports, along
with the president's limo-code-named Stagecoach-and Secret Service vehicles. The
countersniper and counter -assault teams and bomb techs fly in the same aircraft. These
agents are in addition to shift agents who accompany the president on Air Force One.
Canada prohibits agents from carrying arms, but they sneak in their weapons in
presidential limousines.
In contrast to the open car President Kennedy used, the presidential limousine now is a
closed vehicle. Known affectionately as "the Beast," the 2009 Cadillac now in use was
put into service for Barack Obama's inauguration. The Beast lives up to its moniker.
Built on top of a GMC truck chassis, the vehicle is armor-plated, with bulletproof glass
and its own supply of oxygen. It is equipped with state-of-the-art encrypted
communications gear. It has a remote starting mechanism and a self-sealing gas tank.
The vehicle can keep going even when the tires are shot out. It can take a direct hit from
a bazooka or grenade. The car's doors are eighteen inches thick, and its windows are five
inches thick. The latest model has larger windows and greater visibility than the Cadillac
first used by President Bush for his January 2005 inauguration.
Often the first limousine in the motorcade is a decoy. The second limousine is a backup.
The president could actually be in a third limousine or in any vehicle in the motorcade.
The number of cars in the motorcade depends on the purpose of the trip. For an
unannounced visit to a restaurant, seven or eight Secret Service cars, known as the
informal package, make the trip. For an announced visit, the formal package of up to
forty vehicles, including cars for White House personnel and the press, goes out. Agents
refer to their Secret Service vehicles as G-rides.
Including the White House doctor and other administration personnel, a domestic trip
entails two hundred to three hundred people. An overseas trip could involve as many as
six hundred people, including military personnel. In 2008 alone, the Secret Service
provided protection on 135 overseas trips. On such trips, the Secret Service relies on
local police even more than it does in the United States. But when Richard Nixon was
vice president, local police disappeared as an angry mob descended on Nixon and his
wife, Pat, at the Caracas, Venezuela, airport on May 13, 1958. [All this wasted $$$ on a puppet,trust me,their shit stinks just like everyone,talk about idol worship...DC]
"The police were supposed to provide protection at the airport," recalls Chuck Taylor,
one of the Secret Service agents on the detail. "We noticed the police started to leave the
motorcade. They were afraid of the mob, and so the police deserted their security
arrangements."
As stones and bottles were being thrown at the couple, agents formed a tight ring around
them and quickly escorted them into the president's bulletproof limousine. Along the
route to the American embassy, protestors had erected a roadblock. Wielding clubs and
pipes, a crowd swarmed the car.
"They had firebombs, and they were bent on killing everybody in the party," Taylor says.
"In some cases they put small kids out in front of the car, so we'd run over the kids. We
appraised that situation and decided to walk the car through." [BULLS*#T DC]
The crowd tried to pry open the doors and then began to rock the limo and try to set it on
fire. But as long as the agents were facing down the insurgents, they seemed afraid to
approach too closely. The agents managed to get Nixon safely to the American embassy
where more angry insurgents confronted them. [pulling out my hip boots now DC]
"They wanted to burn down the embassy" Taylor says. "We went ahead and put these
sandbags around, and we jerry-rigged a radio system so that we were able to talk to
Washington. I understand they had cut the transatlantic cable, and we weren't able to
communicate normally. We were able to radio the president and tell him what the story
was. The president sent the Sixth Fleet out to evacuate everybody."[Yeah sandbags work against firebombs all the time,and nice touch with the jerry-rigged radio,and the 6th fleet? So did they send for Knute Rockne for the pep talk too? DC]
Now on domestic trips, each motorcade includes a car for the Secret Service
counter assault team armed with submachine guns. Another Secret Service car, known as
the intelligence car, keeps track of people who have been assessed as threats and picks
up local transmissions to evaluate them. If necessary, it jams the communications of
anyone who presents a threat. Normally, a helicopter supplied by the Park Police or local
law enforcement hovers overhead.
For a motorcade, local police on motorcycles block access from side streets and leapfrog
from intersection to intersection. Agents check out offices along the route. Before
President Ford visited Conroe, Texas, Agent Dave Saleeba was told that one office in a
building along the motorcade route could not be opened. Checking further, he learned
that the building was owned by the heirs of a local lawyer.
Back in 1915, the lawyer had become heartbroken when his son, who'd been riding to
see him, fell off his horse, hit his head on a well, and died. The lawyer never entered his
office again and directed that his heirs never open it. However, at Saleeba's request, the
lawyer's granddaughter agreed to open the office. Saleeba found the man's desk covered
with dust. A brown bag on top of the desk looked as if it had contained his lunch, now
disintegrated.
Secret Service agents believe that simply being there, scanning crowds with a ferocious
look, often wearing sunglasses, deters would-be assassins. Agents are looking for signs
of danger-people who don't seem to fit in, have their hands in their pockets, are sweating
or look nervous, or appear as if they have mental problems. Agents lock in on
movements, objects, or situations that are out of place.
"We look for a guy wearing an overcoat on a warm day," says former agent William
Albracht, who was a senior instructor at the Secret Service's James J. Rowley Training
Center. "A guy not wearing an overcoat on a cold day. A guy with hands in his pockets.
A guy carrying a bag. Anybody that is overenthusiastic, or not enthusiastic. Anybody
that stands out, or is constantly looking around. You're looking at the eyes and most
importantly the hands. Because where those hands go is the key."
If an agent sees a bystander at a rope line with his hands in his pockets, he will say, "Sir,
take your hands out of your pockets, take your hands out of your pockets NOW."
"If he doesn't, you literally reach out and grab the individual's hands and hold them
there," Albracht says. "You have agents in the crowd who will then see you're having
problems. They'll come up to the crowd, and they'll grab the guy and toss him. They will
take him out of there, frisk him, pat him down, and see what his problem is. You are
allowed to do that in exigent circumstances in protection because it's so immediate. You
don't have time to say, 'Hey would you mind removing your hands?' I mean if this guy's
got a weapon, you need to know right then."
An agent who sees a weapon screams to fellow agents: "Gun! Gun!"
To identify themselves to other agents and to police helping during events, Secret
Service agents wear color-coded pins on their left lapels. The pins, which bear the five pointed star of the Secret Service, come in four colors. Each week, agents change to one
of the four prescribed colors so they can recognize one another in crowds. On the back
of the pin is a four-digit number. If the pin is stolen, the number can be entered on the
FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the computerized database that police
use when they stop cars to see if they are stolen or if the occupants are fugitives. If the
pin is found, police return it to the Secret Service.
When on protection duty, Secret Service agents wear trademark radio earpieces tuned to
one of the encrypted channels the Secret Service uses. Known as a surveillance kit, the
device includes a radio transmitter and receiver that agents keep in their pockets.
As for the sunglasses, "In training, they would give us clear Ray-Ban glasses," former
agent Pete Dowling says. "The reason they did that was eye protection, in case
somebody threw something at the protectee. Most of the guys had them shaded. But the
stereotype is the Secret Service guy always has sunglasses on, even when he is indoors."
In practice, some agents wear sunglasses so people do not see where they are looking.
Others prefer not to wear them.
Agents wearing plain clothes and no earpieces infiltrate crowds and patrol around the
White House. If they spot a problem or vulnerability, they use a cell phone to notify the
Joint Ops Center at Secret Service headquarters.
"They're the guys in the crowd," an agent says. "You wouldn't know they were there, and
they're on the outside looking in during an event and during an advance."
These agents try to think like assassins: How can they breach the security?
"It's their job to take apart our plan prior to game day," the agent says. "It's their job to
basically say, here are the holes, here are your vulnerabilities, tell us how you're going to
plug these holes."
Technicians take photos of the crowds at presidential events. The images are compared
with photos taken at other events-sometimes using facial recognition software-to see if a
particular individual keeps showing up.
Since the attempts on Ford's life, presidents have generally worn bulletproof vests at
public events. They are currently Kevlar Type Three vests that will stop rounds from
most handguns and rifles but not from more powerful weapons. Agents on the
president's and vice president's details are now supposed to wear them at public events,
but some agents prefer not to wear them. While the vests have been improved, they are
uncomfortable and can make life unbearable on a hot day.
"You have to be hypervigilant," says former agent Jerry Parr, who headed President
Reagan's detail when he was shot. In the twenty years before the attempt on Reagan's
life, "You had one president murdered, one shot and wounded, a governor shot and
wounded and paralyzed, two attempts on Ford, and you had Martin Luther King killed.
You know it's out there. You just don't know where."
12
Rawhide
IN CONTRAST TO Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan treated Secret Service agents, the Air
Force One crew, and the maids and butlers in the White House with respect.
"Carter came into the cockpit once in the two years I was on with him," says James A.
Buzzelli, an Air Force One flight engineer. "But [Ronald] Reagan never got on or off
without sticking his head in the cockpit and saying, 'Thanks, fellas,' or 'Have a nice day'
He [Reagan] was just as personable in person as he came across to the public."
"One Christmas when we were at the ranch, he came up to me and apologized to me for
having to be away from my family on a holiday," former agent Cliff Baranowski says.
"A lot of times they would give us food from a party. I certainly did not expect it, but
sometimes they insisted."
Former agent Thomas Blecha remembers that when Reagan was running for president
the first time, he came out of his home in Bel Air to drive to Rancho del Cielo, the
seven-hundred-acre Reagan ranch north of Santa Barbara. Another agent noticed that he
was wearing a pistol and asked what that was for.
"Well, just in case you guys can't do the job, I can help out," Reagan-code-named
Rawhide-replied. Reagan confided to one agent that on his first presidential trip to the
Soviet Union in May 1988, he had carried a gun in his briefcase.
For a time, East Executive Avenue was closed, and when Reagan's motorcade left the
White House, it would go along E Street onto Fifteenth Street instead of using
Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. As a result, unless he looked out a
window of the White House, Reagan did not see demonstrators opposed to nuclear arms
who camped out across Pennsylvania Avenue in Lafayette Park. After East Executive
Avenue reopened, Agent Patrick Sullivan was driving when Reagan looked out the
window of his limo. Reagan saw a perennial demonstrator in Lafayette Park give him a
"Heil Hitler" salute as the vehicle passed him.
"This one gentleman was there all the time, and he had posters," Sullivan recalls. "He
was a nonviolent protester. We pulled the president's motorcade up East Exec and made
the left turn on Pennsylvania. The demonstrator was so shocked, because he had been
there for a year and had never seen the motorcade go that way."
The demonstrator jumped up.
"He starts giving President Reagan the Nazi salute," Sullivan says. "He starts yelling
'Heil Reagan! Heil Reagan!' The president sees him standing up giving him the Nazi
salute. The president was so shocked and hurt, he said to us, 'Did you see that man
giving me the Nazi salute? Why would he do that?'"
While it seemed to be a rhetorical question, Reagan clearly wanted a response.
"Mr. President, he's out there all the time. He's a nut," Sullivan said to Reagan. "That's
all he does. He camps out there; he's there every day."
"Oh, okay," Reagan said.
"That's just the way he was," Sullivan says. "Once he realized he was a nut, he was okay
with him. He just didn't want this guy to be a regular citizen. Reagan was just a sincere,
down-to-earth gentleman. And I think it hurt his feelings that this guy was giving him
the Nazi salute."
Quite often, Reagan quietly wrote personal checks to people who had written him with
hard-luck stories.
"Reagan was famous for firing up air force jets on behalf of children who needed
transport for kidney operations," says Frank J. Kelly, who drafted presidential messages.
"These are things you never knew about. He never bragged about it. I hand-carried
checks for four thousand or five thousand dollars to people who had written him. He
would say, 'Don't tell people. I was poor myself.'"
While Reagan liked to look for the best in people, he was not a Boy Scout. On one
occasion, Reagan gave a speech at Georgetown University. As the motorcade drove
down M Street toward the White House, Reagan noticed a man in a crowd.
"Fellows, look," Reagan said to his agents. "A guy over there's giving me the finger, can
you believe that?"
Reagan started waving back, smiling.
"We're going by, and he's still waving and smiling, and he goes, 'Hi there, you son of a
bitch,'" agent Dennis Chomicki remembers, imitating Reagan's buttery-smooth delivery.
One late Friday afternoon, Reagan had left the White House for Camp David. Agent
Sullivan was working W-16, the Secret Service's office under the Oval Office.
"A guy came up to the northwest gate carrying a live chicken, demanding to see the
president," Sullivan says. "He said he wanted to do a sacrifice for President Reagan. And
he impaled the chicken on the fence of the White House. He took the chicken and stuck
him on a point on top."
Uniformed officers arrested the man, and he was sent to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for
observation.
When Reagan was to go to Spokane, Washington, in 1986, Pete Dowling was part of the
advance team sent to scope things out. Besides reviewing all known threats, he met with
the Spokane police department, the FBI, and other agencies that might have intelligence
on possible threats.
One night, the police department called Dowling to report that an older couple staying at
a Best Western downtown had found a large paper dinner napkin on the floor of an
elevator. The napkin appeared to have writing on it, so they looked closer. The napkin
apparently had a diagram of the Spokane Coliseum, where Reagan was going to speak in
four days.
"I went to the police department, I got the napkin, and sure enough, it was a diagram of
the coliseum," Dowling recalls. "And it had a legend; it had Xs around the exterior of
the coliseum, and then in the legend it said X equals security post. Then it had all of our
license plates of the cars we were using. Clearly somebody was conducting surveillance
of us."
At the time, a neo-Nazi group called the Aryan Nations was headquartered at Coeur
d'Alene, Idaho, a drive of about forty-five minutes from Spokane. Among other things,
the group objected to the tax system and was threatening to assassinate public officials.
Dowling thought the napkin could have originated from the group. He drove to the Best
Western and asked the clerk to show him all the sign-in cards.
"He gave me a little wooden box that contained index cards," Dowling says. "There
were four hundred rooms in the hotel, so I started thumbing through the index cards, and
when I got to the sixtieth one, bingo. It was the exact handwriting and hand printing that
I saw on the napkin."
Dowling noted the license plate listed on the card. He walked into the parking lot and
saw a four-door sedan with the same license plate number. Looking inside, he saw
blankets neatly piled in the back and two pillows on top of the blankets. Some books
were piled on the floor. Obviously, someone was living in the car. Dowling thought it
odd that someone living in a car would be so tidy. He called the police and asked for two
backup cars.
"We went up to the room, and I knocked on the door, and the guy said, 'Who is it?'"
Dowling says.
"It's me, open up," Dowling replied.
"The idiot opened the door. He was just in his underpants. I grabbed him by his hair, and
I pulled him out into the hallway," Dowling says. "One of the officers grabbed him, and
we all went in and did what we call a protective sweep of the room, just to ensure that
nobody else was in there armed."
Dowling noticed a bullet on top of the dresser. Attached to the bullet was a string, and
attached to the string was a little white piece of paper.
"Reagan will die," the paper said.
The suspect gave Dowling permission to search the room but not his car.
"I'm going to be up all night anyway, so to do an application for a search warrant and to
bring it to a judge at his home at three o'clock in the morning, that's no sweat for me,"
Dowling said to the man. "Either way, it doesn't matter."
"You can search my car," the man said. "The gun's in the car."
It turned out the man had just gotten out of prison after being convicted of bank robbery.
While he was in jail, he had had a romantic relationship with another male inmate. The
other inmate had just been transferred to another prison, and the suspect heard that his
former lover was romantically involved with somebody else.
"He wanted to do something spectacular in the Spokane area so he could go back to jail
and be reunited with the other man," Dowling says.
As Reagan was running for reelection in 1984, a New York state trooper spotted an old
Buick sedan going twenty-five miles an hour on the New York State Thruway where the
speed limit was sixty-five. The trooper pulled the man over and immediately noticed an
array of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition on the floor and front passenger
seat.
"What do you think you're doing?" the officer asked.
"I'm going to kill the people running against Reagan," the man replied.
The officer arrested the man, who was committed to a mental hospital north of New
York City for observation. Because the man had threatened to kill presidential
candidates, two Secret Service agents, at the direction of the Secret Service Intelligence
Division, were dispatched to interview him. At first, the patient's psychiatric manager
balked at the idea of a law enforcement interview. He then relented as long as the agents
removed their guns and handcuffs and did not bring radios or briefcases.
"The man said he was glad to see us," one of the agents says. "He said he loves the
Secret Service and was willing to tell us everything."
But first, the man asked the agents to pray with him.
"We folded our hands and bowed our heads at the interview table and prayed with the
man," the agent says. "At that moment, the psychiatrist walked in. It's a wonder he didn't
have us committed."
When the news broke that Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart was having an
affair with Donna Rice, Reagan was returning to the White House from an evening
event.
"We were in the elevator going up to the residence on the second floor of the White
House," says former agent Ted Hresko. "The door of the elevator was about to close, and
one of the staffers blocked it. The staffer told Reagan the news about Donna Rice and
Gary Hart."
Reagan nodded his head and looked at the agent.
"Boys will be boys," he said.
When the door of the elevator shut, Reagan said to Hresko, "But boys will not be
president."
13
Rainbow
IF NANCY REAGAN'S wealthy California friends reported getting their copies of
Vogue and Mademoiselle before she did, she took it out on the White House staff. For
that reason, Nelson Pierce, an assistant usher in the White House, always dreaded
bringing Nancy her mail.
"She would get mad at me," Pierce says. "If her subscription was late or one of her
friends in California had gotten the magazine and she hadn't, she would ask why she
hadn't gotten hers."
White House ushers would then have to search for the errant magazine at Washington
newsstands, which invariably had not received their copies.
One sunny afternoon Pierce brought some mail to Nancy in the first family's west sitting
room on the second floor of the White House. Nancy's dog Rex, a King Charles spaniel,
was lying on the floor at her feet.
Pierce was old friends with Rex, Ronald Reagan's Christmas gift to his wife, or so he
thought. During the day, the usher's office-just inside the front entrance on the first floor
of the mansion-is often a napping place for White House pets. But for some reason, Rex
was not happy to see Pierce this time. As Pierce turned to leave, Rex bit his ankle and
held on. Pierce pointed his finger at the dog, a gesture to tell the dog to let go.
Nancy turned on Pierce.
"Don't you ever point a finger at my dog," she said.
From the start of his political life, Reagan was stage-managed by Nancy.
"Did I ever give Ronnie advice? You bet I did," Nancy Reagan wrote in My Turn: The
Memoirs of Nancy Reagan. "I'm the one who knows him best, and I was the only person
in the White House who had absolutely no agenda of her own-except helping him."
"Mrs. Reagan was a precise and demanding woman," recalls John F. W. Rogers, the
Reagan aide over administration of the White House. "Her sole interest was the
advancement of her husband's agenda."
It turned out that most of Nancy's advice was sound. As she explained it, "As much as I
love Ronnie, I'll admit he does have at least one fault: He can be naive about the people
around him. Ronnie only tends to think well of people. While that's a fine quality in a
friend, it can get you into trouble in politics."
Code-named Rainbow, Nancy was "very cold," a Secret Service agent in the Reagan
White House says. "She had her circle of four friends in Los Angeles, and that was it.
Nothing changed when she was with her kids. She made it clear to her kids that if they
wanted to see their father, they had to check with her first. It was a standing rule. Not
that they could not see him. 'I will let you know if it is advisable and when you can see
him.' She was something else."
Like Nancy, the Reagan's daughter Patti Davis was difficult. When agents were with her
in New York, she would attempt to ditch them by jumping out of the official vehicle
while it was stopped in traffic. She viewed her detail as a nuisance.
"On one visit to New York City, she was with movie actor Peter Strauss, whom she was
dating at the time," Albracht says. "Ms. Davis started to engage in the same tricks as on
her previous visits and in general treated the assigned agent with disrespect. Strauss
became incensed at her actions and told her, 'You'd better start treating these agents with
respect or I'm going back to L.A.'"
"Guess what," Albracht says. "She started treating us better."
Another agent says Nancy Reagan was so controlling that she objected when her
husband kibitzed with Secret Service agents.
"Reagan was such a down-to-earth individual, easy to talk to," the agent says. "He was
the great communicator. He wanted to be on friendly terms. He accepted people for what
they were. His wife was just the opposite. If she saw that he was having a conversation
with the agents, and it looked like they were good ol' boys, and he was laughing, she
would call him away. She called the shots."
"There was a dog out the ranch, and the agents used to play with the dog, and the dog
barked," says Albracht, relaying what an agent on the scene told him. "One night the dog
was barking and Nancy got mad, and she told the president, 'You go out there and you
tell the agents to leave that dog alone.'"
Apparently, the barking was interrupting her sleep. Nancy was as persistent as the dog's
barking, so Reagan said he would take care of it and left the bedroom.
"He went to the kitchen, and he just stood there," Albracht says. "He got a glass of water,
went back to bedroom, and said, 'All right, I took care of it.' He just didn't want to bother
the agents. He was a true gentleman."
On the day Reagan left office, he flew to Los Angeles on Air Force One. Bleachers had
been set up near a hangar, and a cheering crowd welcomed him while the University of
Southern California band played.
"As he was standing there, one of the USC guys took his Trojan helmet off," a Secret
Service agent says. "He said, 'Mr. President!' and threw his helmet to him. He saw it and
caught it and put it on. The crowd went wild."
But Nancy Reagan leaned over to him and said, "Take that helmet off right now. You
look like a fool."
"You saw a mood change," the agent says. "And he took it off. That went on all the
time."
While Reagan and Nancy had a loving relationship, like any married couple, they had
occasional fights.
"They were very affectionate and would kiss," Air Force One steward Palmer says of the
Reagans. But they also got mad at each other over what to eat and other small issues.
Moreover, Palmer says Nancy could only push the president so far.
"We were going into Alaska. She had put on everything she could put on," Palmer says.
"She turned around and said, 'Where are your gloves?' He said, 'I'm not wearing my
gloves.' She said, 'Oh, yes, you are.' He said he was not."
Palmer says Reagan finally took the gloves, but he said he could not shake hands while
he was wearing them. He said he would not put them on, and he didn't.
Nancy tried to restrict her husband's diet to healthy foods, but he reverted to his favorites
when Nancy was not around.
"She was protective about what he ate," Palmer says. "When she was not there, he ate
differently. One of his favorite foods was macaroni and cheese. That was a no-no for her.
If it was on the menu, she said, 'You're not eating that.'"
For all the spin from the Carter White House about not drinking, it was the Reagans who
drank the least.
"I may have served the Reagans four drinks, maybe, with the exception of a glass of
wine," Palmer says.
When they were at the ranch, the Reagans would ride horseback together every day after
lunch. Despite his cinematic roles in Westerns, he rode English, in breeches and boots.
He usually rode El Alamein, a gray Anglo-Arab given to Reagan by former president
José López Portillo of Mexico. Reagan had a routine he would follow.
"He would go up to the barn just outside the house. He would saddle up the horses, get
them all ready, then he had one of those triangle bells," former agent Chomicki says.
"He would always bang on that iron triangle, and that was Nancy Reagan's sign that the
horses are ready, come on out, let's go."
One afternoon, Reagan was banging away on the bell, but Nancy did not appear. Finally
he went into the house to get her. He came out with her looking unhappy. At that point, a
technician from the White House Communications Agency told Chomicki that he had
detected a problem with the ranch's phone system. A telephone set must have been off
the hook, and the technician wanted to check. Chomicki allowed the technician to enter
the home. The technician soon came out holding a phone that had been smashed to
pieces.
"She was on the phone," Chomicki says. "That's why she didn't come up to the barn.
Nancy never really liked the ranch. She would go up there because the president liked it.
Other than the ride, she used to stay in the house almost all the time, and a good portion
of the time she'd be talking to her friends down in L.A. For the president, the highlight
of his day was to go riding with Nancy. And when she didn't come out because she was
talking on the phone, he threw the phone on the floor."
Besides riding at the ranch, Reagan rode at the Marine Corps Base Quantico southwest
of Washington, at Camp David, and in Washington's Rock Creek Park. Agents assigned
to his detail were trained in horseback riding by the U.S. Park Police. One of the agents,
Barbara Riggs, was a skilled equestrian and required no training. Sworn in in 1975,
Riggs was the tenth female to become a Secret Service agent. The first female agents,five in all-joined the agency in 1971.
Riggs was on a first-name basis with Reagan. When she fell off one of her own horses
and suffered a concussion, he called her upstairs to the living room of the White House
after she returned to work. Reagan handed her a book called The Principles of
Horsemanship and Training Horses. With a wink, he suggested she reread it.
"Yes, I encountered sexual harassment, barriers, and attitudes that women should not be
law enforcement agents," Riggs says. "There were some who did not believe women
were capable, either physically or mentally, of doing the job. But I also encountered
many individuals who acted as my mentors and gave me great opportunities."
In 2004, Riggs became the first female deputy director of the Secret Service. The Secret
Service now has three hundred eighty female agents.
"You are always going to find a dinosaur in the bunch," says Patricia Beckford, the
eighth female agent hired. "You did have to prove yourself. But at a certain point, they
realized that our .357 Magnum shot just as well as theirs."
14
Hogan's Alley
IT GOES WITH the territory that an agent may have to take a bullet for the president.
But the actual instruction to trainees is a little more complicated.
"What we are trained to do as shift agents is to cover and evacuate if there is an attack,"
an agent says. "We form a human shield around the protectee and get him out of the
danger area to a safer location. If an agent is shot during the evacuation, then that is
something that is expected. We rely on our layers of security to handle the attacker,
while the inside shift's main function is to get the heck out of Dodge."
"People always say to me, 'Hey would you really take a bullet for the president?'" says
former agent Dowling. "I say, 'What do you think, I'm stupid?' But what we'll do is we'll
do everything in our power to keep the bullet out of the event. And that's what the Secret
Service is all about. It's about being prepared, it's about meticulous advance preparation,
and it's about training properly so that when you do your job, you don't have to bumble
around for the steps that you take."
The key to that is the James J. Rowley Training Center in Laurel, Maryland. The training
facility is nestled between a wildlife refuge and a soil conservation area. The forest
muffles the gunfire, the squealing wheels, and the explosions that are the sounds of
training Secret Service agents and Uniformed Division officers. Like many of the
buildings on this 440-acre spread, the center itself is named for a former director.
Rowley headed the Secret Service when Kennedy was assassinated, and he spearheaded
many changes after the tragedy.
The main classroom building, made of stone with a green roof, looks like it was lifted
from a community college and dropped there. The building was named for Lewis C.
Merletti, another former Secret Service director, who now heads security for the
Cleveland Browns.
While most of the photos on the walls at headquarters downtown tell of sunny days,
triumphant moments, and protectees well protected, the photos here in the Merletti
building tell of the underside, the hard work of processing evidence; and the dark side,
the failures and poignant reminders. There are photos from the JFK assassination and an
overhead of President McKinley's funeral procession in 1901. That's the year Congress
informally asked the Secret Service to protect presidents, a little late.
Along one wall, every graduating class has its class photo, going back to the start of
formalized special agent training in the fifties. Back then, they wore fedoras. The photos
proceed to the sixties, when agents had preppie hair, through the big-hair days of the
seventies, to the "normal"-looking agents of today.
Here, new agents receive a total of sixteen weeks of training, combined with another
twelve and a half weeks of training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
(FLETC) at Glynco, Georgia. To apply to be a Secret Service agent, an individual must
be a U.S. citizen. At the time of appointment, he or she must be at least twenty-one years
of age but younger than thirty-seven.
Agents need a bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university or three years
of work experience in the criminal investigative or law enforcement fields that require
knowledge and application of laws relating to criminal violations. Agents' uncorrected
vision can be no worse than 20/60, correctable to 20/20 in each eye. Besides passing a
background examination, potential agents must take drug tests and pass a polygraph
before they are hired and given a top secret security clearance.
Each year, the training center graduates seven to eleven classes of twenty-four Secret
Service and Uniformed Division recruits. Even though the training center is in Laurel,
agents refer to it as Beltsville, which is actually the town next door. Most of the training
center's roads have names appropriate to the task at hand-Firearms Road, Range Road,
Action Road, and Perimeter Road. Nothing called Ambush Road, but there is always an
ambush in the works.
At what the Secret Service calls Hogan's Alley-not to be confused with the FBI's
Hogan's Alley at its Quantico, Virginia, training academy-a body is lying in the middle
of the road. Members of the Uniformed Division (UD) sit in a small grandstand
watching down the street as four UD officers in BDUs-battle-dress uniforms-clear the
buildings and sort out how to take the bad guys down. Except for a real two-story house
and soft drink machine, the block-long village is like a Hollywood set, with the façades
of a hardware store, hotel, restaurant, bar, and bank, and real cars parked in front.
Suddenly the body comes to life, gets up, and walks away, signaling the end of the
scenario.
Instructors play the roles of hostage, baddies, and bodies. The retired head of the Prince
George's County SWAT team runs the training here along with other special ops experts.
They talk about the big picture, what agents have encountered in assassination attempts,
as well as the details, such as how to get small behind a trash can. Most important, when
agents hear gunshots, they are trained to respond rather than flinch-to cover a protectee
and relocate him. However, at the training center, a sign says this is a simulated attack
area and warns, "No live weapons beyond this point."
Narrating one of the scenarios, Bobbie McDonald, assistant to the special agent in
charge of training, explains to me, "What we're viewing is how they come upon the
problem, how they alert about the problem, how they alert their partner, how they react
to the situation. Did they take cover? Did they draw their weapon in an appropriate
fashion and at an appropriate time? Did they shoot when they should have? Was it what
we would call a good shoot, versus a bad shoot?"
In another section of the tactical village, a black van slowly drives past, packed with
counterassault team (CAT) members doing in-service training. Wearing black "unis,"
rifles at the ready, they watch out the van's windows, scowling behind their sunglasses.
Down the road, a smoke bomb goes off near a motorcade. The CAT team jumps out to
deal with whatever its members find-a motorcade ambush, a suicide bomber, a shooter.
Perhaps the explosion is a distraction from the real threat. The team leader sees
something in the woods, a sniper hiding behind a tree. Sniper subdued, the instructor
says "the problem" has been dealt with. The team hustles back into the van. The
motorcade reassembles and drives off to continue around campus, where more scenarios
are waiting.
Near another part of the tactical village is a White House gate with a kiosk where the
occasional trapped bird can be found fluttering in exhaustion at all the windows.
Replicas of the Uniformed Division's White House kiosks, those familiar white houses
with pointed roofs, dot the Secret Service campus.
A scenario staged at one of these guardhouses could be dealing with a "gate caller"
about to jump the fence. This part of the tactical town is two blocks long with the same
lettered and numbered streets as downtown Washington near the White House. The
buildings here are not back-lot façades but heavier duty, including an eight-story
repelling tower for counter snipers' practice shots.
Here, trainees work rope line scenarios where they take turns playing the protectee.
When trainees interview a "subject" in the lockup room, the person is usually a
contracted role player-an actor or a retired police officer. Agents learn to use pressure
points to unlock the grip of an assailant or an overeager fan. Outside there are "instant
action drills" where motorcades are ambushed, people fire guns from windows, and
things blow up.
Many of the practical exercises begin at the "airport," where air traffic is always
grounded. Permanently stuck on the tarmac is Air Force One-Half, a mock-up of the
front half of the presidential plane, including the presidential seal and gangway. Next to
it in similar unflyable condition is Marine One-Half, the center's version of the
president's Marine One helicopter.
At the protective operations driving course, the regular students get about twenty-four
hours of training in driving techniques. If they are assigned to drive in a detail, they
receive an additional forty hours of training.
The giant parking lot is like a driver obstacle course from TV commercials or reality
shows. Here they use Chargers-high-powered, high-energy vehicles-to speed out of the
kill zone. As a countermeasure, they learn to do the J-turn, making a perfect one hundred-eighty-degree turn at high speed by going into reverse, jerking the wheel to
right or left, and shifting into drive.
Trainees learn to negotiate serpentine courses, weaving around road objects and crashing
through barriers, roadblocks, and other cars. If the protected car is disabled, they learn to
push it through turns and obstacles with their own vehicle. When backing up their
vehicle, to give them more control, agents are trained not to turn around to look out the
rear window but to use their side-view mirrors.
Besides physical training, agents get eight to twelve hours of swimming instruction,
including escaping from a submerged helicopter. For this, the training center uses the
dunker, which is meant to simulate what would happen if a helicopter went down and an
agent-strapped into his seat-was on it.
In fact, that happened back in May 1973, when Agent J. Clifford Dietrich died while on
assignment with Nixon. Dietrich drowned when a U.S. Army helicopter crashed into the
Atlantic Ocean about two hundred yards from Grand Cay Island in the Bahamas. The
helicopter flipped upside down, and Dietrich was unable to extricate himself. The pilot
and the other six agents with him survived.
At several indoor and outdoor firing ranges, trainees and Secret Service agents doing
periodic requalification shoot handguns, shotguns, and automatic weapons. Out of view,
from behind bulletproof glass, a voice issues commands over a PA. "Hot reload all the
remaining slug rounds from the stock and one from your pocket.... Shooter will continue
one line of rifle slug in four seconds...."
A barrage of bullets flies from six stations. As they are riddled with bullets, the targets
spin in place.
"Everything we teach out here, we hope we never have to do," Bobbie McDonald says.
If it comes down to taking a bullet, "You did something wrong," says an agent. "And if
that happens, I don't think it's something you're going to think about before you do it. It's
just basically you're going to try to get the man out of the way, and if you take some
rounds, so be it. But the whole goal is for both of you to get out of there without a
scratch."
15
"I Forgot to Duck"
COMING BACK FROM the ranch one day, President Reagan chatted with his agents
about how tough it was being president, always surrounded by security.
"I would love to be able to walk into a store like any person, just go down a magazine
rack and browse through the magazines like I used to. Walk here, walk there," Reagan
said.
His agents suggested he go into a store spontaneously to lessen the risk. While he was in
the store, they would block the entrance.
"Valentine's Day was coming up, and he said he wanted to go to a card store in
Washington and get a card for Nancy," says former agent Dennis Chomicki. "So we pull
up in a small motorcade, the president gets out of the car and goes into the store. He was
just browsing around, having a great time."
Meanwhile, a man was looking at cards.
"Reagan picks a card up, and he looks over to this guy and shows it to him and he says,
'Hey do you think Nancy would like this?'" Chomicki says.
At first, the customer said, "Oh, yeah, your wife would like that."
Then he looked up.
"Oh, my God, the president!" he said.
Not long after that, Reagan would be reminded of why presidents need protection. At
two thirty-five P.M. on March 30, 1981, John W. Hinckley Jr., twenty-five, fired a .22
Röhm RG-14 revolver at Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel after giving a
speech.
Members of the public had been allowed to greet Reagan as he left the hotel.
Magnetometers were then used at stationary locations such as the White House but not
when the president traveled outside the White House. As a result, no one had been
screened. By inserting himself into that crowd, which included the press, Hinckley
managed to get within twenty feet of the president.
Instinctively, Agent Timothy McCarthy hurled himself in front of Reagan and took a
bullet in the right chest. It passed through his right lung and lacerated his liver. While
Secret Service agents and Uniformed Division officers have been wounded or killed
during protection duty, McCarthy is the only agent to have actually taken a bullet for the
president by stepping into the line of fire. In a second and a half, Hinckley fired six
rounds. Besides McCarthy, Metropolitan Police Officer Thomas Delahanty and Press
Secretary Jim Brady were wounded. Brady suffered extensive brain damage.
Agent Dennis McCarthy-no relation to Timothy-would be the first to pounce on
Hinckley. At first, McCarthy thought he was hearing firecrackers go off.
"After the second shot, I knew it was a gun," McCarthy says. "At that point, I had a
feeling of panic. I knew I had to stop it." [Old man Bush DC]
By the third shot, McCarthy spotted a pair of hands gripping a pistol in between the
television cameras just eight feet away. McCarthy lunged for the gun and hurled himself
on Hinckley as he was still firing.
"As I was going through the air, I remember the desperate feeling: 'I've got to get to him!
I've got to get to him! I've got to stop him!'" McCarthy says.
Crouched in a combat position, Hinckley collapsed as McCarthy landed on his back.
While the assailant offered no resistance, McCarthy remembers hearing the fast click,
click, click as Hinckley continued squeezing the trigger, even after the .22 caliber
revolver's six shots had been expended. McCarthy had always wondered how he would
react when gunfire actually started. Now he knew.
Like McCarthy, President Reagan at first thought he was hearing the sound of
firecrackers.
"I was almost to the car when I heard what sounded like two or three firecrackers over to
my left-just a small fluttering sound, pop, pop, pop," Reagan said later. "I turned and
said, 'What the hell's that?' Just then, Jerry Parr, the head of our Secret Service unit,
grabbed me by the waist and literally hurled me into the back of the limousine. I landed
on my face atop the armrest across the backseat, and Jerry jumped on top of me."
"I remember three quick shots and four more," Parr tells me. "With Agent Ray Shaddick,
I pushed the president down behind another agent who was holding the car door open.
Agent McCarthy got hold of Hinckley by leaping through the air. I got the president in
the car, and the other agent slammed the door, and we drove off."
The limo began speeding toward the White House.
"I checked him over and found no blood," Parr says. "After fifteen or twenty seconds,
we were under Dupont Circle moving fast. President Reagan had a napkin from the
speech and dabbed his mouth with it. He said, 'I think I cut the inside of my mouth.'"
Parr noticed that the blood was bright red and frothy. Knowing that to be a danger sign,
he ordered the driver to head toward George Washington University Hospital. It was the
hospital that had been preselected in the event medical assistance was needed.
It turned out that the president may have been within minutes of death when he arrived
at the hospital. Going straight there probably saved his life.
Reagan remembered how, as they neared the hospital, he suddenly found he could barely
breathe. "No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get enough air," he said. "I was
frightened and started to panic a little. I just was not able to inhale enough air."
In fact, Parr says, "I didn't know he was shot until we got to the hospital. He collapsed as
we walked in."
As he was placed on a gurney Reagan felt excruciating pain near his ribs.
"What worried me most was that I still could not get enough air, even after the doctors
placed a breathing tube in my throat," Reagan said. "Every time I tried to inhale, I
seemed to get less air. I remember looking up from the gurney, trying to focus my eyes
on the square ceiling tiles, and praying. Then I guess I passed out for a few minutes."
When Reagan regained consciousness, he became aware of someone holding his hand.
"It was a soft, feminine hand," he said. "I felt it come up and touch mine and then hold
on tight to it. It gave me a wonderful feeling. Even now I find it difficult to explain how
reassuring, how wonderful, it felt. It must have been the hand of a nurse kneeling very
close to the gurney, but I couldn't see her. I started asking, 'Who's holding my hand?
Who's holding my hand?'"
At one point, Reagan opened his eyes to see his wife, Nancy.
"Honey, I forgot to duck," he joked.
As luck would have it, that afternoon most of the doctors who practiced at the hospital
were attending a meeting only an elevator ride away from the emergency room.
"Within a few minutes after I arrived, the room was full of specialists in virtually every
medical field," Reagan said. "When one of the doctors said they were going to operate
on me, I said, 'I hope you're a Republican.' He looked at me and said, 'Today Mr.
President, we're all Republicans.' I also remember saying, after one of the nurses asked
me how I felt, 'All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia.'" It was the epitaph of fellow actor
W. C. Fields.
Surgeons found a bullet that had punctured and collapsed a lung. It was lodged an inch
from Reagan's heart. If he had been wearing a bulletproof vest, the bullet likely would
not have penetrated Reagan's body.
"On several previous occasions when I'd been out in public as president, the Secret
Service had made me wear a bulletproof vest under my suit," Reagan explained later.
"That day, even though I was going to speak to some die-hard Democrats who didn't
think much of my economic recovery program, no one had thought my iron underwear
would be necessary because my only exposure was to be a thirty-foot walk to the car."
"Some of my colleagues have said, 'Well, I would have taken him to the White House
because it's the safest place,'" Parr says. "You take a chance when you take the president
to the hospital. If he's not hurt, then you frighten the nation. But in this case, we were
right. And there was a trauma team there that gets a lot of gunshot wounds."
For Parr, it was a decision he had never wanted to make. He joined the Secret Service in
1962, a year before John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
"We never forgot it," Parr says. "We never wanted it to happen on our watch.
Unfortunately, it almost happened on mine."
"The agents who got him [Reagan] out of there did everything right," says former agent
William Albracht, who, as a senior instructor at the training center, taught new agents
about lessons learned from previous assassination attempts. "The other agents went to
the assassin and helped subdue him."
In retrospect, he says, "Maybe they should have jumped in the follow-up [car] and gone
with the protectee instead of staying there and trying to subdue Hinckley Because you
have police there to do that job. All agents are always thinking diversion: Is this the
primary attack, or are the bad guys trying to get us to commit all our assets and then hit
us on the withdrawal? So whether more agents should have gone with Reagan is twenty twenty hindsight. We teach agents to go with the protectee to make sure there is a
successful escape."
At the hospital, the FBI confiscated Reagan's authentication card for launching nuclear
weapons, saying that all of Reagan's effects were needed as evidence. Because no
guidelines had been worked out for a situation where a president undergoes emergency
surgery, it was not clear who could launch a nuclear strike.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution allows the vice president to act for the
president only if the president has declared in writing to the Senate and the House that
he is disabled and cannot discharge his duties. If the vice president and a majority of the
Cabinet agree that the president is unable to discharge his duties, they may make the
vice president the acting president. But that would require time.
Vice President George H. W. Bush could have taken it upon himself to launch a strike by
communicating with the defense secretary over a secure line. But it was questionable
whether he had the legal authority to do so. When Bush became president, his
administration drafted a highly detailed, classified plan for immediate transfer of power
in the case of serious presidential illness.
Before he shot Reagan, Hinckley had been obsessed with movie star Jodie Foster after
seeing her in Taxi Driver. In the 1976 film, a disturbed man plots to assassinate a
presidential candidate. The main character, played by Robert DeNiro, was based on
Arthur Bremer, who shot Governor George Wallace. After viewing the movie many
times, Hinckley began stalking Foster. Just before his attack on Reagan, he wrote to her,
"You'll be proud of me, Jodie. Millions of Americans will love me-us."
On October 9, 1980, about six months before his assault on Reagan, Hinckley had been
arrested as he attempted to board a plane at the Nashville, Tennessee, airport while
carrying three pistols. President Carter was in Nashville at the time. Reagan, then
running for the presidency, had just canceled a trip to Nashville.
As a result of the Reagan incident, the Secret Service began using magnetometers to
screen crowds at events. "We started to look at acceptable standoff distances to keep
crowds away," says Danny Spriggs, who took Hinckley into custody at the shooting and
became a deputy director of the Secret Service. "The distances would vary with the
environment."
The Secret Service also learned to segregate the press from onlookers and keep better
tabs on them to make sure no one infiltrates the press contingent, pretending to be a
reporter. An agent is assigned to watch the press, and members of the press themselves
report those who try to infiltrate.
Similarly, the Secret Service learned lessons from the John F. Kennedy assassination. It
doubled its complement of agents, computerized and increased its intelligence data,
increased the number of agents assigned to advance and intelligence work, created
counter-sniper teams, expanded its training functions, and improved liaison with other
law enforcement and federal agencies.
"Before the Kennedy assassination, training often consisted of agents telling war
stories," says Taylor Rudd, an agent assigned to revamp training. "Many agents on duty
had never had any training."
Now the Secret Service shares intelligence and techniques with a range of foreign
security services. After the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, the
Secret Service and Israel's Shin Bet spent a week together comparing notes.
"The Rabin assassination was much like the Hinckley attempt on Reagan," says former
agent Dowling, who was in charge of foreign liaison when the meetings with Shin Bet
took place. "It happened at a motorcade departure site."
Shin Bet officials laid bare their own shortcomings.
"It was a very emotional, sad thing for them to do," Dowling says. "This particular guy
loitered for some time around the motorcade, and he should have been noticed. And we
kind of experienced something similar with Hinckley. We had somebody who was
clearly stalking the president, somebody who had stalked presidents before. It's not
because this guy thinks Reagan's a bad guy, or he thinks Jimmy Carter's a bad guy. It's
the office that interests them. It's the authority."
About a year after the Reagan assassination attempt, the Secret Service's Washington
field office began receiving calls from a man threatening to kill Reagan. The man would
say, "I'm going to shoot him." Then he would hang up.
Agent Dennis Chomicki was assigned to protective intelligence and was aware that the
calls were coming in because he'd been reading what the Secret Service calls "squeal
sheets," which recount incidents over the previous twenty-four hours. One morning,
Chomicki was reading about the caller when someone called the main line of the field
office, which at the time was at Nineteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Since
Chomicki was one of the first agents in that morning, he picked up the call.
"Hi, it's me again," the caller said. "You know me."
"No, I don't know you," Chomicki responded.
"Well, I'm the guy that's going to kill the president," the man said.
"Look, do me a favor," Chomicki said. "I'm standing here on a wall phone because I just
opened up the door. Why don't you call back on my desk so I can sit and talk with you?"
The man agreed, and Chomicki gave him his direct dial number.
Back then, the Secret Service had an arrangement with what is now Verizon that the
phone company would immediately trace calls even from unlisted numbers when an
agent called a telephone company supervisor. Chomicki called a supervisor and gave
him the number at his desk so that all incoming calls would be traced. He was sure the
man would not be stupid enough to call the number.
"I walked over to my desk, and sure enough, he called back," Chomicki says. "So we
started talking, and I was able to record that conversation."
The man said he had a rifle with a scope.
"I'm going to aim in, squeeze the trigger off, and blow his head apart like a pumpkin,"
the man said.
"Hey, this is pretty serious stuff. Why don't we meet?" Chomicki said.
"What do you think, I'm crazy?" the caller said, and hung up.
The phone company called and said the man had called from a pay phone on New York
Avenue. With the location of the pay phone in his pocket, Chomicki dashed out the door.
Just then, another agent was walking in.
"Bob, come on, we got to go," Chomicki said. "I'll tell you all about it on the way
down."
They ran to the Secret Service garage and jumped into their respective Secret Service
cars. They drove to New York Avenue and Eleventh Street, where the Greyhound bus
terminal was located at the time.
"We were looking around, and we didn't see anybody," Chomicki says. "There was a
coffee-to-go truck sitting nearby. We went up and asked the guy, 'Did you see anybody
on the phone a short while ago?'"
"Yeah, about quarter to eight there was a guy," the man said.
He gave the man's estimated height and weight and described him as wearing blue pants
and a blue shirt. The time cited by the coffee man coincided with the call Chomicki had
received at the field office. Chomicki asked the coffee man why he had noticed the
individual using the public pay phone.
"Usually I show up on the corner at eight," the man explained. "I just happened to get
here early today, and my customers don't expect me here until eight, so business was
slow. I was just sitting here staring at the phone booth and saw this guy on the phone,
and I just happened to remember what he looked like."
The agents jumped into their cars. Chomicki drove east on New York Avenue; the other
agent drove west. Just then, Chomicki spotted a man who matched the description given
to him by the coffee man. He was using a pay phone on the outer wall of the bus
terminal building.
Chomicki made a U-turn and parked his car across the street. He walked up behind the
man and heard him talking in a Midwestern accent. It was the voice of the man who had
called him at the field office.
"I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and I pushed him between the phone and the
side panel, and I grabbed the phone," Chomicki says.
"This is agent Chomicki of the Secret Service," he said into the receiver. "To whom am I
speaking?"
"Wow! How'd you get him?" a voice on the other end of the line said. It was another
agent back at the field office. He said the man had just called, threatening to kill Reagan.
The suspect claimed he was just trying to call a taxi. As he tried to get away, Chomicki
dragged him to his car, placed him against the trunk, and handcuffed him. After he was
given a psychiatric examination, a judge committed him to a mental institution.
Secret Service agents often deal with what is called White House-itis, a malady of
arrogance that grips some White House aides. Near the end of Reagan's term, that
affliction almost got one of his aides shot. Agent Glenn Smith was guarding Reagan at
the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. Smith heard a man
shout, "Stop or I'll shoot!" Smith took out his .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum and placed
his finger on the trigger. Just then, a man came bolting through a door with a New York
City police officer in hot pursuit.
The man turned out to be a White House staffer who was so full of himself that when a
Secret Service agent asked him to identify himself at an inner checkpoint, he refused.
When the agent tried to block his way, he pushed the agent away. The police officer then
chased after him.
"If I had gotten a clear shot at the man, I would have shot him," Smith says.
As with all presidents, some people totally lost it when meeting Reagan. One woman in
a crowd threw her baby into the air. Agent Glenn Smith had to catch the little girl. An
eighty-year-old woman held on to Reagan's hand so tightly that Smith had to pry it
loose. Hoping to get an autograph, a sheriff approached Air Force One at high speed in
his cruiser with lights flashing. The sheriff brought his car to a halt just in time.
"In a few more seconds, we would have opened fire on the car," Smith says.
While in office, Reagan never showed the effects of Alzheimer's disease, which
ultimately led to his death. "We had a hundred twenty agents on his detail, and he
seemed to remember everyone's name," Smith says.
But in March 1993, a year before he announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer's,
former president Reagan honored Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney at his library
and invited him to his ranch. As Mulroney was leaving, the prime minister asked Agent
Chomicki, "Do you notice something with the president?"
Chomicki said he did but did not know what the problem was.
"He would just stop mid-sentence and forget what he was saying," Chomicki recalls.
"Then he would just start a whole new story."
After Reagan had been out of office for three years, he was to speak at an event in
Akron, Ohio. In contrast to the retinue he'd had as president, Reagan traveled with just
one staffer and his Secret Service contingent. The agent in charge of the former
president's protective detail came into the command post and said to agent Dowling,
"You know, the president's been sitting in his room alone all morning. And he'd really
like for some folks to talk to. Would you guys mind if he came over and sat in the
command post and just chatted with you guys for a while?"
"That'd be terrific. Bring him over," Dowling said.
For two hours, Reagan chatted with the agents, telling stories and jokes.
"He told us he and Mikhail Gorbachev had private conversations," Dowling says. "They
agreed that their talks were not about today and are not about us. They're about our
grandchildren and the life that they're going to live."
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