The First Family Detail Read online

  Reagan nodded his head and looked at Agent Hresko.

  “Boys will be boys,” he said to the agent.

  When the door of the elevator shut, Reagan added firmly, “But boys will not be president.”

  Until the Miami Herald revealed Hart’s fling with Rice in May 1987, the media had not exposed extramarital affairs of presidents and presidential candidates. Yet the hypocrisy and lack of judgment exhibited by a politician engaging in such relations are arguably clues to character that the electorate should consider.

  In fact, there was more to the Hart story. According to a former Secret Service agent who was on the candidate’s detail, well before his encounter with Rice, Senator Hart routinely cavorted with stunning models and actresses in Los Angeles, courtesy of one of his political advisors, actor Warren Beatty.

  “Warren Beatty gave him a key to his house on Mulholland Drive,” the agent says. “It was near Jack Nicholson’s house.” Beatty would arrange to have twenty-year-old women—“tens,” as the agent described them—meet Senator Hart at Beatty’s house.

  “Hart would say, ‘We’re expecting a guest,’ ” the former agent says. “When it was warm, they would wear bikinis and jump in the hot tub in the back. Once in the tub, their tops would often come off. Then they would go into the house. The guests stayed well into the night and often left just before sunrise. Beatty was a bachelor, but Hart was a senator running for president and was married.”

  “Sometimes,” the agent says, “there were two or three girls with him at a time. We would say, ‘There goes a ten. There’s a nine. Did you see that? Can you believe that?’ Hart did not care. He was like a kid in a candy store.”

  Asked for comment, Gayle Samek, his spokesperson, said, “Senator Hart tends to focus on the present rather than the past, so there’s no comment.”

  When John Hinckley shot Reagan at the Washington Hilton, the military aide with the nuclear football took off for the White House, where agents were taking the president. But that plan soon changed.

  “I checked him over and found no blood,” Agent Jerry 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. Recognizing that as a danger sign, he ordered the driver to head toward George Washington Hospital Center. 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 not only was separated from the football during that time, but the FBI confiscated all his clothing and personal effects at the hospital as evidence. That included the card with codes for authenticating the president’s identity so he could launch a nuclear strike.

  “We sat in the office the next day and looked at this thing, and then we found out [what the card was],” Thomas J. Baker, who was in charge of the FBI response at the Washington field office, tells me. “It looked basically like a credit card or an ATM card,” says Baker, who was the assistant special agent in charge of criminal investigations and the first FBI agent on the scene at the shooting. “It had some holes punched through it.”

  Despite a demand by James V. Hickey Jr., then the director of the White House Military Office, the FBI held on to the authenticator card for two weeks. Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, the president may transmit to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives a written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, transferring power automatically to the vice president as acting president. That is what Reagan did before undergoing surgery. But just prior to that, as agents carried him to trauma bay five in the emergency room, he was unconscious.

  Incredibly, at the time, no procedure was in place to delegate authority immediately when a president is disabled. Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet would have to transmit to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House a declaration that the president was unable to discharge his duties. But until that took place, it was not clear who could launch a nuclear strike while Reagan was incapacitated. As vice president, George H. W. Bush could have taken it upon himself to authorize a strike by calling the defense secretary through secure communications provided by the nuclear football, but even the vice president may not have had legal authority to do so.

  When Bush became president, his administration drafted a highly detailed, classified plan for immediate transfer of power in case a president is unable to discharge his duties. In that event, the vice president or the next official in the line of succession is informed by the senior staff member with the president or the national security advisor, or, if they have been taken out, the Defense Department duty officer, and that individual automatically becomes acting president, according to John Stufflebeem, who oversaw the Defense Department program that deploys the nuclear football.

  “If you cannot execute duties as commander in chief, you are ipso facto not the president,” Stufflebeem says. “That authority is transferred to somebody who can execute that authority to be commander in chief.”

  Even after having been shot, Reagan displayed his sense of humor. To his doctors, he said, “I just hope you’re Republicans.” To which one doctor replied, “Today, Mr. President, we’re all Republicans.”

  Reagan shared his sense of humor with his agents.

  “He’d hear a joke from one of his buddies, and the next thing you know, he’d be telling us as we’re walking somewhere,” former agent Sullivan says. “If it was a little off-color, he’d make sure no female agents were around because he was just a real gentleman.”

  After Reagan left office, he was to speak at an event in Akron, Ohio. In contrast to the retinue he had 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 poked his head into the command post. He said to Agent Pete 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.”

  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,” former agent Glenn Smith says.

  But in March 1993, a year before he announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s, 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 in mid-sentence and forget what he was saying,” Chomicki recalls. “Then he would just start a whole new story.” While Reagan was in office, “I never noticed anything like that.”

  After he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Reagan remarked, “Well, there must be a positive side to this. Maybe I’ll get to meet new people every day,” former agent Sullivan says. “He tried to make light of it, which is classic Ronald Reagan,” Sullivan observes. “Even though there was bad news, he’d try to put you at ease.”

  As the disease progressed, Reagan stopped going to his office and playing golf.

  “Re
agan would watch TV, and we would take him on walks,” Fred Fukunaga, an agent who was with him almost to the end, says. “He was still innately kind and loved seeing little kids. He was always joking around.”

  13

  A BULLET FOR THE PRESIDENT

  The Secret Service’s training facility is spread over 440 acres between a wildlife refuge and a soil conservation area in Laurel, Maryland. The forest muffles the gunfire, the squealing wheels, and the explosions that are the sounds of training Secret Service agents and Secret Service Uniformed Division officers.

  Here at the James J. Rowley Training Center, agent trainees receive sixteen weeks of training. In addition, they receive twelve and a half weeks of training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia.

  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—instructors set up scenarios to show trainees how to take down the bad guys. Except for a real two-story house and soft drink machine, the block-long village is like a Hollywood set. It has façades of a hardware store, a hotel, a restaurant, a bar, and a bank. Real cars are parked in front.

  Narrating one of the scenarios, Bobbie McDonald, assistant to the special agent in charge of training, explains, “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?”

  Down the road, a smoke bomb goes off near a motorcade. The counterassault team jumps out to deal with whatever it encounters—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 jumps back into the van. The motorcade reassembles and drives off to continue around campus, where more dangers await. These could be a series of “instant action drills,” where motorcades are attacked, snipers fire from windows, and anything may blow up.

  Trainees learn to respond to threats and take turns playing the protectee. They rehearse responding to an assailant by using pressure points to unlock his grip. When trainees interview a “subject” in the lockup room, the person is usually a contracted role player—an actor or a retired police officer.

  At the protective operations driving course, trainees receive about twenty-four hours of training in driving techniques. Agents who are about to be assigned to drive in a motorcade receive an additional forty hours of training.

  Driver training is carried out on a giant parking lot that looks like the obstacle course from a TV commercial or a reality show. Here they use Chargers—high-powered, high-energy vehicles—to speed out of the kill zone. As a countermeasure, drivers learn to execute the J-turn, making a perfect 180-degree turn at high speed by shifting into reverse, jerking the wheel to the right or left, and shifting into drive.

  Trainees learn to negotiate serpentine courses, weaving around objects in the road and crashing through barriers, roadblocks, and other cars. In case a protectee’s car is disabled, they learn to push it through turns and obstacles using another vehicle. When backing up, agents are trained not to turn around to look out the rear window. Instead, they must learn to use their side-view mirrors so they can maneuver more rapidly.

  At several indoor and outdoor firing ranges, trainees and Secret Service agents practice shooting handguns, shotguns, and automatic weapons.

  Everyone has heard that a Secret Service agent could take a bullet for the president. But the idea behind their training is to prevent that from ever happening.

  “People always say to me, ‘Hey, would you really take a bullet for the president?’ ” says former agent Pete 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.”

  “What we are trained to do as shift agents is to cover and evacuate if there is an attack,” an agent explains. “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.”

  As McDonald puts it, “Everything we teach out here, we hope we never have to do.”

  A key part of the training focuses on previous assassinations and assassination attempts and what can be learned from them. Six years after John Hinckley shot President Reagan, the Secret Service’s Office of Training assigned agent William Albracht to teach what was called the “Reagan Attempt.” Along with a range of other topics, including actual assassinations, Albracht taught the course as a senior instructor for two years.

  In preparing for the sensitive assignment, Albracht read all the Secret Service interviews with the agents who were involved in the incident, studied Hinckley’s history, examined the shooting site, watched video and reviewed photos taken that day, and interviewed the agents who were with Reagan and did the advance. He then taught the class to agents who had actually witnessed the incident to make sure everything was accurate in the course he would teach to new agents.

  Even though his findings would have been the lead story in newspapers throughout the country if they had ever become public, Secret Service management under Director John R. Simpson approved them and certified Albracht to teach the course at the Rowley Training Center.

  On the one hand, Albracht taught that the agents performed magnificently.

  “Hinckley discharged his Rohm .22 cal. RG-14 pistol six times,” according to his class synopsis. “Reagan press secretary James Brady was hit in the head with the first shot as he walked to the motorcade.”

  The second shot hit Metropolitan Police officer Thomas Delahanty in the left shoulder and traveled to his spine area, the synopsis says.

  “Agent Tim McCarthy, who was assigned to the President’s Protective Detail, was hit by Hinckley’s third shot as he turned to respond to the threat and assumed a blocking position, spreading his arms in front of Reagan as Reagan was being pushed into the limousine. McCarthy took a bullet from Hinckley in the stomach,” according to the synopsis.

  The fourth shot hit the right rear window of the president’s limo. The fifth shot hit the right rear limo panel. It flattened out like a dime, ricocheted, and traveled through the space between the limo body and the now opened right rear door. That was the round that penetrated Reagan under his seventh rib on the left side. The round then tumbled through his left lung and stopped two inches from his heart.

  Hinckley’s sixth and final shot went wide of its mark and hit no one.

  “This was due to the quick response of Agent D. V. McCarthy,” the synopsis says. “When Hinckley opened fire, McCarthy leapt across the crowd and grabbed Hinckley as he pulled the trigger for the last time. He grabbed Hinckley’s gun and diverted his aim. McCarthy’s instinctive reaction is the reason there was not yet another casualty. To fully comprehend how incredibly quick his response was, it should be noted that Hinckley fired all six shots in 1.48 seco
nds.”

  Equally impressive, three seconds after the first shot was fired, Special Agent in Charge Jerry Parr pushed President Reagan into the armored limo.

  “Ten seconds after the first shot, the presidential limo departed the area, initially en route to the White House complex,” the synopsis notes. “But after SAIC Parr realized that Reagan had been wounded, he diverted to George Washington Hospital ER. This decision alone is credited with saving the life of POTUS.”

  That day, the agents acted with “utter disregard for their own personal safety,” Albracht concluded. “They placed themselves directly in harm’s way with little to no thought to anything other than their duty.”

  But heroic though the agents were, Albracht determined that the reason Hinckley was able to get a shot at Reagan was that the Reagan White House had ordered agents to allow unscreened members of the public to get close to the president to greet him as he left the Washington Hilton.

  As part of a cover-up of what really happened, an internal Secret Service inspection report posed this question: “Why was the accused gunman allowed to get so close to the president, and if it was a designated press area, how was he able to penetrate it? Even if it was a designated press area, why was it located so close to the presidential motorcade?”

  In answer, the March 31, 1981, inspection report said, “The area was not a designated press area, but rather was open to the general public. We would prefer to keep these public areas further away, but this area was positioned within accepted standards.”

  Continuing the cover-up, the inspection report posed a second question: “Why wasn’t a security perimeter established further from the president’s path and the people within the area more closely scrutinized?” In answer, the inspection report said, “The people within the area were under surveillance. The distance is a matter of judgment and civil rights as to how much an area can be restricted.”

  But the training center synopsis sets forth the damning facts. It says the Reagan White House staff overruled the Secret Service and demanded that the public be allowed without any magnetometer screening within about fifteen feet of the president as he left the hotel.