The First Family Detail Read online

  One afternoon, Jenna and some friends were drinking spiked Cokes in the back of an agent’s Suburban on the way to a football game in Texas.

  “If they’re doing something that could endanger their safety, like excessive drinking, I would step in,” the agent who was driving them says. “I wouldn’t personally say normal drinking or using marijuana is going to affect their immediate health. We’re not there in a law enforcement role. Our job is strictly to protect them. So even though a driver could get a ticket for driving with an open container of alcohol, you just kind of look the other way because I was not drinking, and I know as an agent I’m not going to get a ticket for having an open can in the car. But if they were doing lines of cocaine or something like that, that’d be different because people have died from that kind of thing.”

  If a protectee began smoking marijuana in his presence, a current agent says, “I would tell the kid to put it out. I’d handle it personally right there.”

  Back when George McGovern was running for president, Agent Richard Repasky picked up his daughter Teresa McGovern at the Columbus, Ohio, airport. “She gets in the Secret Service car and is in the back and she lights up a joint,” Repasky recalls. “The car was reeking of marijuana. What was I going to do, arrest her?”

  The 1972 Democratic nominee later wrote a book in which he recounted how Teresa began drinking at age thirteen and was hospitalized for depression after her arrest for smoking pot at age nineteen. While she overcame the problem for a while in her thirties, she returned to drinking and was found frozen to death at age forty-five in a parking lot in Madison, Wisconsin, on the night of December 12, 1994, after a drinking binge.

  In a similar vein, long before she announced it publicly in 1989, agents found that Kitty Dukakis, the wife of former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who ran against George H. W. Bush in the 1988 election, had a drinking problem.

  “I would be there at their home in the middle of the night, and she’d come down and get into the cupboards and get some alcohol out of there and drink that,” a former agent says.

  In her book Shock, which came out in 2006, Kitty Dukakis described how she finally overcame a lifetime of depression and battles with drug and alcohol addiction with electroconvulsive therapy.

  Agents protecting first children have encountered another special problem. After Walter F. Mondale was nominated to be Carter’s vice president, agents set up a watch post in the basement of his Washington home. An agent on Mondale’s detail strolled into the watch post and found Mondale’s daughter, Eleanor, sitting on the lap of another agent on a swivel office chair. Then sixteen, she was wearing short shorts and apparently had been making out with the agent.

  “They were startled and looked embarrassed,” the former agent says. “They looked like a couple of teenagers making out. It was shocking.”

  In a 1998 Time magazine profile of her, Eleanor Mondale was described as having fantasized with her best friend about Secret Service agents. She would compile secret lists of “which were mine, and which were hers.”

  “Eleanor would find out whether an agent was single or not and try to get friendly,” former agent Dennis Chomicki says. “She dressed in shorts and tight tops. The agents were like, ‘Whoa man, I don’t want to get involved in this.’ ”

  A leggy blonde, Eleanor became an actress, television host, and radio personality. She died of cancer in 2011 at the age of fifty-one. Prior to her death, her lawyer said allegations that she had compiled such lists or sat on an agent’s lap were “false.”

  At times, agents wind up acting as emergency medical technicians, as when Henry Hager, whom Jenna later married, became so drunk attending a Halloween party with her that agents took him to Georgetown University Hospital.

  Over time, the Bush twins became more mature and demonstrated that they appreciated their detail.

  “Around Fourth of July, Jenna had a whole bunch of steaks delivered to our command post,” an agent says. “Around Christmas, she gave us all another order of steaks and hot dogs and stuff like that. It’s got to be tough being the kid of a president. I can’t imagine it.”

  Even a visit by the president to a longtime friend can be a daunting experience for the friend. When George W. Bush was president, he and Laura had dinner at the home of Clay Johnson III, a close friend from high school whom Bush had named deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, and his wife, Anne. Guests that evening included Bush’s Yale friend Roland W. Betts, one of two principals in Chelsea Piers in New York, and FBI director Robert S. Mueller III and his wife, Ann. Checking out the Johnsons’ Spring Valley home in Washington, the Secret Service set up a command post in the basement.

  “They asked that drapes be put up in the dining room and suggested a chair in which the president should be seated,” Anne Johnson recalls. “Agents were posted around the yard, and no-parking cones were put up in front of the house.”

  The Secret Service asked the Johnsons to clear a closet big enough to hold at least two people.

  “In case of an emergency, an agent was going to grab the president, and the two of them were going to dive in,” Anne Johnson says. “That would have been an interesting dive, because GWB would have had Laura by the hair, at the very least.”

  Archly, Anne Johnson asked an agent, “What should everyone else do in case of an emergency?”

  “I only have one client, the president,” the agent drily replied.

  Agents were always amazed at the difference between Bush in person and the way he came across at press conferences.

  “He does not look comfortable in front of a microphone,” an agent who was on his detail says. “With us, he doesn’t talk like that, doesn’t sound like that. He’s funny as hell. Incredible sense of humor, and he’ll joke around. He’s two different personalities.”

  “When he had a conversation with his staff, Bush was very thoughtful and very intelligent and spoke very well,” says a former agent on his detail. “The problem was that you get a lot of handlers who keep telling you what to say in speeches. I always wish that the American people knew the real George Bush.”

  Since federal law provides for protection of the children of former presidents only when they are under sixteen, the Secret Service no longer protects Jenna and Barbara. As a rule, former presidents receive few threats. But because of the number of threats still directed at Bush, his detail today consists of seventy-five agents, including agents who protect Laura. While the numbers vary, that is more than the number assigned to other former presidents.

  “They want protection for the convenience,” a former agent says of former presidents and first ladies. “We do their travel arrangements, we make it possible for them to catch trains and planes, we are their fleet of cars. We allow them to do things the ordinary citizen never could do.”

  If agents think highly of Bush, it is nothing compared to their feelings about his wife. An agent who was assigned to the Bushes one Christmas remembers how caring Laura—code-named Tempo—was. She talked to him for thirty minutes and seemed apologetic about having to take him away from his family during Christmas.

  In contrast to Hillary Clinton, “Laura has the undying admiration of almost every agent,” an agent says. “I’ve never ever heard a negative thing about Laura Bush. Nothing. Everybody loves her to death and respects the hell out of her.”

  22

  WATCH THE HANDS

  To most Americans, Secret Service agents are anonymous figures wearing sunglasses, a communications earpiece, and a grim expression. Behind the sunglasses, agents are tuning into a sort of different dimension, looking for any sign of suspicious activity.

  Agents focus first on people’s hands. They 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, and situations that are out of place.

  “We look for a guy wearing an overcoat on a w
arm day,” says former agent William Albracht. “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, the agent 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 calls out to fellow agents: “Gun! Gun!”

  When on protection duty, Secret Service agents wear the trademark radio earpieces tuned to one of the encrypted channels the service uses. Known as a surveillance kit, the device includes a radio transmitter and receiver that agents keep in their pockets.

  Sunglasses are not required, but most agents choose to wear them not only to block the sun but to hide their eyes from onlookers.

  “With sunglasses, I can look around and look at you and stare at you, and you don’t know if I’m staring at you or not,” an agent explains.

  To identify themselves at events to other agents and to police, Secret Service agents wear on their left lapels color-coded pins featuring the Secret Service five-pointed star. The pins come in four colors. Each week, agents wear a different color. On the back of the pin is a four-digit number. If the pin is stolen, the number can be entered in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC). If the pin is found, police return it to the Secret Service.

  Pins called hard pins are used to identify White House aides to Secret Service agents. Embossed with the presidential or vice presidential seal, the pins signify that the staffer is entitled to have access to the president or vice president. Wearing the pins, staffers are not required to identify themselves to agents. But Secret Service agents have found that some of Vice President Joe Biden’s staffers refuse to wear their pin and huffily demand to be recognized regardless.

  On one trip, an agent spotted a Biden staffer not wearing her pin and reminded her to wear it at all times. She agreed to do so, but the next day she was again not wearing her pin. When questioned, she admitted that she had left the pin in her hotel room. This time, even though he recognized her, the agent told her she would not be allowed to walk around freely because she wasn’t wearing her pin.

  “That’s a major operational security violation, to leave your pin in your hotel room,” the agent says. “Where a maid has access, where hotel staff has access, where anyone with a key card has access, they could enter your room and take it.”

  At another event for Biden, an agent refused to let an on-site support staffer go backstage because he was wearing what is called a soft pin, which is color-coded and has no seal. The soft pin allows access only when a visitor is escorted by White House staff wearing a hard pin. When the agent refused to let him roam freely, the man complained to a Biden staffer. The staffer told the agent she didn’t have time to escort the man and demanded the agent give him access. When the agent refused to budge, she complained to a high-ranking Secret Service official.

  “Of course, the official said to give everyone access behind the stage without hard pin staff escorts,” the agent says. “What we have is complacent senior management who are waiting for their next job in the private sector.”

  While agents wearing earpieces are easily spotted, Secret Service agents wearing plain clothes and no radio earpieces also circulate within crowds at public events 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. 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 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 photograph crowds at presidential events. The images are compared with photos taken at other events—sometimes using facial recognition software—to see if a particular onlooker keeps showing up. If one does, agents look for the individual at future events and investigate further.

  Since the attempts on President Ford’s life, presidents have generally worn bulletproof vests at public events. They are 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 may wear them at public events, but many agents prefer not to. They are uncomfortable and can make life unbearable on a hot day.

  Explaining why he always wears the vests, one agent says, “What good am I if I don’t have a vest on if I’m trying to stop a bullet from hitting the president or vice president? I get up and put that vest on every day when I go to work because I think if I can’t stop a round, what good am I for this man?”

  In developing criminal profiling, FBI agents under the direction of Dr. Roger Depue interviewed assassins and would-be assassins in prison. The subjects included Sirhan B. Sirhan, who killed Bobby Kennedy, and Sara Jane Moore and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, both of whom tried to kill President Ford.

  The FBI profilers found that assassins generally are unstable individuals looking for attention and notoriety. Assassins often keep diaries. It enhances the importance of their acts. Like most celebrity stalkers, assassins tend to be paranoid and to lack trust in other people.

  “Usually loners, they are not relaxed in the presence of others and not practiced or skilled in social interaction,” John Douglas, one of the FBI profilers who did the interviews, wrote in his book Obsessions. Before an assassination attempt, the perpetrator fantasizes that “this one big event will prove once and for all that he has worth, that he can do and be something. It provides an identity and purpose,” Douglas said.

  Thus, John Hinckley was convinced that actress Jodie Foster would respect him more if he killed Ronald Reagan. He called his attempt to assassinate Reagan “an act of love.”

  “Jodie Foster may continue to outwardly ignore me for the rest of her life, but I have made an impression on that young lady that will never fade from her mind,” Hinckley wrote to a New York Times reporter after being found not guilty by reason of insanity. “I am with Jodie spiritually every day and every night. I have made her one of the most famous actresses in the world. Everybody but everybody knows about John and Jodie. We are a historical couple whether Jodie likes it or not. ‘I Am Napoleon.’ ”

  “You have to be hypervigilant,” says former agent Jerry Parr, who headed President Reagan’s detail when he was shot. Citing the assassinations or attempted assassinations of Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Governor George Wallace, Gerald Ford, and Martin Luther King, Parr says, “You know it’s out there. You just don’t know where.”

  23

  THROWING A FIT

  As with President Reagan, agents say they could set their watches by Dick Cheney’s schedule.

  “If Cheney said he was giving a tour of the vice president’s residence at 11:30 A.M., he was there at 11:30 A.M.,” former agent Dennis Chomicki says. “Cheney is a very quiet guy in a car. It doesn’t mean he’s not friendly or he dislikes you. But Cheney’s a real businessman, everyth
ing was pretty serious and straight up. There weren’t too many occasions for jokes, and he was a very likeable protectee.”

  In contrast to his successor, Joe Biden, with Cheney there was “never an afternoon when you showed up at the White House and were told we’re going to Delaware tonight,” a Secret Service agent who was on Cheney’s detail recalls. “Every agent wanted to go to the Cheney detail because he cared about agents’ quality of life.”

  “Dick Cheney was one of the best protectees we’ve ever had,” a current agent says. “He never ever questioned security. He never ever questioned how we did things or why we did things. He knew and respected what we had to do as the Secret Service. That man’s schedule was projected out a year at a time.”

  As a result, “you knew that you were going to be in Washington for these months, and he went to Jackson Hole for the summer, and he went to the Eastern Shore every other weekend or every third weekend,” the agent says. “But you knew far in advance when you were going to be out of town.”

  A gourmet cook, Cheney loved to shop for himself at the Gourmet Giant grocery store in McLean, Virginia.

  “We’d just let him go in the store and run around, and we’d try to keep as low a profile as we could,” Chomicki says. “Then he’d come out with all his groceries, he’d throw them in the car, and we’d take off. His grandfather was a chef on the Union Pacific Railroad, and he used to take VP Cheney with him on a train, and he taught him how to cook.”

  The Cheneys would invite agents and their families to the Christmas party they gave every year and stood for photos with them.

  “I remember that I was probably the one hundred sixtieth click that afternoon, but when my kids walked up, Mrs. Cheney acted like we were the first picture of the day,” an agent who was on the vice president’s detail says. “She squatted down and reached out and hugged my little girl, and it really meant a lot to me.”