The First Family Detail Page 3

  Like her husband and his White House staff, Hillary and her staff were disorganized and habitually late.

  “She had children running her campaign,” an agent then on her detail says. “She had a lack of organization and a lack of maturity. She could not keep a schedule.” When she stayed at the houses of Democratic supporters, “We would show up at their homes at 2 A.M., and she would sleep in the master bedroom,” he says.

  Hillary’s Senate campaign staff planned a visit to a 4-H Club in dairy farm country in upstate New York. As they approached the outdoor event and she saw people dressed in jeans and surrounded by cows, Hillary flew into a rage.

  “She turned to a staffer and said, ‘What the f— did we come here for? There’s no money here,’ ” a Secret Service agent remembers.

  Ironically, while Hillary is the protectee from hell, agents have nothing but praise for her daughter, Chelsea.

  “In my career, Chelsea Clinton did it the best,” says an agent familiar with both her detail and the Bush twins’ details. “Treated the detail right, told them what was going on, never gave problems that I knew of.”

  “Chelsea was always very nice to the agents, very cordial, and that’s all you ever want, is to have a free flow of information so there are no surprises and you can plan for their security,” former Secret Service agent William Albracht says.

  “It’s kind of funny, as dysfunctional as the Clintons are, Chelsea is the best,” another agent says.

  Hillary’s staff reflects her imperiousness. According to agents, Huma Abedin, who heads Hillary’s Transition Office and was her deputy chief of staff at the State Department and traveling chief of staff during her campaign for the presidency, can be just as rude and nasty as Hillary. A former agent recalls helping Abedin when she got lost driving Chelsea to the February 2008 Democratic presidential debate in Los Angeles.

  “She was belligerent and angry about being late for the event,” the former agent says. “No appreciation for any of it, not a thank-you or anything. That was common for her people to be rude.”

  At another event in Los Angeles, a female agent challenged Abedin because she was not wearing a pin that identifies cleared aides to Secret Service agents. The agent had no idea who she was.

  “You don’t have the proper identification to go beyond this point,” the agent told her.

  “Huma basically tried to throw her weight around,” a former agent says. “She tried to just force her way through and said belligerently, ‘Do you know who I am?’ ”

  That got her nowhere. Eventually, Abedin—who is married to disgraced former congressman and New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner—cooperated with the agent and suggested a contact who could verify her identity.

  “Huma Abedin looked down on the agents and treated them as second-class citizens,” a former agent says. While agents are not supposed to carry luggage, they will do so as a courtesy if they like a female protectee, such as Lynne Cheney or Rosalynn Carter. But with Abedin, “the agents were just like, ‘Hey, you’re going to be like that? Well, you get your own luggage to the car. Oh, and by the way, you can carry the first lady’s luggage to the car, too.’ She’d have four bags, and we’d stand there and watch her and say, ‘Oh, can we hold the door open for you?’ ”

  “On TV, they will make it sound like they just really appreciated and loved those Secret Service agents and appreciate all their sacrifices and all that,” a former agent says of the Clintons. “Then behind the scenes, they’re like, ‘I don’t want to see these guys.’ ” He adds, “When it’s convenient for them, they’ll utilize the service for whatever favor they need, but otherwise, they look down upon the agents, kind of like servants.”

  Agents say Hillary’s nastiness and contempt for them and disdain for law enforcement and the military in general continued, both when she was secretary of state and now that she is protected as a former first lady, earning her the distinction of being considered the Secret Service’s most detested protectee.

  “There’s not an agent in the service who wants to be in Hillary’s detail,” a current agent says. “If agents get the nod to go to her detail, that’s considered a form of punishment among the agents. She’s hard to work around, she’s known to snap at agents and yell at agents and dress them down to their faces, and they just have to be humble and say, ‘Yes ma’am,’ and walk away.”

  The agent adds, “Agents don’t deserve that. They’re there to do a job, they’re there to protect her, they’ll lay their life down for hers, and there’s absolutely no respect for that. And that’s why agents do not want to go to her detail.”

  3

  CLANDESTINE MOVEMENTS

  When it comes to outrageous behavior, few presidents have matched Lyndon Johnson. Yet, true to its name, the Secret Service kept it all secret.

  Even when his wife, Lady Bird, was at home in the White House, Johnson had what Secret Service agents called “clandestine movements” in the middle of the night to see a secretary at her home.

  “Johnson would slip out of the White House for a night liaison at 11 P.M. with one agent driving,” former agent Ramon Dunlap says. “He thought he was being discreet and getting away with having no protection beyond the driver, but he never got away with it.” An agent would drive while Johnson’s detail, unknown to LBJ, would discreetly follow.

  Johnson had a sex life equal to John F. Kennedy’s. In addition to one-night stands, Kennedy had several consorts within the White House. Two of them, Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowen, were secretaries who were known as Fiddle and Faddle, respectively. They would have threesomes with Kennedy.

  Wearing only T-shirts that revealed their nipples, Fiddle and Faddle were cavorting with the president one afternoon in the White House pool when Jackie decided unexpectedly to return to the White House. Her Secret Service detail warned JFK’s detail, and Kennedy exited the pool, giving his Bloody Mary to Secret Service agent Anthony Sherman.

  “Enjoy it, it’s quite good,” the president said with aplomb.

  Like Johnson, JFK had long-standing affairs with his fetching secretaries. But Kennedy, unlike Johnson, won his Secret Service agents’ admiration. He treated them with respect, asked about their wives or kids when they were sick, and gave them plenty of notice if he was planning a trip.

  “Kennedy was genuinely concerned about people and tried to learn from them,” says former agent Charles “Chuck” Taylor, who was on his detail.

  Unlike Johnson, Kennedy was at least discreet about his affairs. At one point, Lady Bird caught her husband having sex with one of his secretaries on a sofa in the Oval Office. Johnson blew up at the Secret Service for not having warned him that his wife was approaching.

  According to Bill Gulley, who was then director of the White House Military Office, Johnson would spot pretty secretaries in the White House, make a play for them, and if they went to bed with him, he would transfer them to his personal staff. Of the eight secretaries around him, only three were not having sex with the president, Gulley says.

  Joseph Laitin, Johnson’s deputy press secretary, recalls that Johnson made a play for Laitin’s secretary.

  “All I know is, the next day, she was his secretary,” Laitin recalls, adding that she became a member of the president’s harem. “One day she said, ‘Mr. President, I won’t be here after next week,’ ” the press officer says.

  “Why not?” Johnson asked.

  “I’m getting married,” she replied.

  Winking, LBJ said, “Well, if it doesn’t work out, come back.”

  A White House photographer claimed he always knew when another Johnson secretary had had sex with the president in the Oval Office, Laitin says.

  “[The secretary] would go in to take dictation, and when she came out, the seams in her stockings were not straight the way they were when she went in,” Laitin says. “The door was always closed.”

  On a regular basis, Johnson would sit nude in the White House pool as he dictated letters to his attractiv
e secretaries, Dunlap remembers.

  Johnson did not limit himself to women on his personal staff. He had “a stable” of women with whom he had sex, including some who stayed at the ranch when Lady Bird was there, a former agent says.

  “He and Lady Bird would be in their bedroom, and he’d get up in the middle of the night and go to the other room,” the former agent says. “Lady Bird knew what he was doing. One woman was a well-endowed blonde. Another was the wife of a friend of his. He had permission from her husband to have sex with her. It was amazing.”

  Johnson routinely closed the door to his stateroom on Air Force One and spent hours locked up with one of his pretty secretaries, even when his wife was on board, according to Air Force One steward Robert M. MacMillan and other crew members.

  “Sometimes a message came in, and the radio operator could not deliver it to the old man in his room because he was fooling around,” D. Patrick O’Donnell, an Air Force One flight engineer, remembers. “He could lock it. He would be in the partitioned area with some broad. Lady Bird would get up and try and get in.”

  Laitin recalls seeing Johnson engaged in intense conversation on Air Force One with one of the curvaceous secretaries he was known to be having sex with.

  “Across the aisle was Lady Bird reading a book,” Laitin says. “She was a very tolerant woman.”

  If Johnson had no regard for his wife’s sensitivities, he had even less for his agents’ feelings. On a regular basis, Johnson would tell Secret Service agents they were fired.

  “Johnson told a Secret Service agent driving the limousine that he was fired because the air-conditioning in the limo quit,” former agent Dunlap says.

  When Johnson—code-named Volunteer—was vice president, he was late for an appointment with President Kennedy and ordered a Secret Service agent to drive up on the sidewalk to bypass traffic on the street.

  “Johnson said to jump the curb and drive on the sidewalk,” former agent Chuck Taylor says. “There were people on the sidewalk getting out of work. I told him, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I told you to jump the curb.’ He took a newspaper and hit the agent who was driving on the head. He said, ‘You’re both fired.’ ”

  In this instance, Johnson did not make good his threat. But Dunlap says the president’s penchant for firing agents was a way of belittling them and was typical of his crude behavior and the way he treated everyone around him.

  “If he had a bunch of congressmen and their wives on the Sequoia, and he wanted to take a leak off the bow of the boat, he wasn’t above doing it,” Dunlap says, referring to what was then the presidential yacht. “He was proud of his organ. If he had to take a leak in the Rose Garden, he did that, too, in front of reporters. They would not print anything like that or he would have their ass. He could pull their press credentials. He would sit on the toilet and talk to aides. He had no qualms about doing that. It was embarrassing to say the least.”

  “The first time I met him, he pissed in front of me,” Johnson’s deputy press secretary Laitin says. “I was a bit shocked.”

  Dunlap says Johnson treated Lady Bird and his daughters, Lynda Bird Johnson Robb and Luci Baines Johnson Nugent, like everyone else.

  “He talked crudely to his daughters and to Lady Bird,” Dunlap says. “When he started giving Lady Bird hell, she would start humming and walk away.”

  “Johnson would come on the plane [Air Force One], and the minute he got out of sight of the crowds, he would stand in the doorway and grin from ear to ear, and say, ‘You dumb sons of bitches. I piss on all of you,’ ” recalls Air Force One steward MacMillan. “Then he stepped out of sight and began taking off his clothes. By the time he was in the stateroom, he was down to his shorts and socks. It was not uncommon for him to peel off his shorts, regardless of who was in the stateroom.”

  Johnson did not care if women were around.

  “He was totally naked with his daughters, Lady Bird, and female secretaries,” MacMillan says. “He was quite well endowed in his testicles. So everyone started calling him bull nuts. He found out about it. He was really upset.”

  “He had episodes of getting drunk,” George Reedy, his press secretary, told me. “There were times where he would drink day after day. You would think this guy is an alcoholic. Then all of a sudden, it would stop. We could always see the signs when he called for a Scotch and a soda, and he would belt it down and call for another one, instead of sipping it.”

  Johnson’s drinking only fueled his outbursts. Air Force One steward MacMillan recalls serving roast beef on the plane. Johnson blew up because the slice his aide Jack Valenti had was rare.

  Johnson grabbed Valenti’s tray and brought the food back to the galley.

  “You two sons of bitches, look at this,” he said. “This is raw. You gotta cook the meat on my airplane. Don’t you serve my people raw meat. Goddamn, if you two boys serve raw meat on my airplane again, you’ll both end up in Vietnam.”

  Johnson threw the tray with the meal upside down on the floor and stormed off.

  Former agent Richard Roth remembers thinking, “If Johnson weren’t president, he’d be in an insane asylum.”

  A champion of African-Americans, Johnson marshaled support from southern Democrats for his civil rights legislation. But his hypocrisy extended to regularly referring to blacks as “niggers.” On Air Force One, Johnson was discussing his proposed civil rights bill with two governors. Explaining why it was so important to him, MacMillan remembers that Johnson said it was simple: “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”

  “Johnson was in the limousine in Denver, and the microphone was on, and he didn’t realize it,” former agent Clark Larsen says. “They’re going down the street and he said, ‘Look at all those niggers driving around.’ The people on the street didn’t know where the voice was coming from. They were looking across the street and looking around the corner, and a couple of them were even looking to the heavens.”

  Secret Service agents found Lady Bird—code-named Victoria—to be the opposite of her husband: She was gracious to and respectful of agents. Former presidents receive lifetime Secret Service protection. Unless they remarry, spouses of former presidents are given lifetime protection as well. After her husband died, Lady Bird had a total of eight agents—two per shift—protecting her.

  “She had a southern accent and was very well spoken,” a former agent recalls. “Everything she said sounded rehearsed, because it was perfectly worded and perfectly pronounced.”

  Former agent Robert Rosebush remembers driving Lady Bird to a friend’s house in Austin and missing a turn. Instead of correcting him, she said, “My, my. I don’t think I’ve ever been this way before.”

  As first lady, Lady Bird—whose real name was Claudia—promoted environmentalism and encouraged Americans to plant wildflowers and native plants.

  “Her eyes were failing, but we’d take her out and walk along certain areas at certain times of the year when the flowers were in bloom, and she’d just love to stop and look at Indian paintbrush or whatever the different flowers were, and she still knew them,” a former agent says.

  In August 1993, at the age of eighty, Lady Bird had a severe stroke. After that, “she could barely speak,” the former agent says. “It sounded like she had a mouthful of marbles. So, from that point forward, it was never very easy to understand her, and she had to write things down, and of course, that was pretty hard to read, too. So, from that point forward, she could understand us and she could indicate yes or no, but she always had a health aide with her.”

  Lady Bird alternated between using a walker and a wheelchair. Secret Service agents protecting Bess Truman in her last days faced a similar situation. She spent most of her time in bed.

  “Bess Truman would get up out of bed every Wednesday and go down to the beauty parlor, and she’d walk so slow and hold her arm out, and then the agent would have to put his arm on top of hers, and then they’d go really, really slow,” according to former agent
Lloyd Bulman. “It’d take them a long time to get out of the car, to put her in the car, take her down to the beauty shop, and she’d get out of the car, put her arm out again, and the agent would walk her into the beauty shop.”

  Agents were amazed that neither the Johnsons’ ranch nor their home in Austin, Texas, displayed a photo of John F. Kennedy or Jackie Kennedy. Instead, they noticed a photo of the Johnsons with Ronald Reagan walking among California redwoods.

  Lady Bird died on July 11, 2007, at her Austin home overlooking a lake.

  “The agents knew she was going to pass, and they had an opportunity to say good-bye to her,” a former agent says.

  4

  POTUS

  Five days before President Obama was to appear at the 2013 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Secret Service advance agents began scoping out the Washington Hilton, where the April 28 talk would take place.

  “The advance entails trying to know everything about the hotel from top to bottom, above it, below it, around it,” says an agent who was involved in the process. “You determine what streets you need to close off, all the vulnerability points. You want to obviously meet with White House staff and try to determine where the president is going to be, where he’s going to move, his footsteps, what time he arrives, the time he leaves.”

  Agents located a suitable room where POTUS could relax if he wanted to or if he needed to make a secure call.

  “You determine where we can put him if there’s an incident in the hotel, a place that’s hard, solid, strong, that we can throw him into and hunker down on top of him,” the agent says.

  Agents carry protective hoods known as expedient hoods, to be placed over the president’s head in the event of a chemical attack.

  “You need to make sure you have a couple of egress routes to the motorcade in case there’s an emergency,” an agent says. “A lot of logistical work goes into it, time lines, working with staff to determine guests of the president, who’s going to be there, who attends.”