In the President's Secret Service Page 4
Pat, he says, “had a tough life. Nixon would hardly talk. The only time he enjoyed himself was when he was with his friends Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp, when they would drink together.”
Nixon often spent time with Abplanalp on his friend’s island, Grand Cay in the Bahamas.
“Just to give you an idea of his athletic prowess, or lack of it, he loved to fish,” a former agent says. “He’d be on the back of Abplanalp’s fifty-five-foot yacht, and he would sit in this swivel seat with his fishing pole. Abplanalp’s staff would hook Nixon’s hook and throw the hook out. And Nixon would be just sitting there, with both hands on the pole, and he’d catch something, and the staff would reel it in for him, take the fish off, put it in the bucket. Nixon wouldn’t do anything but watch.”
During Watergate, “Nixon was very depressed,” says another former agent. “He wasn’t functioning as president any longer. [Bob] Haldeman [Nixon’s chief of staff] ran the country.”
Milton Pitts, who ran several barbershops in Washington, would go to a tiny barbershop in the basement of the West Wing to cut Nixon’s hair.
“Nixon talked very little,” Pitts told me. “He wanted to know what the public was saying. We had a TV there. But he never watched TV. All the other presidents did.”
During Watergate, Nixon would ask Pitts, “Well, what are they saying about us today?”
Pitts would say he hadn’t heard much news that day.
“I didn’t want to get into what people were saying,” Pitts said. “I’m not going to give him anything unpleasant. He was my boss.”
One afternoon, Alexander Butterfield, who would later reveal the existence of the Nixon tapes, came in for a haircut just before Nixon did. Motioning to the television set, Butterfield said to Pitts, “Leave that on. I want him [Nixon] to see what they are doing to us.”
But as soon as Nixon walked into the barbershop, “He pushed the button, and the TV went off,” Pitts says. “He said, ‘Well, what are they saying about us today?’ I said, ‘Mr. President, I haven’t heard much news today, sir.’”
As the Watergate scandal progressed, “Nixon got very paranoid,” a Secret Service agent says. “He didn’t know what to believe or whom to trust. He did think people were lying to him. He thought at the end everyone was lying.”
While Nixon rarely drank before the Watergate scandal, he began drinking more heavily as the pressure took its toll. He would down a martini or a manhattan.
“All he could handle was one or two,” a Secret Service agent says. “He wouldn’t be flying high, but you could tell he wasn’t in total control of himself. He would loosen up, start talking more, and smile. It was completely out of character. But he had two, and that was that. He had them every other night. But always at the end of business and in the residence. You never saw him drunk in public.”
In contrast to the blustering in his taped conversations, Nixon in private seemed passive and often out of it, although he did have a sense of humor. After spending a weekend at Camp David, Nixon stepped out of his cabin with Pat to get into a Secret Service limousine that would take them to Marine One, the president’s helicopter.
“Secret Service agents were at the ready to move,” says one of Nixon’s agents. “The agent who was driving was checking everything out, making sure the heater was properly adjusted. Nixon paused to talk to Pat. The driver accidentally honked his horn, and Nixon, thinking he was being impatient, said, ‘I’ll be right there.’”
At his San Clemente home, Nixon was watching television one afternoon while feeding dog biscuits to one of his dogs.
“Nixon took a dog biscuit and was looking at it and then takes a bite out of it,” says Richard Repasky who was on his detail.
Nixon would walk on the beach wearing a suit—all his suits were navy blue—and dress shoes. Even in summer, he would insist on having a fire burning in the fireplace. One evening, Nixon built a fire in the fireplace at San Clemente and forgot to open the flue damper.
“The smoke backed up in the house, and two agents came running,” says a former agent who was on the Nixon detail.
“Can you find him?” one of the agents asked the other.
“No, I can’t find the son of a bitch,” the other agent said.
From the bedroom, a voice piped up.
“Son of a bitch is here trying to find a matching pair of socks,” Nixon said, poking fun at himself.
One agent will never forget a reunion for Vietnam prisoners of war held outside Nixon’s San Clemente home.
“This POW did a series of paintings of Hanoi camp scenes,” the former agent says. “He was quite good. He presented Nixon with a big painting of POWs. Later that evening, after everyone had left, Nixon was going back to his home. It was a warm night. His assistant turned to Nixon and said, ‘What do you want me to do with the picture? Should I bring it in the house?’”
“Put that goddamned thing in the garage,” Nixon said. “I don’t want to see that.”
The former agent says he shook his head and thought, “You smiled and shook hands with these guys, and you couldn’t care less. It was all show.”
“Monday through Friday, Nixon would leave his home at twelve-fifty-five P.M. to play golf,” Dale Wunderlich, a former agent on his detail, says. “He would insist on golfing even in pouring rain.”
Occasionally, Nixon’s son-in-law David Eisenhower, grandson of former president Dwight Eisenhower, went with him. Agents considered the younger Eisenhower the most clueless person they had ever protected. One day, the Nixons gave him a barbecue grill as a Christmas present. With the Nixons inside his house, Eisenhower tried to start the grill to char some steaks. After a short time, he told Wunderlich it would not light.
“He had poured most of a bag of briquets into the pit of the grill and lit matches on top of them, but he had not used fire starter,” Wunderlich says.
“Do you know anything about garage door openers?” Eisenhower asked another Secret Service agent. “I need a little help. I’ve had it two years, and I don’t get a light. Shouldn’t the light come on?”
“Maybe the lightbulb is burnt out,” the agent said.
“Really?” David said.
The agent looked up. There was no bulb in the socket.
“We did a loose surveillance, or tail, on David Eisenhower when there were a lot of threats on the president, and he was going to George Washington University Law School in Washington,” a former agent says. “He was in a red Pinto. He comes out of classes and goes to a Safeway in Georgetown. He parks and buys some groceries. A woman parks in a red Pinto nearby. He comes out in forty-five minutes and puts the groceries in the other Pinto. He spent a minute and a half to two minutes trying to start it. Meanwhile, she comes out, screams, and says, ‘What are you doing in my car?’”
“This is my car,” he insisted. “I just can’t get it started right now.”
The woman threatened to call the police. He finally got out, and she drove off.
“He was still dumbfounded,” the former agent says. “He looked at us. We pointed at his car. He got in and drove off like nothing had happened.”
Subsequently, Eisenhower bought a new Oldsmobile and planned to drive it from California to Pennsylvania to see his grandmother Mamie Eisenhower, who was code-named Springtime. In Phoenix, the car gave out. Eisenhower called a local dealership, which said it would fix the car the next morning. After staying overnight in a motel, Eisenhower went to the dealership where the car had been towed. The dealership told him the problem had been fixed: The car had run out of gas and needed a fill-up.
Near the end of Nixon’s presidency, his vice president Spiro Agnew was charged with accepting one hundred thousand dollars in cash bribes. Agnew had taken the payoffs when he was a Maryland state official and later when he was vice president. Agnew pleaded nolo contendere and agreed to resign, leaving office on October 10, 1973.
What never came out was that the married Agnew, a champion of family values who made no secret of
his disdain for the liberal press, was having affairs while in office. One morning in late 1969, Agnew asked his Secret Service detail of five agents to take him to what is now Washington’s elegant St. Regis hotel at 923 Sixteenth Street NW.
“We took him in the back door and brought him to a room on the fourth floor,” says one of the agents. “He asked us to leave him alone for three hours. The detail leader understood he was having an affair with a woman.”
The agents waited in Lafayette Park, two blocks from the hotel and across the street from the entrance to the White House. They then returned to the hotel to pick up the vice president.
“He looked embarrassed,” the former agent says. “Leaving him in an unsecured location was a breach of security. As agents, it was embarrassing because we were facilitating his adultery. We felt like pimps. We couldn’t look her [his wife] in the eye after that.”
In addition to that incident, Agnew was having an affair with a dark-haired, well-endowed female member of his staff. Agnew would not stay in hotels overnight unless the Secret Service arranged for her to be given an adjoining room, a former agent says. The woman was the age of one of Agnew’s daughters.
Ironically, Agnew—who had a good relationship with his agents—expressed concern to them early on about whether they would be telling stories about him to others. In fact, while agents love to exchange stories about protectees among themselves, as a rule, Secret Service agents are more tight-lipped with outsiders than CIA officers or FBI agents. The reason the Secret Service insists that agents not reveal information about personal lives of protectees is that those under protection may not let agents close if they think their privacy will be violated.
While that is a legitimate concern, those who run for high office should expect a high degree of scrutiny and to be held accountable for personal indiscretions that conflict with their public image and that shed light on their character. Rather than expecting the Secret Service to cover up for them, they should not enter public life if they want to lead double lives. That is particularly true when one considers that a president or vice president having an affair opens himself to possible blackmail. If a lower-level federal employee was having an affair, he would be denied a security clearance.
“If you want the job, then you need to lead the kind of life and be the kind of person that can stand up to the scrutiny that comes with that job,” says former Secret Service agent Clark Larsen.
“You just shake your head when you think of all the things you’ve heard and seen and the faith that people have in these celebrity-type people,” a former Secret Service agent says. “They are probably worse than most average individuals.” He adds, “Americans have such an idealized notion of the presidency and the virtues that go with it, honesty and so forth. In most cases, that’s the furthest thing from the truth…. If we would pay attention to their track records, it’s all there. We seem to put blinders on ourselves and overlook these frailties.”
The poor personal character of presidents like Nixon and Johnson translated into the kind of flawed judgment that led to the Watergate scandal and the continuing fruitless prosecution of the Vietnam War when American security interests were not at stake. Voters tend to forget that presidents are, first and foremost, people. If they are unbalanced, nasty, and hypocritical, that will be reflected in their judgment and job performance.
If a friend, an electrician, a plumber, or a job applicant had a track record of acting unethically, lying, or displaying the kind of unbalanced personality of a Johnson or a Nixon, few would want to deal with him. Yet in the case of presidents and other politicians, voters often overlook the signs of poor character and focus instead on their acting ability on TV.
No one can imagine the kind of pressure that being president of the United States imposes on an individual and how easily power corrupts. To be in command of the most powerful country on earth, to be able to fly anywhere at a moment’s notice on Air Force One, to be able to grant almost any wish, to take action that affects the lives of millions, is such a heady, intoxicating experience that only people with the most stable personalities and well-developed values can handle it. Simply inviting a friend to a White House party or having a secretary place a call and announce that “the White House is calling” has such a profound effect on people that presidents and White House aides must constantly remind themselves that they are mortal.
Of all the perks, none is more seductive than living in the one-hundred-thirty-two-room White House. Servants are always on call to take care of the slightest whim. Laundry, cleaning, and shopping are provided for. From three kitchens, White House chefs prepare meals that are exquisitely presented and of the quality of the finest restaurants.
If members of the first family want breakfast in bed every day—as Lyndon Johnson did—they can have it. A pastry chef makes everything from Christmas cookies to chocolate éclairs. If the first family wants, it can entertain every night. Invitations—hand-lettered by five calligraphers—are rarely turned down. In choosing what chinaware to eat from, the first family has its choice of nineteen-piece place settings ordered by other first families. They may choose, for example, the Reagans’ pattern of a gold band around a red border, or the Johnsons’ pattern, which features delicate wildflowers and the presidential seal.
Fresh flowers decorate every room, and lovely landscaping—including the Rose Garden and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden—adorns the grounds.
“The White House is a character crucible,” says Bertram S. Brown, M.D., a psychiatrist who formerly headed the National Institute of Mental Health and was an aide to President John F. Kennedy. “It either creates or distorts character. Few decent people want to subject themselves to the kind of grueling abuse candidates take when they run in the first place,” says Dr. Brown, who has seen in his practice many top Washington politicians and White House aides. “Many of those who run crave superficial celebrity. They are hollow people who have no principles and simply want to be elected. Even if an individual is balanced, once someone becomes president, how does one solve the conundrum of staying real and somewhat humble when one is surrounded by the most powerful office in the land, and from becoming overwhelmed by an at times pathological environment that treats you every day as an emperor? Here is where the true strength of the character of the person, not his past accomplishments, will determine whether his presidency ends in accomplishment or failure.”
Thus, unless a president comes to the office with good character, the crushing force of the office and the adulation the chief executive receives will inevitably lead to disaster. For those reasons, the electorate has a right to know about the true character of its leaders.
6
Daro
ALMOST DAILY, SOMEONE comes to the White House gates and demands to see the president or causes a disturbance requiring the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division to intervene. Each year, twenty-five to thirty people try to ram the White House gates in cars, scale the eight-foot-high reinforced steel fence, shoot their way in, set themselves on fire at the gates, or cause other disruptions. Most of the people who cause disturbances around the White House are mentally ill.
“For the same reason that people stalk the president, the White House is a magnet for the psychotic,” says former agent Pete Dowling. “The president is an authority figure, and many people who have psychoses or have paranoid schizophrenia think that the government is transmitting rays at them or interrupting their thought processes. And what is the ultimate symbol of the government? It’s the White House. So, many of these people come to the gate at the White House and say they want to have an appointment to see the president or they want to see the president.”
“The White House is a mecca for what we call M.O.s—mental observation nuts,” says a former Uniformed Division officer. “Sometimes almost every day there was what we call a White House collar. You’d have people that show up and say ‘Listen, I demand to talk to the president now. My son’s in Iraq, and it’s his fault.’”
Unlike Secret Service agents, uniformed officers are required to have only high school diplomas. Nor do they have the background and training of Secret Service agents. To apply, they must be U.S. citizens. At the time of their appointment, they must be at least twenty-one years of age and younger than forty. They also must have excellent health, be in excellent physical condition, and have uncorrected vision no worse than 20/60. Besides a background check, they are given drug and polygraph tests before being hired. In addition to their White House duties, the Uniformed Division protects foreign embassies.
In protecting the White House and providing security at events, the Uniformed Division employs canine units. Mainly Belgian Malinois, most of the dogs are cross-trained to sniff out explosives and to attack an intruder. Much like German shepherds in appearance, the breed is believed to be higher energy and more agile. The dogs are prey driven, and ball play is their reward after they locate their “prey.” The Secret Service pays forty-five hundred dollars for each trained canine unit. In all, the agency has seventy-five of them.
While waiting to check cleared vehicles that arrive at the White House’s southwest gate, the dogs stand on a white concrete pad that is refrigerated in summer so their paws don’t get hot. Each dog eagerly checks about a hundred cars a day.
Demonstrating how a canine unit operates, a technician in the underground garage at Secret Service headquarters proudly introduces Daro, a brawny eighty-seven-pound Czech shepherd. The dog is presented with a real-world scenario: Hidden from view, a metal canister holding real dynamite has been planted behind a dryer, which is used in laundering the rags that polish the president’s limos. Because the dynamite is not connected to a blasting cap or fuse, it is considered safe to bring it into headquarters.
Daro races around the parked cars, sniffing. Then he walks up to the dryer, stops, and sits. At this point, some explosives-sniffing dogs are trained to bark, but Daro sits down, as he has been trained to do. After his success, his reward is not the usual doggie treat but a hard red rubber ball, which he ravages, chewing off bits of red rubber.