by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
They gave us black gloves instead of blue. Some of us finally got the Kevlar and leather ballistic gloves we wanted, so maybe we won. But it took controversy rather than common sense to get things done.
But the most revealing portion of the blue glove story was not how a Uniformed Division officer may or may not have overreacted. It was how people under Mrs. Clinton’s direct command had messed up in the first place, how she exhibited her rage in a truly over-the-top, unprofessional manner.
Let’s return to the memo describing the delegation as HIV positive. Somehow Frank’s delegation had secured a copy of that document—and it was the violation of revealing their personal medical records that outraged its members far more than Crusty and his blue glove act.
Now, who prepared that memo? It wasn’t the Secret Service. It was the White House Social Office—an operation directly under the command of Hillary Rodham Clinton herself. The Secret Service would never have committed such private medical information to a written document. It knew better than to do that—and certainly better than to label the entire delegation as HIV positive.
Mrs. Clinton’s own office created the crisis. But who received her obscenity-filled tirades?
The Secret Service.
But some other people suffered far more than we did.
I was working in the East Wing and heading toward the second-floor Social Office to retrieve an event list for the morning’s guests. I spied several clearly agitated members of Mrs. Clinton’s staff.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
“No, problem, Gary,” one answered, but clearly there was a problem. “What is it?”
“Is everything all right?” I asked. “You don’t have to tell me if it’s not my business. I’m just making sure everyone is safe. Is there anything that I need to be aware of? Or pass along?”
They assured me that I had nothing to worry about security-wise. But they had plenty to worry about First Lady-wise.
Mrs. Clinton’s mad whirl of special events, special tours, and various other functions—all part of her continuing public relations offensive—had never really slowed down. But each event cost money—and, as usual, the White House budget remained at the bursting point. To economize, her staff had engaged several unpaid interns to assist with their functions.
This morning’s stir—and there was a stir every morning—involved an intern’s having botched a huge order for official White House Social Office invitations, basing the design on a previous draft of copy, not the latest. These were not your run-of-the mill invitations. These were dispatched to royalty, other foreign leaders, dignitaries, ambassadors, and power players all over the world. They were top-of-the-line and had to be completely redesigned and reordered.
I tried advising Mrs. Clinton’s distraught staffers to keep the matter in perspective. Surely the White House, the country, had bigger problems than this—even if it was money flushed down the drain. Hey, nobody died.
“That’s not the problem,” I was told.
“Who’s going to tell Hillary?” another staffer continued with obvious trepidation.
My eyes widened. It wasn’t the actual problem that was the issue—it wasn’t the waste of taxpayer dollars. It was facing the First Lady’s response. Yes, imagine dealing with mega-wedding invitations for the world’s biggest Bridezilla—in this case, none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Her staffers had to cover their posteriors—and fast. They explicitly informed me that careers were made or broken on the whim of her “wrath”—a term I heard often. I backed away much more quickly and silently than I had arrived.
But the question wasn’t the waste of tens of thousands of public funds (probably more than my annual salary). The issue wasn’t why they had entrusted this task to inexperienced interns—and then not properly reviewed their work.
The issue, as always, was “How do we tell Hillary?”
Fear reigned among her staff. It made it impossible for them to say no to her. It paralyzed their decisions, and in the end, it created disastrous consequences.
I mostly saw Vince Foster in the hallways. He was Mrs. Clinton’s personal attaché, a lawyer from Arkansas. Word circulated that she berated him mercilessly. The first time I saw Foster I figured he wouldn’t last a year. He looked uncomfortable and unhappy in the White House. I knew what it was like to be yelled at by superiors, but Mrs. Clinton never hesitated to launch a tirade. Yet her staffers never dared say, “I don’t have to take this shit!” They reminded me of battered wives: too loyal, too unwilling to acknowledge they’d never assuage her. They had no one to blame but themselves, but they could never admit it.
She criticized Foster for failing to get ahead of the constant scandals, for cabinet positions not confirmed, and for the slowness of staffing the White House. Foster eventually took his own life in Fort Marcy Park. In his briefcase was a note torn into twenty-seven pieces, blaming the FBI, the media, the Republicans—even the White House Ushers Office. A rumor circulated among law enforcement types that contended his suicide weapon had to be repaired in order for the forensics team to fire it since it wouldn’t function for them. Maybe his final shot misaligned the cylinders and later prevented contact with the bullet primers. But that, along with many other public details of the case (carpet fibers on his suit coat, etc.), made his case spooky. The last lines of his sparse suicide note read: “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”
A UD friend of mine, Hank O’Neil, was posted outside of Foster’s office as part of the FBI’s investigation of his suicide. Maggie Williams, Mrs. Clinton’s always well dressed chief of staff, physically pushed her way past Hank into Foster’s office, arguing that he had no right to block her entrance. She removed boxes that were never recovered; they were destroyed. Congressmen bashed Officer O’Neil’s integrity, but he held firm. He reported exactly what he saw and didn’t make any inferences about it, but they were sure he held some smoking gun and was protecting the Clintons.
All I’d been warned of proved true. Working protective details during the election, I sized up the Clinton machine by talking with agents and local police in Arkansas. I wanted to know what to expect. Mrs. Clinton installed her office one floor up, next to the Legal Department’s offices. Staffers scurried to avoid her attention. We exchanged “Good mornings” with President Clinton. With her, we used our best judgment and kept silent, but things grew worse.
Around 1993, I befriended the FBI liaison to the White House, Gary Aldrich. Everyone at UD liked Aldrich—even if he was FBI. The Secret Service agents had their normal interagency chip on their shoulder for him, but his stories about interacting with the Clintons were rich. He was basically the ambassador between the lauded and revered Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Clinton’s Executive Branch. For the Clintons, the lines between government and politics were always blurred.
“I keep having to tell them,” he’d confide in us, “‘we’re not your private investigative service over here. We’re the FBI.’”
Aldrich’s hunched posture betrayed those frustrations, as though he’d grown weary of throwing up his arms, shrugging his shoulders, and shaking his head while exclaiming, “We just can’t conduct these inquiries and checks on whomever they wish—even if they are working for the president!” He’d look at us, hoping for a shared sense of disbelief. We’d mirror his look of astonishment and humor. If was as if he was asking for confirmation of his own sanity in a crazy world. We knew the feeling all too well.
“They can’t just run a check on someone because they want more info on them,” Aldrich would tell us. “It’s not a good enough reason. And then I have to hear from my people that they’re going over my head and contacting others at the FBI directly. It’s like, ‘C’mon guys. [We’re] just trying to help you.…’”
It was all Standard Clinton Operating Procedure.
In June 1996 Aldrich’s predicament became public knowledge when the Hous
e Government Reform and Oversight Committee discovered that the White House Office of Personnel and Security had requested the FBI to conduct more than nine hundred illegal background checks on its political opponents, many of them former Reagan and Bush appointees.
This improper peeking into confidential FBI files began, however, on a rather small numerical scale, with the harassing of seven White House Travel Office officials. Hillary wanted these good people fired so their jobs could go to her Arkansas cronies. But it wasn’t enough that these employees be fired; they had to be put through the wringer of a series of inquisitorial federal investigations.
Gary Aldrich would later write:
Mrs. Clinton [used] security agencies as a hammer to attack and punish those who stood in her way. The FBI, the Secret Service and the Internal Revenue Service hounded and then prosecuted seven innocent men who worked for the White House travel office simply because they were standing in the way of Mrs. Clinton’s political interests and ambitions. She knew federal investigations would destroy those good men, but she wanted her friends in those slots, and that was all that mattered.*
Did Hillary ever tell the truth about this scandal? Not exactly. As Ken Starr’s successor, Robert Ray, found in 2000, “The evidence was insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that any of Mrs. Clinton’s statements and testimony regarding her involvement in the travel office firings were knowingly false.”**
Translate that sentence into English, and I think it pretty clearly says: She’s wiggled out of it again.
Recall also that all improper snooping was accomplished through the White House Office of Personnel and Security. Its director was a fellow named Craig Livingstone, whom Gary Aldrich considered “a joke.”*** No one could even quite figure out who had hired Livingstone, and certainly nobody wanted to take credit. His security and personnel experience seemed to consist mainly of being a bouncer in a D.C. nightclub. But rumors swirled that Hillary had hired him (though some said it was Vince Foster). She, of course, denied it.
“Some of my security friends,” Gary Aldrich, however, would later write, “thought that this [Livingstone’s appointment] was Mrs. Clinton’s way of showing us that she held no respect for us.”*
This scandal became known as Filegate, just another scandal piled onto the other scandals from Whitewater to sexual harassment and others. We were learning: The only thing that pushed a Clinton scandal out of the public eye was another scandal.
One day, UD officers met to review events at their respective posts. A bewildered new officer arrived. “Hey, you’ll never believe it, but I passed the First Lady, and she told me to go to hell!”
A second young officer responded, “You think that’s bad? I passed her on the West Colonnade, and all I said was ‘Good morning, First Lady.’ She told me, ‘Go f—yourself.’”
“Are you serious?”
“‘Go f—yourself’!” He imitated her, pointing a finger.
We were stunned but not all of us were surprised. Our sergeant challenged him, but another officer soon corroborated his story. Our sergeant was speechless. We assured the rookie that this wasn’t the job’s normal atmosphere—at least, not under the previous administration. The sergeant fumed and called the watch commander, who pushed things up the Secret Service chain of command, who said they’d forward it to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. The Service circulated a memo reminding everyone to report any “unusual” First Family interaction to their supervisors.
The new guy (who had earned a Purple Heart fighting the Clintons’ war in Somalia) got an apology for the First Lady’s actions—but not directly from her, of course. Quite a difference from how Barbara Bush once apologized to my family. Staff morale suffered once more.
By now Hillary’s behavior never surprised me—I never let it surprise me.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer—yes, that Dr. Ruth—had just visited the president. She claimed she had been the final voice in getting the president to run. Every time she visited she told us she had been a sniper in the Israeli army’s early inception—that’s 100 percent true. “If you were an enemy, I could put a bullet right in your chest out at two hundred yards, young man,” she boasted, thumping me in the chest. It honestly hurt. She’s a tiny old lady but with hands like a vise. I wouldn’t pick a fight with her.
Later, one of Mrs. Clinton’s staffers escorted a group of visiting Arkansas VIPs. She ordered me to keep an eye on them while she scooted elsewhere. I refused. Her request jeopardized security. We weren’t even allowed to help with luggage if the First Family was struggling, because it would tie up our hands.
She kept insisting, emulating Mrs. Clinton’s behavior like a caricature. She made a call, and soon my earpiece echoed with an ominous, “Evergreen heading to Oval Office area.”
The First Lady marched straight up to me. The Arkansas VIPs were still in awe over the Oval Office.
“I understand we have a problem here.”
“No, ma’am, we don’t. Ms. [the staffer] wants to leave this party unescorted in the Oval Office and it’s simply against protocol. Someone has to escort them at all times while in the White House.”
Safely beyond the VIPs’ earshot, Mrs. Clinton oozed her typical hostility. Fending off her tongue-lashing, I referred again to my official post protocol. I had to be ready for emergency response. Trouble didn’t wait for tours. Someone once dropped dead in my area. I had to act. But this wasn’t the first time Mrs. Clinton berated me. She simply didn’t understand what the UD did, never bothered to learn about her new surroundings or personnel. She wanted things done. I was there to create a secure environment, and escorting her VIPs prevented that. When she finished slinging expletives, pointing her finger up at me (I’m 6’2” and she’s 5’4” tops) and openly threatening my career, I suggested a solution.
“What I would recommend is that they go to the Roosevelt Room. That way they can be supervised as long as they stay there and I’m not called away. If I’m called away, they will have to be sent back to the West Wing Lobby. That’s the best I can think of at this time, but they simply can’t stay in the Oval Office.”
“Ugh. Fine.” She stormed off.
Her staffer glared at me. I killed their VIPs with kindness, as Roosevelt Room protocol differs from the Oval Office’s. I found a framed picture in the president’s study and brought it out to them. One of the ladies was in the picture, and the rest were clearly jealous.
When the First Lady and her staffer returned, our guests informed Mrs. Clinton how much they enjoyed their time, the pictures, and the stories “the officer” told of the Roosevelt Room. She grabbed me by the arm, pretending we were the best of friends and that she loved the Secret Service.
Her personality adversely affected those entrusted with her safety. If I noticed that a new officer was as high-strung as she was, I’d carefully hint to him or her that perhaps they might seek another assignment. The sense of high drama she exuded would only burn them out physically or emotionally. Worse, they might overact on the job or be so stressed out that they would start messing up, might even leave an Uzi submachine gun on the bumper of the presidential limo—that had happened once.
It was strange: Hillary Clinton always looked uncomfortable around her husband, let alone anyone else. I can’t call her shy, but she was definitely standoffish. She never relaxed. She never allowed herself any off-hours or off-duty candor. I couldn’t imagine being like that—always having to say or do the right thing, always calculating. Human beings need confidants, friends, family, people they can relax with, but the First Lady was always wound up, an unhappy captive of her own sense of mission.
Opposites attract. That’s why on paper, the First Couple was perfectly matched. But their opposites were too opposite.
Bill Clinton was friendly and charming with just about everyone besides Hillary. He always seemed to want to give his company extra time. He was very generous that way. Like him or not, share his political ideas or not, find yourself in the same room with him
, and you are hooked. You can’t help but like him.
But that was not Hillary. She was clearly all business, 24/7. Her private leadership style was based on pure fear and loathing—and I never saw her that turn off. Even in the president’s presence, Mrs. Clinton operated at far greater than arm’s length—a cheerless grifter always on her scheming way to someone or something else more important than the person directly in front of her.
If you saw them privately, they never seemed to meld at all. But turn on a camera or bring in a fat-cat donor, and the ice suddenly melted. They’d smile at each other, laugh, trade little jokes. They’d move in closer to each other, turn warmer—yes, even romantic. They might even hold hands. They could flip that emotional light switch whenever they had to, then switch it back off again when the crowds and cameras departed.
It was all a business for them: Clinton, Inc.
At a White House event for agents and their wives, the Clintons invited UD officers who worked closely in the West Wing, and I was honored to be included. The agents weren’t too thrilled, which made it that much sweeter. It was a big deal to Genny.
As usual, the First Couple posed for a seemingly endless amount of pictures. At receptions, they never got a chance to eat so much as an hors-d’oeuvre. Standing the entire time in the horribly overheated room and struggling to stay awake, the president would play little pranks on guests he felt comfortable with. I almost felt guilty about getting a picture with him, but Genny insisted.
The four of us—myself, the First Couple, and my wife—posed for a photo. I put my hand behind Mrs. Clinton, and immediately my hand was grabbed by a soft hand that placed it on Mrs. Clinton’s rear. I was mortified and just froze. Snap. The picture was taken, and we thanked the president profusely but were whisked away so the next couple could get their photo. I leaned over to Genny.
