by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
He continued: “What I remember is that she was very—Monica was very upset. She got upset from time to time. And—and I was, you know—I couldn’t see her. I had—I was doing, as I remember—I had some other work to do that morning.”
Another complete lie. The gall! He was seeing Eleanor, the B-list media star. I’d surprised them in the Map Room and had testified about it! I also testified to corroborate another Northwest Gate officer’s testimony of what he told Monica when she just arrived, completely off schedule and off book, to the White House to see the president spontaneously, as if that’s how things were—but then again, I knew that’s how things were done. Unbelievable, but it was right there on C-SPAN. I’d seen his character firsthand. President Clinton saying he had work to do December 6 when he was seeing Eleanor Mondale: It was too elaborate a maze to navigate.
“And she had just sort of showed up and wanted to be let in and wanted to come in at a certain time. And she wanted everything to be that way. And we couldn’t see her. Now I did arrange to see her later that day. And I was upset about her conduct.”
He was upset about her conduct? What about his conduct?
“I’m not sure I knew or focused on, at that moment, exactly the question you asked. I remember I was—I thought her conduct was inappropriate that day.”
It kept getting worse. Off camera, you could hear in the lawyer’s voice that their nostrils were filled with the scent of blood. It must have been intoxicating. After all, this was the ultimate A Few Good Men moment they lived for.
The president continued, “I don’t know whether I found out that day. I knew that they—I knew that somehow she knew that among—that—that Eleanor Mondale was in to see us that day. I knew that I don’t know that I knew how she knew that on that day. I don’t remember that.”
“Pardon me. That leads into my second question, which is, weren’t you irate at the Secret Service precisely because they had revealed this information to Ms. Lewinsky on that very day—so irate that you told several people—or at least one person—that somebody should be fired over this, on that very day?”
This was also absolutely true and he absolutely demanded it, with a heavy-handed insinuation, to “forget it ever happened.” It was no different from the time I had turned Monica away at the Oval Office in trying to protect the presidency and frankly the Clinton brand. The president had immediately leaned out the door, stared me right in the face, as I stood next to the PPD agent, and said he was expecting someone to come with papers and that if I saw them to let them in.
For all the Clintons’ repeated scandals, they blamed everybody except themselves. Every time I heard the Clintons blame the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” the Uniformed Division, the agents on their personal details, their staff persons, the media, and others, I realized how glad I was to have gotten out of their White House when I did. I got out too late, but still mostly unscathed. I could still provide for my family, and by God’s graces and a few men of real character, I remained on the job and became an instructor. That semen-stained blue dress saved our lives, one way or the other, in the media or from the Clinton Machine’s ire.
I watched as the president continued to bash the Secret Service and the Uniformed Division on how “inappropriate” it was to reveal whom the president met with. Yes, we had, but he was so wildly beyond protocol and sowing discord among us for so long that he had no business judging an officer’s character when his own mistress showed up to the White House for her booty call. The machine pushed me out, it pissed off Tripp, it pissed off the Fox, and it jeopardized the character and integrity of the presidency in so many ways. The Clintons never had our backs; they were on it. He demeaningly referred to us as “these uniform people.”
I witnessed a funny little moment when the lawyer caught the president in a bind. He ended his question about the president’s insinuating or directly telling officers and Betty Currie to make sure the Monica-becoming-irate story didn’t get told out of school and he ended his question with “or anything to that effect?”
The president snapped, “What does that mean, ‘anything to that effect’?”
“Well, Mr. President, you’ve told us that you were not going to try to help the Jones’s attorneys, and I think it’s clear from your testimony that you were pretty literal at times. So that’s what I’m saying. I don’t necessarily know the exact words. The question was, do you have any knowledge of the fact.…”
I enjoyed watching the man who still inhabited the Oval Office squirm. He looked as I did when I was trying to protect him in my own grand jury testimony.
Minutes went by and when I was done rubbing my eyes, my face and mouth muscles were tight from laughing, gritting, and fighting tears of despair. His supporters had so much hope for this candidate and president. He promised so much.
“Well, I have a question regarding your definition. And my question is, is oral sex performed on you within that definition as you understood it?”
“As I understood it, it was not, no,” said the weasel.
When asked about the semen stain, he couldn’t even give a straight answer.
Congress moved toward his impeachment—exactly what I had tried to save him from.
Impeachment proceeded. It was hell, but I wanted it all to go away. Either shit or get off the damn pot. Impeach him or don’t, but I wanted it off the papers, and my face off C-SPAN and all the other cable news networks. I wanted Bill off the news, too. As long as he was on TV, I knew no work was getting done at the White House. And the impeachment proceedings damn near shut down, if not locked down, both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Two Republican speakers of the House forfeited their jobs after their own infidelities came to light. Unbelievable. But at least they had the decency to step aside.
The president was impeached on grounds of perjury before the grand jury and obstructing justice, which were both so demonstratively true. A count involving perjury in the Paula Jones case and an abuse of power charge failed.
Were his misdeeds sufficient reason to strip him from office? He’d perjured himself, ruined his own reputation, tarnished the presidency, and damaged if not destroyed the careers, reputations, and lives of a great many people, from myself to Monica to many of his staff. And for what?
The Paula Jones case wasn’t a scam. President Clinton and his attorney, Bob Bennett, filed for dismissal, but her suit wasn’t dismissed. It was real enough for Bill Clinton to fork over $850,000 in November 1998 to settle it. He admitted no wrongdoing. That’s not his style. But he paid and got back to work.
In February 1999 the Senate acquitted President Clinton on both the perjury and obstruction of justice charges. He’d long been a lame duck; now so was Congress. President Clinton had squandered every chance of getting real work done for his own constituents and supporters. The Clintons didn’t lose, but certainly no one won.
I hoped it was all over.
But I’d been disappointed before.
16.
“COMMENCE FIRING!”
At Beltsville, I finally got my instructor’s test.
And I failed it.
I had studied as never before and knew every detail up and down. I failed badly. Failed! No amount of PT and self-abuse could push away the disappointment I felt in myself. After everything I had been through, I thought I had found a new calling in training others, but I’d failed the required written test.
I was either going to be pushed out into a lesser job further on the periphery of the agency, or some of the higher-ups (to whom I was mud anyway) would finally justify giving me the boot, citing my dyslexia and ADD. I’d be gone. The instructor who conducted and evaluated the tests called me in. I held my breath.
“What the hell happened, Gary?”
He was frustrated and couldn’t understand how someone who soaked up the demonstrations and range instruction failed the written test. I was completely straightforward. I revealed my trouble with written tests, the “learning differences” I had
hidden or compensated for over the years. My dyslexia was screwing me over, and it was terribly apparent from my written test score. My life was in their hands. A supervisor asked me a question that I’d answered incorrectly on the test, and I told them the answer—and I was right. He sighed and folded his hands, and I braced for the bad news.
“All right, Gary, here’s what’s going to happen.”
Here it comes. I’m through.
But to my surprise they allowed me to take the test orally, asking me each question and then writing down my answer. They were as perplexed as I was elated. But they saw who I really was and I will always be eternally grateful to them. My test was no different from anyone else’s except that it was read to me aloud, and I gave my answers verbally.
You know, that’s what real diversity is: a diversity of the mind, which is absolutely apolitical as opposed to the politically correct version of diversity. My instructors recognized that I could recite all the answers and all the data (the same as I would have to with students), but I couldn’t read and write it for a several-hour test—and when would an instructor ever have to do that with students? Never.
They knew the most crucial thing: Life in the real world (in this case gunfights and firearms training) doesn’t correlate with written exams. Someone who could pass the written test with flying colors might be the last guy you’d want at your side when shit hit the fan.
I wanted to dance in the street or fire automatic weapons into the air—but I settled for a firm handshake.
As a JJRTC junior instructor, I considered how to act professionally and to really get through to the trainees. I had to find my style, be stern yet understanding, forceful but not pushy, and trusted and respected but never friendly. A good instructor is demanding, but a great instructor gets his students to be demanding of themselves. They have to push themselves to their own limits.
Fairy-tale notions of killing and training would be dispelled. Training opportunities had to move them to accurately evaluate their own abilities, diagnose their issues, and escape from the most impossible jams.
I taught, “If good guys aren’t the best, then the good guys don’t win. When you’re engaged, it’s going to be ugly. There is going to be blood everywhere: under your fingernails, seeping through to your underwear, and in your face. Your firearm will be slippery from it. They’ll show pictures of it afterward and it won’t look like the movies!”
Our training could be the difference between someone’s retaining a firearm or being disarmed by an attacker, accidentally shooting a civilian, or being the marksman whom freedom counts on. Saving the Secret Service’s top protectees and helping them retain their own lives and dignity would be won in training—or lost.
Training never stops. Training is worthless or even dangerous without the right character.
Abilities, like firearms, if not maintained, rust and become a danger, not an asset, in a pinch. With other law enforcement agencies, the first responsibility is to fight the attacker, but with the USSS, safeguarding the protectee comes first; killing or subduing some son of a bitch is a distant second. That’s what an instructor ensures at JJRTC. Throw in fully armored vehicles moving at high speeds doing protection drills to teach students what they may be called upon to do, and things get really crazy. Honestly, it’s like shooting fully automatic firearms to engage hostile targets while extracting a presidential protectee to a safe zone and administering serious first aid. The scenarios we ran at JJRTC were insane, but terrifyingly realistic.
The normal probationary period for a newbie instructor is one year, but I had my own classes in six months. We took puppy-eyed recruits and spit ’em out as Rottweilers. “Fight, shoot, move” was my motto.
I was pulling some OT at 0700 on a Sunday morning at JJRTC. The weather was nice. All was calm. It was going to be an easy day. The officer with me on the gate answered the phone.
“Uh, Gary, it’s the SAC [Special Agent in Charge] of training. He wants to talk to you.”
“Gary?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why the f—am I seeing your face on TV? Why are my kids watching you on HBO?” he asked, seething.
Here we go again, I thought.
“Well, those tapes got released along with the president’s deposition,” I explained, referring to the C-SPAN broadcast.
“Not that, Gary. This is something else.”
So I ran to a break room, where I saw myself on HBO in a documentary called American Anthem. A documentary team had arranged a session with a presidential staffer and kept their video camera running as they passed through White House security. And who was the one officer who noticed their red light was on—and gave them a hard time about their unauthorized filming? And ended up on HBO acting like a hard-ass? Me! The video crew filmed exactly what happened to someone entering the White House from start to finish, and in the documentary I told her she couldn’t go in—just before the staffer she was dealing with waved me off.
We obtained a copy of the documentary and battened down for a possible shit storm. Thankfully, no one ever made a big deal about it other than everyone in-house busting my balls over it.
The USSS was expanding. The lobbying every agency does for bigger budgets is like a competition, and our agency was doing well. We trained larger and larger classes, but we were concerned that quality standards might fall to accommodate quickly expanding cohorts of servicemen. And greater funding meant more inspections to ensure that the taxpayers’ money was well spent. That was fine. But in practice, that translated into more dog-and-pony shows.
And so it was that following the president’s impeachment, I next saw Mr. and Mrs. Clinton during one of our dog-and-pony shows. I had my shades on and hoped my bald head wouldn’t give me away. I really didn’t want to be recognized by them and thankfully, I wasn’t. They merely shook my hand along with everyone else’s and thanked us all for our time. I wiped my sweaty bald pate in relief.
The First Lady took a surprising liking to firearms, especially a Thompson submachine gun, an original and an American classic, Al Capone’s legendary “Chicago typewriter.” When Mrs. Clinton let loose a spray of man-stopping .45 ACP rounds into the paper, dirt, and berms of our outdoor one-way range, I thought she’d erupt in a maniacal laugh. She just smiled ear-to-ear. Most newcomer women shy away, but not her. If not for the Assault Weapon Ban, she probably would’ve taken the Thompson home with her. Her next shots zipped right into the target’s crotch. Everyone chuckled, turned away, or glanced at the president.
We also provided our visitors with a rifle, rested its stock on a sandbag, and sighted targets at fifty yards. The visitor just had to pull the trigger to hit the target. I was impressed that Mrs. Clinton pulled the stock of the rifle into her shoulder. Recoil can slam right into you, but she knew what she was doing. Higher-caliber rounds like the 7mm Remington Magnum can snap a collarbone, so we outfitted visitors with weakened, reduced loads. We also set the eye relief on the scope so the recoil didn’t send it back into their eyes. If the First Lady got scoped, it could fracture her eye socket or eyeball or just leave a really swollen black eye—just like the one she gave Bill.
She sat on a ground-level shooting bench and fired, hitting her target on paper but high. She wanted a bull’s-eye, so the instructor lowered the shot placement on her target. He adjusted her beanbag target rest, squeezing to raise the rifle’s stock and lower its barrel, thereby lowering the bullet’s point of impact.
She was looking through the scope, and he was squeezing the beanbag and asking her if the sights were lined up on the target. He kept asking if they were lined up and if the sights moved when he squeezed. It was some grand mystery to him why the sights weren’t moving despite squeezing the beanbag.
He wasn’t squeezing the beanbag; he had his hand on her breast! I was mortified and didn’t know what to do. Eventually he caught on. We swallowed our laughter and were stoic. Our buddy was red-faced and apologized profusely, but in a low, serious tone so as to ke
ep it just between her and him.
Thank God my fellow instructors honored my request to keep me at arm’s length from the Clintons, because if I had accidentally pulled that shit—I could barely look at the Clintons regardless—I would be six-feet deep either in dirt, media headlines, or legal paperwork. But the show went on. I thought the incident highlighted many of the little awkward moments instructors have to worry about when teaching students of the opposite gender. We must ask ourselves five times a day: Am I about to be hit with a sexual harassment suit? Eventually you just move on. But the instructor with Mrs. Clinton was shaken at the thought.
In 1999, as I attained the instructor gig, we were summoned to run protective details when the USSS foreign missions branch required reinforcements with ambassador and foreign dignitaries’ visits. We were increasingly called in to stem protection personnel gaps. We were a mix of agents and UD and even a few LEOs from other agencies. At least fifty of these security details floated around D.C. at any given time, protecting the who’s who of the political and military world. These missions were fun and crazy. The fun depended on the mission specifics, but the craziness depended on the protectees, our principals. We didn’t get to choose where they went, whether they visited a museum or strip club—we provided the ride. We just did our job, and I can tell you many stories of heroism regarding how these teams protected VIPs who weren’t our president, the vice president, or the First Family.
We covered NATO’s fiftieth anniversary. As everyone arrived for roll call at SSHQ, we all introduced ourselves. Hell, the last memorable time I was at SSHQ a damned FBI agent Mirandized me—that rat bastard. The shift leader realized who I was—one of the UD who testified against the president. Our protectee was Vaclav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic. The communists had imprisoned Havel, a dissident and playwright, for many years before he emerged to lead a free Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, he wasn’t in good health and was going to keep a low profile during his stay in D.C. while he visited the NATO fiftieth birthday. I think he had one lung and some heart issues. The joke was that he was married to this blonde far younger than he, and our mission revolved around providing him with an AED (automatic external defibrillator) if he got too excited about her.
