The First Family Detail

by Ronald Kessler

  “He said one contains Marine One, and the other contains other important assets for the president in case of emergencies,” Jarvis says.

  The woman’s claim that Bush would be wearing a sport jacket and would sit behind the driver made Jarvis skeptical, but he immediately briefed supervisors at the Secret Service Intelligence Division duty desk in Washington.

  “You guys are going to think I’m crazy,” he began, then related the information about the vision and how Henigman had correctly led him to the president’s limo.

  As Jarvis saw it, “We deal in the bizarre all the time. Nothing’s too wacky that hasn’t come across the duty desk report sheet. You’re just straight up and lay it out the way you see it. And together you examine and turn the thing over and make a determination.”

  At 1 A.M., Jarvis called the head of the advance team and briefed him. However, since Henigman seemed to be wrong about what clothes Bush would be wearing and where he would be sitting in the limo, they dismissed the psychic’s concerns. Still, that morning, before Bush left for Oklahoma, the head of the advance team informed detail leaders based in W-16, where agents are stationed under the Oval Office, about the psychic’s vision and the fact that she knew where the presidential limousines were parked.

  Jarvis also discussed the matter with the agent in charge of the motorcade. He asked if the motorcade route would take the president by an overpass. The agent said it would go under a railroad overpass and several elevated intersections on Routes 64 and 412 from Enid Woodring Regional Airport.

  “Do you have an alternate motorcade route?”

  “Sure, we always do,” the agent replied.

  That morning, Air Force One landed in Enid. Known by the Secret Service code name Angel, Air Force One got its name when Dwight D. Eisenhower—code-named Providence—was president. Because a flight controller mistook the president’s plane for a commercial one, the pilot suggested designating any aircraft the president was in as Air Force One.

  The current presidential plane is a Boeing 747-200B bubble-top jumbo jet acquired in 1990 when George H. W. Bush was president. It has a range of 9,600 miles and a maximum cruising altitude of 45,100 feet. It cruises at 600 miles per hour but can achieve speeds of 701 miles per hour. The plane is 231 feet long, and its three levels give it 4,000 square feet of floor space. In addition to two pilots, a navigator, and a flight engineer, the plane can carry seventy-six passengers. It is equipped with two galleys, where Air Force One stewards can prepare a hundred meals at one sitting.

  Under Federal Aviation Administration regulations, Air Force One takes precedence over all other aircraft. When approaching an airport, it bumps any other planes that have preceded it into the airspace. Before it lands, Secret Service agents on the ground check the runway for explosives or objects such as stray tires. Generally, other aircraft may not land on the same runway for fifteen or twenty minutes before Air Force One lands.

  As President Bush came out of Air Force One in Enid, Agent Jarvis stared at him in disbelief. Bush was not wearing a suit. He had on an outdoor jacket and an open-collar shirt, just as the psychic had said he would. Bush then walked down the gangway steps and got in on the limousine’s right side, his usual position. Jarvis started to relax. But after delivering a short speech in Enid, Bush invited some friends to sit with him in the limo for the four-mile drive back to the airport. They got in first—on the right side. Bush walked around the limo, got in on the left side, and sat down behind the driver. Again, the psychic had been right.

  Jarvis and the advance leader decided the psychic could not be ignored. Never mind if anyone thought they were crazy. For the trip back to the airport, the agents ordered the motorcade to take the alternate route along East Market Street and Jerauld Gentry Road. It did not go under an overpass.

  No harm befell Bush, and agents never told him what had happened. Nor did anyone check to see if snipers were on any overpasses. In November 1993, a little more than a year after her encounter with the Secret Service, Henigman died at the age of fifty-five.

  10

  PEANUT FARMER

  Jimmy Carter cultivated the image of a jolly populist who grew up on a farm, ran a peanut warehouse, and championed the workingman.

  The presidency “is a place of compassion,” Carter said in accepting his nomination for a second term at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. “My own heart is burdened for the troubled Americans. The poor and the jobless and the afflicted …”

  Behind the scenes, it was a different story.

  “Carter was just very short and rude most of the time,” an agent recalls. “With agents, he’d just pretend like you were not around. You’d say hello, and he’d just look at you, like you weren’t there, like you were bothering him.”

  Carter actually told Secret Service agents and uniformed officers he did not want them to greet him on his way to the Oval Office. It was apparently too much bother for him to have to say hello back to another human being.

  Nor did Carter have much use for the military. Even though he was a Naval Academy graduate, Carter “talked down to the military, just talked like they didn’t know what they were talking about,” a former agent says.

  “Carter didn’t want military aides to wear uniforms,” former agent Cliff Baranowski recalls.

  Not surprisingly, of all the presidents in recent memory, Carter was the chief executive most detested by Secret Service agents. Agent John Piasecky was on Carter’s detail for three and a half years. That included seven months of driving him in the presidential limousine. Aside from giving directions, Carter never spoke to him, he says.

  Carter tried to project an image of himself as man of the people by carrying his own luggage when traveling. But that was another charade. When he was a candidate in 1976, Carter would carry his own bags when the press was around but would ask the Secret Service to carry them the rest of the time.

  As president, Carter—code-named Deacon—orchestrated more ruses involving his luggage.

  “When he was traveling, he would get on the helicopter and fly to Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base,” says former Secret Service agent Baranowski. “He would roll up his sleeves and carry his bag over his shoulder, but it was empty. He wanted people to think he was carrying his own bag.”

  “Carter made a big show about taking a hang-up carryon out of the trunk of the limo when he’d go someplace, and there was nothing in it,” says another agent who was on his detail. “It was empty. It was just all show.”

  Carter would regularly make a show of arriving early at the Oval Office to call attention to how hard he was working for the American people.

  “He would walk into the Oval Office at 6 A.M., do a little work for half an hour, then close the curtains and take a nap,” says Robert B. Sulliman Jr., who was on Carter’s detail. “His staff would tell the press he was working.”

  Another agent says that at other times, he could see Carter through the Oval Office windows dozing off in his desk chair while he was ostensibly working.

  “Carter was a phony, an absolute phony,” an agent says.

  “When he was in a bad mood, you didn’t want to bring him anything,” a former Secret Service agent says. “It was this hunkered-down attitude: ‘I’m running the show.’ It was as if he didn’t trust anyone around him. He had that big smile, but when he was in the White House, it was a different story.”

  “The only time I saw a smile on Carter’s face was when the cameras were going,” says former agent George Schmalhofer, who was assigned periodically to the Carter detail.

  Perhaps because of his aversion to the military, Carter refused to let the military aide with the nuclear football stay in a nearby trailer when Carter was visiting his home in Plains, Georgia.

  “Carter did not want the nuclear football at Plains,” a former agent says. “There was no place to stay in Plains. The military wanted a trailer there. He didn’t want that. So the military aide had to stay in Americus.” The town was a fifteen
-minute drive from Carter’s home. “Carter didn’t want anyone bothering him on his property,” the former agent explains. “He wanted his privacy.”

  Terrence Adamson, Carter’s lawyer, denied that Carter refused to let the military aide stay near his residence. But Bill Gulley, who was in charge of the operation as director of the White House Military Office, confirmed it.

  Carter may have shown no interest in protecting the country from a nuclear attack, but he loved to pore over the inner workings of the White House, including how the air-conditioning worked. He even delved into how the Secret Service transported presidential limousines. Carter decided that to save money, they should be driven across the country instead of flown. Because the Air Force flew the vehicles as part of training, the Secret Service believed that Carter’s plan actually increased costs.

  A sign of another Carter project, an agent recalls seeing the blueprints for a new submarine on Carter’s desk in the private study off the Oval Office.

  “I don’t know what the hell he was trying to do, figuring out if it would work?” the agent says.

  While he publicly denied it, Carter would personally schedule the times when aides could play on the White House tennis courts.

  “Carter said, ‘I’m in charge,’ ” a former Secret Service agent says. “ ‘Everything is my way.’ He tried to micromanage everything. You had to go to him about playing on the tennis court. It was ridiculous.”

  Agents were convinced that Carter as president was in over his head and that Rosalynn was the smarter one. She had a loving relationship with her husband and acted as an advisor, sometimes firmly correcting what he said. Unlike her husband, she treated agents with respect.

  “Rosalynn really was the brains of the outfit,” says former agent Repasky. “She kept him in line and constantly advised him. She was very pragmatic and organized. He would make an ultra-liberal comment, and she would ground him and tell him he had to be more centrist. If he didn’t listen, she could get cold and steely.”

  “I think the presidency was too big for Carter to comprehend,” says former agent Ramon Dunlap.

  In recent memory, according to agents, the brattiest offspring of a president was Amy Carter, who was ten when her father became president.

  “Amy was spoiled rotten,” an agent on her detail says.

  “Amy Carter was a mess,” says Brad Wells, an Air Force One steward. “She would look at me and pick up a package of [open] soda crackers and crush them and throw them on the floor. She did it purposely. We had to clean it up. That was our job.”

  Secret Service agents guarding Amy—code-named Dynamo—at school often found themselves in the middle when Amy wanted to play with friends after school instead of going home to the White House to do her homework, as she was supposed to do. When agents told her she had to go home, “Amy would call her father and hand the phone to the agents,” Dennis Chomicki, who was on her detail, remembers. “The president would say to take Amy anywhere she wants to go. Amy just had her father wrapped up.”

  Since Amy would often stay at a friend’s house through the evening, agents wound up working longer hours than if they had taken her directly to the White House. As a result, says Chomicki, “the detail would always try to get Mrs. Carter, the first lady, on the phone, because she would say, ‘Nothing doing, she’s coming home. She’s got her homework to do.’ ”

  Of all the presidential children guarded by the Secret Service, Carter’s second oldest son, James Earl “Chip” Carter III, was one of the least liked. Twenty-six when his father won the presidency, Chip had helped campaign for him in 1976 and again gave speeches on his behalf when Carter ran for reelection in 1980.

  “He was outrageous,” a Secret Service agent says. “Chip was out of control. Marijuana, liquor, chasing women.” Separated from his wife, Chip would “pick up women in Georgetown and ask if they wanted to have sex in the White House. Most of them did. He did it as often as he could,” the agent says.

  At one point, Rosalynn Carter told the press that all three of her sons had experimented with marijuana. Their oldest son, John William “Jack” Carter, was discharged by the Navy for smoking weed.

  After he left the presidency, Jimmy Carter often went skiing and fishing with Rosalynn in Colorado.

  “He’d go skiing, and he’d take lessons, and his wife would take lessons, too,” a former agent says. “But he wouldn’t listen to his instructor. He thought he was an expert. He’d go skiing, and she’d go skiing, and he’d keep falling down or not doing things right, and she would do everything right the way the instructors taught her. He’d get pissed off because she was a better skier than he was.”

  The same pattern played out when the couple went fishing.

  “She’d go out there in the middle of the stream and go fishing, and he’d be out there thinking he was the best fisherman in the world,” the former agent says. “He’d be tossing that line out there, and she’d be catching fish, and he’d get just furious because he couldn’t catch a fish and she could.”

  11

  WHITE HOUSE COLLAR

  The White House is code-named Crown, and for an assassin, the president is the jewel in the crown. Terrorists, mentally unstable individuals seeking acclaim, lone gunmen with a gripe against the government, and assassins who crave notoriety would all love to take out the president.

  Each year, twenty-five to thirty people with mayhem in mind 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. Individuals who demand to see the president confront the Secret Service on a daily basis. Most of the people who cause disruptions around the White House are mentally ill and see the White House as Mecca.

  “For the same reason that people stalk the president, the White House is a magnet for the psychotic,” former agent Pete Dowling observes. “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.”

  Agents and Uniformed Division officers have a name for the arrest of those who cause a disruption at the gates: White House collars.

  “Every day there is at least one White House collar,” says a former uniformed officer. “Most sane people who really want to harm the president aren’t going to actually telegraph it. But you’d have people who would show up and say ‘Listen, I demand to talk to the president now. My son’s in [the war], and it’s his fault. And I’m not leaving until I talk to the president.’ At that point, special agents from the Protective Intelligence Squad in the Washington field office come out and interview the guy.”

  Eventually, agents warn the individual to leave or he will be arrested. In most cases, he complies.

  At the White House, “you know right away if there’s a fence jumper,” a Secret Service agent says. “There are electronic eyes and ground sensors six feet back [from the sidewalk] that are monitored twenty-four hours a day. They sense movement and weight. Infrared detectors are installed closer to the house. You have audio detectors. Every angle is covered by cameras and recorded.”

  Uniformed Division officers and the division’s Emergency Response Team, armed with P90 submachine guns, form the first line of defense.

  “If somebody jumps that fence, ERT is going to get them right away, either with a dog or just themselves,” an agent says. “They’ll give the dog a command, and that dog will knock over a two-hundred-fifty-pound man. It will hit him dead center and take him down.” In addition, he says, the Uniformed Division’s countersnipers will train their weapons on the intruder.

  A suspect who is armed and has jumped the fence may get a warning to drop the weapon. If he does not immediately obe
y the command, the Secret Service is under orders to take the person out quickly rather than risk a possible hostage-taking situation.

  Uniformed Division officers protect the White House building complex as well as foreign embassies. Secret Service agents protect individuals: the president and his family, the vice president and his family, former presidents and their spouses, visiting heads of state, and certain White House officials, like the chief of staff and the national security advisor. Agents also protect some Cabinet officers, like the secretary of the treasury and the secretary of homeland security, because they are in the line of succession to the presidency and are not otherwise protected.

  As their name implies, Uniformed Division officers wear uniforms, while Secret Service agents wear suits. Unlike Secret Service agents, uniformed officers are required only to have high school diplomas. Nor do they have the background and training of agents. Like agents, they must be U.S. citizens to apply. At the time of their appointment, they must be at least twenty-one years of age but younger than forty. The age limit for special agents is thirty-seven years. Besides passing a background examination, potential agents and uniformed officers must take drug tests and pass a polygraph examination before being hired.

  Interestingly, the Secret Service adopted the term “special agent” for all its agents from the FBI, whose director J. Edgar Hoover had devised it to give G-men more stature.

  While most agents say they respect the job uniformed officers do, agents are above them in the pecking order. Agents will refer to Uniformed Division officers as “box creatures,” a reference to the fact that they work from box-like guard posts at the White House. Uniformed Division officers, in turn, will refer to agents as “suit guards.”