“John Hinckley, a mentally deranged individual, prepositioned himself in a general public area that the White House staff had requested,” the course synopsis says flatly. “To the White House staff, this was an issue of letting the people see their president. They did not feel that the potential risk factor outweighed the positive PR.”
In fact, contrary to the inspection report’s claim that the public’s access to the president was “within accepted standards,” the Secret Service’s Washington field office advance agent and the Presidential Protection Division advance agent both objected to letting the public into the area, Albracht states.
“They looked on it as an unneeded security risk,” the synopsis says. “They wanted zero press or public in the area that would be considered within handgun range. The countersniper teams and the advance security checks on nearby buildings would have taken care of snipers at a greater distance from the hotel entrance.”
When the Secret Service and the White House staff disagree on security arrangements, “the USSS advance attempts to work out the issue,” the synopsis says. “If an acceptable solution cannot be agreed upon, the matter is kicked upstairs to the USSS detail supervisors and the White House advance office.”
However, “in these matters, the White House staff usually trumps the USSS unless a direct link can be shown to a potential threat,” the synopsis continues. “In the case of the public area in proximity to Reagan’s arrival and departure, based on the intelligence on hand, a direct link could not be made—only that it was a security concern, and we wanted a sterile environment. As a result, the general public area where Hinckley stood fifteen feet, seven inches from the leader of the free world was open to all.”
In other words, unless the Secret Service had a crystal ball and knew in advance that Hinckley was planning to shoot the president that day as Reagan left the hotel, agents would have to bow to the wishes of the White House and let the unscreened public get close to the president.
In its effort to whitewash what had happened, the Secret Service tried to shift blame to the FBI, telling Congress that the bureau never told the Secret Service that on October 9, 1980, Nashville International Airport security officers had arrested Hinckley on a charge of illegal possession of three pistols. The Secret Service tried to claim that the arrest had something to do with President Carter’s arrival in Nashville that day and therefore the FBI should have conveyed a warning that Hinckley was stalking presidents. Hinckley’s pistols were uncovered when his suitcase was screened as he was about to take off for New York. But while the FBI knew about the arrest, nothing tied Hinckley—or any one of thousands of others arrested by the Nashville police around that time—to the president.
“We had nothing to connect Hinckley with stalking Mr. Carter,” Darrell Long, an airport security officer who made the arrest, later said.
Even if a connection had been made to the president’s visit, the Secret Service could not have prevented Hinckley from traveling six months later to Washington, where he read in the Washington Post that Reagan would be speaking that day at the Washington Hilton.
H. Stuart Knight, who was Secret Service director when the shooting occurred, never revealed what really happened. Indeed, Knight and other Secret Service officials who testified to Congress claimed, looking back, that they saw no reason to change the Secret Service’s protective procedures. However, Knight was happy to point fingers at the FBI. Asked in a Senate hearing what the Secret Service might have done if it had known about Hinckley’s previous arrest and had connected it with Carter’s arrival in Nashville, Knight said lamely, “At a minimum, we would have interviewed the gentleman, and perhaps something more, I don’t know.”
Similarly, an August 1981 report on the incident by the Treasury Department, which then included the Secret Service before it was moved to the Department of Homeland Security, concealed the real story. Prepared by the Treasury Department’s general counsel Peter J. Wallison, it referred vaguely to a need for the Secret Service to work more closely with the White House in setting up protection procedures.
As the Treasury report was about to come out, Wallison frankly told the Associated Press that he would leave questions of who should be allowed near the president and how close they should be to the “political people and to the people with more expertise in protection.” In other words, by Wallison’s own account, the investigation into why the tragedy happened would not address that question.
In commenting for this book, Wallison, who later served as Reagan’s White House counsel during the president’s second term, confirmed that he learned from his interviews with Secret Service agents who were involved that the agents wanted Reagan to be in a secure environment as he left the Washington Hilton, but the Reagan White House staff overruled them.
“The staff had wanted the president to be seen by the media and the public as he came out from the speech,” Wallison said, while the Secret Service “fought that.” He added, “My view now would be that as soon as there is a problem and the president was shot at and hit, the people in the White House were wrong.”
After the shooting, the White House gladly acceded to Secret Service wishes.
“Things such as magnetometers and sterile arrival and departure areas became standard operating procedure,” Albracht’s class synopsis says. An August 19, 1981, Associated Press story on the Treasury Department report confirmed that security around the president had become “noticeably tighter” since the shooting, with “reporters and others being kept at greater distances.”
Based on his own experience as an agent, Albracht notes that those tight procedures continued and in fact became more stringent into the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency, when Albracht retired. But as documented in this book, after the Department of Homeland Security took over the Secret Service in 2003, corner cutting—such as allowing people into events without magnetometer screening—again became prevalent.
14
NANCY
Unlike her husband, Nancy Reagan—code-named Rainbow—could be aloof and demanding.
Nancy was “very cold,” a Secret Service agent assigned to her detail says. “She had her circle of four friends in Los Angeles, and that was it. Nothing changed when she was with her kids. She made it clear to her kids that if they wanted to see their father, they had to check with her first. It was a standing rule. Not that they could not see him. ‘I will let you know if it is advisable and when you can see him.’ She was something else.”
If Nancy Reagan’s wealthy California friends reported getting their copies of Vogue and Mademoiselle before she did, she took it out on the White House staff. For that reason, Nelson C. Pierce Jr., an assistant usher in the White House, always dreaded bringing Nancy her mail.
“She would get mad at me,” Pierce says. “If her subscription was late or one of her friends in California had gotten the magazine and she hadn’t, she would ask why she hadn’t gotten hers.” White House ushers would then be dispatched to search for the missing magazine at Washington newsstands, which invariably had not received their copies, either.
One afternoon Pierce brought Nancy her mail in the first family’s west sitting room on the second floor of the White House. Nancy’s dog Rex, a King Charles spaniel that was a Christmas gift from her husband, was lying at her feet.
Pierce was old friends with Rex, or so he thought. During the day, the usher’s office—just inside the front entrance on the first floor of the mansion—is a favorite snoozing area for White House pets. But this time, for some reason, Rex was not at all cheerful about seeing Pierce. As Pierce turned to leave, Rex bit his ankle and held on. Pierce pointed his finger at the dog, a gesture to tell Nancy’s pet to let go. But Nancy turned on Pierce.
“Don’t you ever point a finger at my dog,” she said.
Throughout his political life, Nancy stage-managed her husband.
“Did I ever give Ronnie advice? You bet I did,” Nancy wrote in My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reaga
n. “I’m the one who knows him best, and I was the only person in the White House who had absolutely no agenda of her own—except helping him.”
“Mrs. Reagan was a precise and demanding woman,” recalls John F. W. Rogers, the Reagan assistant and director of administration at the White House. “Her sole interest was the advancement of her husband’s agenda.”
In fact, most of Nancy’s advice was sound. As she explained it, “As much as I love Ronnie, I’ll admit he does have at least one fault: He can be naive about the people around him. Ronnie only tends to think well of people. While that’s a fine quality in a friend, it can get you into trouble in politics.”
Like Nancy, the Reagans’ daughter Patti Davis was difficult. When agents were with her in New York, she would attempt to ditch them by jumping out of the Secret Service car while it was stopped in traffic. She viewed her detail as an annoyance.
“On one visit to New York City, she was with movie actor Peter Strauss, whom she was dating at the time,” a former agent says. “Ms. Davis started to engage in the same tricks as on her previous visits and in general treated the assigned agent with disrespect. Strauss became incensed at her actions and told her, ‘You’d better start treating these agents with respect or I’m going back to L.A.’ ”
“Guess what,” the agent says. “She started treating us better.”
Former agent Clark Larsen remembers Patti yelling at him and another agent for following too closely. “She didn’t want agents around, but she had to,” Larsen says. “She didn’t have a choice, unless her dad signed off on it, and he wasn’t about to do that and leave her out exposed to either embarrass him or to have something bad happen to her.”
“At least with the Nixon kids, they would all get together, but there was not a lot of affection shown with the Reagan kids,” a former agent on the Nixon and Reagan details says. “With the Reagan kids, each had his or her own agenda, and then they didn’t want anything to do with the other one. They never got together as a family. Ever.”
Former agent Lloyd Bulman got to know Reagan’s first wife, actress Jane Wyman, while protecting Maureen Reagan, the president’s daughter with Wyman.
“Jane Wyman was really nice,” Bulman says. “I’d go up to her penthouse suite with Maureen, and Maureen would go inside the penthouse, and pretty soon I’d be standing by the door, and a hand would come around the corner, and it was Jane Wyman,” Bulman says. “She would grab me by the shoulder and pull me inside and say, ‘Come in and have some lemonade or some food. You’re just like part of the family.’ ”
In contrast, Nancy Reagan was so controlling that she objected when her husband kibitzed with Secret Service agents.
“Reagan was such a down-to-earth individual, easy to talk to,” an agent says. “He was the great communicator. He wanted to be on friendly terms. He accepted people for what they were. His wife was just the opposite. If she saw that he was having a conversation with the agents, and it looked like they were good ol’ boys, and he was laughing, she would call him away. She called the shots.”
On the day Reagan left office, he and Nancy flew to Los Angeles on Air Force One. Bleachers had been set up near a hangar, and a wildly cheering crowd welcomed him as the University of Southern California band played.
“As he was standing there, one of the USC guys took his Trojan helmet off,” a Secret Service agent says. “He said, ‘Mr. President!,’ and threw his helmet to him. He saw it and caught it and put it on. The crowd went wild.”
But Nancy Reagan leaned over to him and said, “Take that helmet off right now. You look like a fool.”
“You saw a mood change,” the agent says. “And he took it off. That went on all the time.”
While Reagan and Nancy had a loving relationship, like any married couple they had occasional fights.
“They were very affectionate and would kiss,” Air Force One chief steward Charles Palmer says of the Reagans. But they also got mad at each other over what they should eat and other small issues. Palmer says Nancy could push the president only so far.
“We were going into Alaska. She had put on everything she could put on,” Palmer says. “She turned around and said, ‘Where are your gloves?’ He said, ‘I’m not wearing my gloves.’ She said, ‘Oh, yes, you are.’ He said he was not.”
Reagan finally took the gloves, but he said he could not shake hands while he was wearing them. He said he would not put them on, and he didn’t, Palmer says.
When they were at the ranch, the Reagans would ride horses together every day after lunch. In contrast to Joe Biden’s instruction that they stay a mile behind him in Delaware, besides having the military aide with the nuclear football with him on horseback, Reagan had the White House doctor follow him with Secret Service agents in a Humvee, former agent Patrick Sullivan says.
Despite his hard-riding cowboy roles in westerns, Reagan rode English, in breeches and boots. He usually rode El Alamein, a gray Anglo-Arab that former president José López Portillo of Mexico had given him.
“He would go up to the barn just outside the house, he would saddle up the horses, get them all ready, then he had one of those triangle bells,” former agent Dennis Chomicki says. “He would always bang on that iron triangle, and that was Nancy Reagan’s sign that the horses are ready, come on out, let’s go.”
One afternoon, Reagan was banging away on the bell, but Nancy did not appear. Finally, Reagan went in the house to get her. He came out with her, looking distressed. Then a technician from the White House Communications Agency told Chomicki that he had detected a problem with the ranch’s phone system. A telephone set must be off the hook, he said, and the technician wanted to check on it. Chomicki allowed him to enter the Reagan home, and he soon came out holding a phone that had been smashed to pieces.
“She was on the phone,” Chomicki says. “That’s why she didn’t come up to the barn. Nancy never really liked the ranch. She would go up there because the president liked it. Other than the ride, she used to stay in the house almost all the time, and a good portion of the time she’d be talking to her friends down in L.A. For the president,” Chomicki says, “the highlight of his day was to go riding with Nancy. And when she didn’t come out because she was talking on the phone, he threw the phone on the floor.”
Nancy Reagan tried to restrict her husband’s diet to healthy foods, but whenever she was not there, he reverted to his favorites.
“She was protective about what he ate,” Air Force One steward Palmer remembers. “When she was not there, he ate differently. One of his favorite foods was macaroni and cheese. That was a no-no for her. If it was on the menu, she said, ‘You’re not eating that.’ ”
While most recent presidents liked their steak medium rare, Reagan liked his well done. He also liked hamburger soup—made with ground beef, tomatoes, and carrots—roast beef hash, beef and kidney pie, and osso buco. Nancy Reagan liked paella à la Valenciana, salmon mousse, and chicken pot pie. For dessert, the Reagans both liked apple brown Betty, prune whip, fruit with Cointreau, and plum pudding.
For all the spin from the Carter White House about not drinking, it was the Reagans who drank the least. During Reagan’s years in office, on Air Force One, “I may have served the Reagans four drinks, maybe, with the exception of a glass of wine,” Palmer says.
“Nancy Reagan was very protective of that guy,” says Jimmy R. Bull, the chief communicator on Air Force One. “The president would need forty hours a day to do all the things people wanted him to do. You can run him into the ground in a hurry, mentally and physically.”
“No one looked out for his welfare more or was more concerned about him as a human being,” says James F. Kuhn, Reagan’s administrative assistant during his second term. “Everyone said she was demanding. I remember her saying some things to me about things that should be done. But she never asked for anything for herself. It was always for her ‘roommate,’ as she called him.”
Vice President Joe Biden regularly orders the Secret
Service to keep his military aide with the nuclear football a mile behind his motorcade, potentially leaving the country unable to retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack. Associated Press
Secret Service agents discovered that former president Bill Clinton has a blond, well-endowed mistress who lives near the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York. As soon as Hillary Clinton leaves, the mistress shows up. Associated Press
Because Hillary Clinton is so nasty to agents, being assigned to her protective detail is considered a form of punishment and the worst assignment in the Secret Service. Associated Press
The Secret Service covered up the fact that President Ronald Reagan’s White House staff overruled the Secret Service to let unscreened spectators get close to Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton, allowing John W. Hinckley Jr. to shoot the president. Associated Press
Vice President Joe Biden has racked up costs to taxpayers of a million dollars to fly to and from his home in Delaware on Air Force Two. His office tried to cover up the costs of the personal trips. Associated Press
Secret Service agents were ordered to ignore security rules and allow the SUV carrying actor Bradley Cooper to drive unscreened into a secure, restricted area when President Obama was about to give his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Corbis
Secret Service director Mark Sullivan diverted agents from their protective duties, including watching for snipers as President Obama and his family lifted off in Marine One, and ordered them instead to protect his assistant at her home as a favor to her. Corbis
While under Secret Service protection, Jenna Bush bamboozled agents and purposely lost her detail. Associated Press
The First Family Detail Page 11
