In training new agents, the FBI Academy teaches that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Yet over and over, voters have ignored warning signs of poor character and candidates’ track records and focused instead on their promises, their celebrity, and their acting ability on television. It’s a blindness that they would never extend to choosing a friend, a new employee, an electrician, or a plumber. Yet in entrusting the country and their security to a president, they are making a far more important decision.
Each time, voters have regretted disregarding those clues to character. When running for vice president, Richard Nixon became embroiled in an ethics issue when the New York Post revealed he had secretly accepted $18,000 from private contributors to defray his expenses, an issue Nixon addressed in what became known as his Checkers speech. It should have come as no surprise that Nixon ended up driven from office by the scandal known as Watergate.
Almost as if they feel undeserving of honorable, trustworthy politicians, Americans too often fall for the phony argument that so long as they do not influence public acts, flaws in a candidate’s character are nobody’s business. But human beings do not consist of two spheres, public and private. Poor judgment, hypocrisy, ruthlessness, deceit, arrogance, and corruption displayed in one’s personal life inevitably manifest themselves in public life.
Character is who we are. To disregard that is to court disaster. Once a candidate becomes president, any character flaws are magnified. It is difficult to imagine the pressure that being president of the United States imposes and how readily the power of being president 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 take action that affects millions of lives is an intoxicating experience that only people with the most stable personalities and solid values can handle. Inviting a friend to a White House party or having an assistant place a call and announce that “the White House is calling” has such a potent effect on people that presidents and White House aides come to believe that, like Superman, they are invincible.
“I would see CEOs make asses of themselves trying to ingratiate themselves with presidents,” a former agent says. “They revert back to fourth graders. They stumble over their words. They flush with embarrassment. It never fails.”
“Their egos get so big they can’t believe anybody could tell them what to do, and they can’t control themselves,” former agent Richard Repasky says of presidents.
Trivial though it may seem, even the use of the honorific “Mr. President” leads some who have held that office to think they are divine.
“Few people, with the possible exception of his wife, will ever tell a president that he is a fool,” President Ford lamented in his book, A Time to Heal. “There’s a majesty to the office that inhibits even your closest friends from saying what is really on their minds. They won’t tell you that you just made a lousy speech or bungled a chance to get your point across. Instead, they’ll say they liked the speech you gave last week a little better or that an even finer opportunity to get your point across will come very soon. You can tell them you want the blunt truth; you can leave instructions on every bulletin board, but the guarded response you get never varies.”
Disillusioned by President Johnson’s arrogance, his press secretary George Reedy brilliantly analyzed how presidents become consumed by the office in his book The Twilight of the Presidency. “The atmosphere of the White House is a heady one,” Reedy warned. “By the twentieth century, the presidency had taken on all the regalia of monarchy except robes, a scepter, and a crown.”
“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 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 strong character, the crushing force of the office and the adulation the chief executive receives will inevitably lead at best to poor judgment and at worst to catastrophe. As one example, the contrast between Hillary Clinton’s nastiness in private and her Cheshire cat smile in public demonstrate both hypocrisy and an unbalanced personality.
The fact that Hillary fired a White House usher who was the father of four children for trying to help a former first lady with her computer and denounced and humiliated her friend Vince Foster in front of White House colleagues demonstrates Nixonian ruthlessness, hypocrisy, and paranoia that could be expected to balloon if she were ever president. Likewise, her calculated determination to overlook her husband’s philandering to enhance her political fortunes suggests overweening ambition that could spiral out of control in the White House. Nor is Hillary’s nastiness with Secret Service agents—earning her a reputation as the most detested protectee—a sign of a stable individual who cares about the little people she claims to champion. Instead, agents say the real Hillary Clinton hungers for power and bears little resemblance to the image she seeks to project.
By the same token, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich betrayed his true character when he showed up at the hospital bed of his first wife, Jackie, after her cancer surgeries and tried to discuss details of the divorce he wanted. Gingrich later dismissed what happened by saying the couple “got into an argument, which I think people who have gone through divorces can probably identify with.”
In contrast to their professed distaste for government waste, possible Republican presidential candidates Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Rand Paul show up for five-minute interviews at Fox News with five or six fawning aides in tow. Normally, one or two aides accompany members of Congress for such appearances.
Much as Nixon’s Checkers episode was an early clue to his character, Joe Biden’s irresponsibility and colossal lack of judgment in refusing to let the nuclear football near him in Delaware, and his hypocrisy and arrogance in claiming to be the sheriff who cuts government waste while incurring costs of a million dollars for personal trips on Air Force Two, are early signs of potential disaster were he to become president.
“If the general public knew what was really going on inside the White House, they would scream,” a former agent says. “Americans have such an idealized notion of the presidency and the virtues that go with it, honesty and so forth. That’s the furthest thing from the truth.” He adds, “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. They are probably worse than most average individuals.… If we would pay attention to their track records, it’s all there. We seem to put blinders on ourselves and overlook these frailties.”
“No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character,” John Morley, the British statesman, said.
Regardless of the character flaws they may see, Secret Service agents are sworn to protect the president at risk to their own lives. FBI agents tend to admire Secret Service agents more than they do any other law enforcement officers. As former FBI director Mueller has told me, the Secret Service’s mission of preventing a criminal act is “far harder than investigating one after it takes place.”
“The Secret Service attracts a lot of people who have a code of ethics that entails self-sacrif
ice,” Norm Jarvis, a former USSS special agent in charge, says. “These are people who are willing to sacrifice their own lives, not in a conscious way, but based on their training and culture. When they hear a gunshot, they go to an instinct mode to save the president’s life.”
“I think that deep down inside every agent’s heart, he or she would probably imagine himself or herself being the one who could take a bullet for the president and would be so honored to be that guy,” a current agent says. “I would love to be the agent who did that, and I think most of the agents that I know would feel that way. It’s out of our own sense of personal pride and dignity.”
If agents often feel underappreciated and abused, there are compensations. Former agent Patrick Sullivan recalls returning to Washington on Air Force One after four reelection campaign stops across the country for President George H. W. Bush.
“It was ten o’clock at night when we’re all sitting on Air Force One on our way back,” Sullivan says. “We were complaining about the long day, and our shift leader looked at us and said, ‘You know, those people who got their picture taken with him paid some ungodly amount of money just to stand next to him and get their picture taken. Do you know what they’d pay to be in that seat that you’re in right now?’ ”
Brave and dedicated though they are, Secret Service agents’ management has let them down, risking an assassination.
“We don’t have enough people or the equipment to do protection the way they advertise they do,” a veteran agent says. “And how we have not had an incident up to this point is truly amazing—a miracle.”
SECRET SERVICE CHRONOLOGY
1865 The Secret Service Division is created on July 5 in Washington, D.C., to suppress counterfeit currency. Chief William P. Wood is sworn in by Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch.
1867 Secret Service responsibilities are broadened to include “detecting persons perpetrating frauds against the government.” The Secret Service begins investigating the Ku Klux Klan, nonconforming distillers, smugglers, mail robbers, perpetrators of land fraud, and other violators of federal laws.
1870 Secret Service headquarters relocates to New York City.
1874 Secret Service headquarters returns to Washington, D.C.
1875 The first commission book and a new badge are issued to operatives.
1877 Congress passes an act prohibiting the counterfeiting of any coin or gold or silver bar.
1883 The Secret Service is officially acknowledged as a distinct organization within the Treasury Department.
1894 The Secret Service begins informal, part-time protection of President Grover Cleveland.
1901 Congress informally requests Secret Service protection of presidents following the assassination of President William McKinley.
1902 The Secret Service assumes full-time responsibility for protection of the president. Two operatives are assigned to the White House detail.
1906 Congress passes the Sundry Civil Expenses Act for 1907, providing funds for Secret Service protection of the president. Secret Service operatives begin to investigate western land frauds.
1908 The Secret Service begins protecting the president-elect. President Theodore Roosevelt transfers some Secret Service agents to the Department of Justice, forming the nucleus of what is now the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
1913 Congress authorizes permanent protection of the president and the president-elect.
1915 President Woodrow Wilson directs the secretary of the treasury to have the Secret Service investigate espionage in the United States.
1917 Congress authorizes permanent protection of the president’s immediate family and makes it a federal criminal violation to direct threats toward the president.
1922 The White House Police Force is created at the request of President Warren Harding.
1930 The White House Police Force is placed under the supervision of the Secret Service.
1951 Congress enacts legislation that permanently authorizes Secret Service protection of the president, his immediate family, the president-elect, and the vice president if he requests it.
1961 Congress authorizes protection of former presidents for a reasonable period of time.
1962 Congress expands protection to include the vice president, the vice president–elect, and the next officer in line to succeed the president. Under current law, their immediate families receive protection as well. Such protection may not be declined.
1965 Congress makes assassinating a president a federal crime. It authorizes the protection of former presidents and their spouses for life and of their children until age sixteen.
1968 As a result of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, Congress authorizes protection of major presidential and vice presidential candidates and nominees. Congress also authorizes protection of widows of presidents until death or remarriage.
1970 The White House Police Force is renamed the Executive Protective Service and given increased responsibilities, including protection of diplomatic missions in the Washington area.
1971 Congress authorizes Secret Service protection for visiting heads of foreign states or governments, and other official guests, as directed by the president.
1975 The duties of the Executive Protective Service are expanded to include protection of foreign diplomatic missions located throughout the United States and its territories.
1977 The Executive Protective Service is renamed the Secret Service Uniformed Division.
1984 Congress enacts legislation making the fraudulent use of credit and debit cards a federal violation. The law authorizes the Secret Service to investigate violations relating to credit and debit card fraud, federally related computer fraud, and fraudulent identification documents.
1986 The Treasury Police Force is merged into the Secret Service Uniformed Division. A presidential directive authorizes protection of the accompanying spouse of the head of a foreign state or government.
1990 The Secret Service receives concurrent jurisdiction with Department of Justice law enforcement personnel to conduct any kind of investigation, civil or criminal, related to federally insured financial institutions.
1994 The 1994 Crime Bill is passed, providing that any person manufacturing, trafficking in, or possessing counterfeit U.S. currency abroad may be prosecuted as though the activity occurred within the United States.
1998 Broadening the jurisdiction of the Secret Service and other federal law enforcement agencies, the Telemarketing Fraud Prevention Act allows for criminal forfeiture of the proceeds of fraud. The Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act establishes the offense of identity theft. Penalties are established for anyone who knowingly transfers or uses, without authority, any means of identification of another person with the intent to commit an unlawful activity.
2000 The Presidential Threat Protection Act authorizes the Secret Service to participate in the planning, coordination, and implementation of security operations at special events of national significance as determined by the president. These events are called national special security events.
2001 The Patriot Act expands the Secret Service’s role in investigating fraud and related activity in connection with computers.
2002 The Department of Homeland Security is established, taking over the Secret Service from the Department of the Treasury effective March 1, 2003.
2006 Mark Sullivan, who joined the Secret Service in 1983, is named director.
2007 Protection begins for presidential candidate Barack Obama on May 3, the earliest initiation of Secret Service protection for any candidate in U.S. history. Because of her status as a former first lady, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was already receiving protection before she entered the race.
2008 Protection of presidential candidate John McCain begins on April 27. Just before the presidential candidates announce their selections for vice presidential running mates, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin receive protection. After Obama is elected president on November 4, his children,
Malia and Sasha, receive Secret Service protection.
2009 Barack Obama is sworn in as the forty-fourth president on January 20.
On November 24, the Secret Service allows Michaele and Tareq Salahi into a White House state dinner even though they are not on the guest list and did not undergo a background check. Subsequently, the Secret Service finds that a third intruder, Carlos Allen, attended the dinner.
2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney begins receiving Secret Service protection on January 4.
After local police are called when a Secret Service agent assigned to protect President Obama during his trip to Cartagena, Colombia, refused to pay a prostitute her agreed-upon fee, the Secret Service sends home eleven agents believed to have engaged prostitutes. The author breaks the story in the Washington Post on April 14.
2013 President Obama signs legislation on January 10 granting lifetime Secret Service protection to all former presidents and their spouses. The Former Presidents Protection Act reverses a 1994 law that said that after January 1, 1997, former presidents were to be protected for only ten years after leaving office. As a result of the reversal, Obama and George W. Bush and their spouses will receive lifetime protection.
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