In the President's Secret Service

by Ronald Kessler

  Clinton liked to go running, presenting the predictable security problems.

  “There were people waiting for him to run every morning,” says Pete Dowling, who was second in command of Clinton’s detail during the first term. “So it was nice for him, but quite frankly, for us they were unwanted guests. They weren’t screened; we didn’t know who they were. People were trying to hand him water bottles, so we were really concerned about that. If the president were to run up the Mall every day with the same regularity it’d be pretty easy for a terrorist group, who would observe his actions, maybe to plant a bomb in a trash can. And if he didn’t run by that day? They’d just take it away and come back again. That kind of presented a threat to us that we hadn’t seen before.”

  The Secret Service discussed its concerns with Clinton, but he continued to run. That changed after he fell walking down the stairs at golf pro Greg Norman’s house in Florida in the early morning hours of March 14, 1997. The Secret Service Joint Ops Center then woke agent Norm Jarvis at home to ask him to secure the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where surgery would be done on the president to reattach a tendon torn from his right kneecap.

  Later that morning, Clinton arrived by motorcade from Andrews Air Force Base. Jarvis arranged for an agent to stand in the operating room throughout the surgery.

  “I’m not sure if they knew we had guns on under our scrubs, but sharp cutting instruments so close to the president—even in the hands of a trusted military physician—needed a countermeasure in the hands of a trusted agent,” Jarvis says.

  Clinton’s doctor, Admiral E. “Connie” Mariano, who traveled with the president, oversaw the operation. But Jarvis was startled to see an orderly line of dozens of surgeons in the operating room waiting to step up and do part of the knee reconstruction.

  “Each one had a tool, probe, scalpel, or whatever, waiting to take their turn to poke, cut, or saw so they could claim they operated on the president of the United States,” Jarvis says. “After the anesthesia was administered, the first surgeon did the initial incision. The next exposed the tendon. Then another cut the tendon to even out the jagged remains. Another surgeon cleaned and exposed the kneecap. On and on it went for hours.”

  In one form or another, Jarvis had seen this phenomenon played out dozens of times: For most people, any contact with a president is a highlight of their lives.

  Clinton did not want to return to the White House in an ambulance, and Secret Service vans were not equipped to transport him in a wheelchair. Because Jarvis knew Sarah Brady, wife of the former Reagan press secretary James Brady, he asked if the Secret Service could borrow her husband’s wheelchair-accessible van for the trip.

  Clinton faced about eight weeks on crutches and months of physical therapy. He had to wear an adjustable leg brace to restrict knee movement. After that incident, Clinton gave up running and started using exercise machines.

  Meanwhile, the Secret Service tried to adapt to Clinton’s style.

  “President Clinton would see a small crowd of spectators that may have gathered behind a rope outside our secure perimeter just to get a glimpse of the president, and he would head off to shake their hands,” says Jarvis. “Of course, this drove us to distraction because we didn’t want him to approach an un-magged crowd. We didn’t know if we had a Hinckley or Bremer in the crowd with a handgun. A person like that might be loitering in the area because he couldn’t get into the event.”

  In fact, at one point, Jarvis was faced with just such a situation: Clinton had plunged into a crowd that had not been screened.

  “I was in the lead on the rope line,” Jarvis says. “When you’re working a rope line, there are agents leading in the president’s direction, then there’s the president, and then others who trail behind, with others nearby.”

  Jarvis noticed a woman whose hands were under her coat.

  During an event, “You’ll be in the formation and walking along with the president, you spot something, and you say something over the air to the shift leader,” Jarvis says. “You’re generally very quiet. There’s not a lot of chatter, but if you say something and you’re with the president, it means something. You size up the person that causes you to bring your attention to them, and you have to make a quick judgment as to what you’re going to do or what the detail needs to do.”

  In this case, “What was strange was everyone was looking at the president—clapping, yelling, smiling,” Jarvis says. “She was staring down and had a real puzzled look on her face. Mind you, the president was two arms’ lengths from us. I let the shift leader know I had a problem, and I just wrapped my arms around this woman because I didn’t have time to frisk her.”

  Jarvis held her in a bear hug as the shift and the president worked their way around him.

  “She was startled, but I wouldn’t let her arms out from under the coat,” Jarvis says. “I held her until I could get some assistance, which arrived from a protective intelligence team that was nearby.”

  The team interviewed the woman and quickly determined that she was mentally ill.

  “She didn’t have a weapon under her coat, but you can tell mentally disturbed people by the way they react,” Jarvis notes. “And when they react the opposite of everybody else, it brings your attention to them, and you know you’ve got an issue out of the ordinary.”

  To be sure, Jarvis says, “Not a lot of people would appreciate an agent grabbing them in a bear hug and pinning them against a crowd. But you’ve got maybe seconds to correctly respond to a situation that has potentially catastrophic consequences.”

  “We had a young, gregarious guy who absolutely thrived on and was energized by being in crowds,” Dowling says. “We weren’t going to have a conversation saying, ‘Sir, you’re really going to have to change. This isn’t presidential.’ We really had to redefine the way we did business on the road.”

  Dowling thought the fact that Clinton would plunge unpredictably into crowds could work to the advantage of the Secret Service because there was no advance notice. “The odds of somebody being there that would willingly want to do him harm were at least decreased,” notes Dowling, who later headed the Washington field office. At the same time, Dowling says, the Secret Service worked with the staff to identify places where Clinton could go and allow agents to scout out the areas in advance.

  On Sunday morning, February 26, 1995, Dowling read an item in Parade magazine’s Personality Parade and knew he was in for trouble. The item asked how much truth there was to “those stories coming out of Washington that Bill Clinton is still an incurable womanizer.”

  Parade answered, “If there were any hard evidence that the president of the U.S. was womanizing, you can be certain it would have appeared by now in the media. The days when the White House press corps respected a president’s privacy and ignored his extracurricular activities—as with JFK—are long gone.”

  More ominously for the Secret Service, the item continued: “Insiders say the salacious rumors about Bill Clinton often can be traced to Secret Service agents, who may be feuding with the first lady. She reportedly suspects that some of the agents are snoops and tries to keep them at a distance. One agent recently spread a story that Mrs. Clinton had become so tired of her husband’s wandering ways that she threatened to seek a divorce and run against him in 1996. No one believes that outlandish tale, but unfortunately it has made its way through the Washington gossip mill.”

  Dowling, the assistant special agent in charge of the Clinton detail, was working that Sunday. The Clintons were attending church, and the president said nothing to him about the Parade item. However, two hours later, Dowling was at his office in Room 62 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building when the phone rang.

  “Mr. Dowling, stand by please for the president,” a White House operator said.

  “Did you see Parade magazine this morning?” Clinton asked Dowling.

  “Yes, sir, I did,” Dowling replied. “I was very disturbed at what I saw
.”

  “This is happening all too often, that the Secret Service is purported to have said this,” Clinton said.

  “For the first time in history, Mr. President, we’ve had to defend our honor in terms of being able to maintain the privacy of the family that we protect,” Dowling said. “But let’s think about this for a second. You think if we were to say something, we would say something as preposterous as that? As that your wife was going to run against you?”

  “You know, you’re right,” Clinton said.

  In fact, many of the stories were untrue. Hillary never threw a lamp at Bill, the Secret Service saw no indication that she was a lesbian, and Bill never left the White House to see an alleged girlfriend at the Marriott. But on August 17, 1998, Bill Clinton confessed from the Map Room of the White House on national television to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong,” Clinton said.

  The next day, the Clintons took Air Force One to Martha’s Vineyard.

  “I was up at Martha’s Vineyard right after he had confessed on national TV to the whole Monica Lewinsky affair,” Albracht says. While Albracht was operating the command post, Hillary called him and said, “Where is he?”

  “Ma’am, the president is downtown right now. I think he just arrived at a Starbucks,” Albracht said.

  “Confirm that,” Hillary demanded, and Albracht did. Hillary then ordered Albracht to tell the president to “get home now, and I mean right now.”

  Albracht passed along the message to the detail.

  “Oh, my God. Clinton loves mingling with people, and he loves to play golf, but she was having none of that,” Albracht says. “Clinton was to remain at the Martha’s Vineyard estate. He was being punished. It was like he was grounded,” Albracht says.

  When in public, Hillary would smile and act graciously. As soon as the cameras were off, her angry personality often became evident. During her run for the Senate, Hillary planned visits to diners and local hangouts as part of her “listening tour.”

  “The events were all staged, and the questions were screened,” says a Secret Service agent who was on her detail. “She would stop off at diners. The campaign would tell them three days ahead that they were coming. They would talk to the owner and tell him to invite everyone and bring his friends. Hillary flew into rages when she thought her campaign staff had not corralled enough onlookers beforehand. Hillary had an explosive temper.”

  Publicly, Hillary—code-named Evergreen—courted law enforcement organizations, but she did not want police near her.

  “She did not want police officers in sight,” a former agent says. “How do you explain that to the police? She did not want Secret Service protection near. She wanted state troopers and local police to wear suits and stay in unmarked cars. If there was an incident, that could pose a big problem. People don’t know police are in the area unless officers wear uniforms and drive police cars. If they are unaware of a police presence, people are more likely to get out of control.”

  In Syracuse, a bearded man who aggressively sought autographs accosted Hillary as she went for a walk outside her hotel.

  “He grabbed her,” an agent says. “She was livid. But she had insisted she did not want us near her.”

  Hillary’s campaign staff planned a visit to a 4-H club in dairy farm country in upstate New York. As they approached the outdoor event and she saw people dressed in jeans and surrounded by cows, Hillary flew into a rage.

  “She turned to a staffer and said, ‘What the [expletive] did we come here for? There’s no money here,’” a Secret Service agent remembers.

  In contrast to Hillary, since leaving the White House, Bill Clinton is “very friendly to the agents,” says one agent. “I think he realizes once he’s out of office, we’re pretty much all he’s got, and he does treat the guys really well.”

  Until 1997, former presidents received lifetime Secret Service protection, as did their spouses unless they remarried. However, congressional legislation that became effective in 1997 limited the protection of former presidents who leave office after that date to no more than ten years after they leave office. Bill Clinton will be the first president whose protection will end after ten years. Children of former presidents receive protection to age sixteen. In September 2008, Congress passed legislation extending protection of the vice president, his spouse, and his children who are under sixteen years of age to six months after he leaves office.

  After Clinton left the presidency, “Anywhere he went, he shook hands; he’d go out of his way to shake the hand of a worker,” says a former agent who was on his detail. “Fifty feet away and on a tarmac, he’s walking around a plane to shake the hand of a worker. Or going through the hotel’s restaurant, he’s in the back in the kitchen shaking people’s hands and taking pictures.”

  Clinton’s office is in Harlem, where a woman on the street told the agent, “Honey, you can take the day off. We’re not going to let anything happen to that man.”

  22

  Shutting Down Magnetometers

  DURING SENATOR JOHN Kerry’s presidential campaign, an event near a train station was about to start. A thousand supporters still had to be screened.

  “What are we going to do?” a Kerry staff member said. “There’s still a thousand people waiting to come to the mags [magnetometers].”

  “Right,” the agent said in response. “This is security. They’ll come in as soon as we can screen them.”

  “Well, he’s going to be here in five minutes. There’s no way they’re going to get them in the mags,” the aide said.

  According to the agent, a Secret Service supervisor then allowed the rest of the crowd to enter unscreened.

  “That happened a number of times at other sites, other venues,” the agent says. “How are they making these decisions? You’ve got agents doing the right thing, making this as safe as it can be for the candidate, and one supervisor completely undercuts it.”

  When President George W. Bush visited an eastern European country, “The local police set up a very good checkpoint and were doing a thorough job of screening people with magnetometers,” an agent who was assigned to the trip recalls. “When a staff lead saw the mags were backed up and not all the people would make it to hear Bush’s speech, she demanded that the mag officers expedite clearing people through. When a Uniformed Division lieutenant said they needed to do their job, the White House staff person completely went nuts, threatening the officer and threatening to report him to the head of Bush’s detail. The local authorities held their ground and did not cave to the staffer.”

  Yet at other times, the Secret Service bows to White House or candidate pressure to stop magnetometer screening. When acquiescing to such requests, Secret Service management assures the White House staff that stopping screening is not a problem, Andy Card, President Bush’s former chief of staff, tells me. The White House, in turn, trusts the service.

  Aides want to believe in the omnipotence of the Secret Service because it serves their political ends. They do not want to annoy stragglers. Yet if one of the people allowed through without screening drew a weapon or threw a grenade and assassinated a president or a candidate, it would be entirely because of the Secret Service’s negligence. Indeed, Arthur Bremer was able to shoot Alabama governor George Wallace—the only presidential candidate shot while under Secret Service protection—because magnetometers were not used.

  As was the case with protecting presidents, Congress was slow to act when it came to protecting presidential candidates. It did not extend protection to candidates until Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968, after he won the Democratic presidential primary in California. As a result of the legislation, Secret Service agents were protecting Wallace on May 15, 1972, when he spoke to about two thousand people at a shopping center parking lot in Laurel, Maryland. It was a beautiful, sunny day. Because of the heat, Wallace decided to remove his cumbe
rsome bulletproof vest.

  “The crowd was cheering and everyone was responding well to him,” recalls William Breen, a Secret Service agent on his detail at the time. “He certainly could electrify a crowd. And when he concluded his speech, he was supposed to leave the podium and go directly, directly to the car. There were not to be any intermediate stops. And as he started—I was the point agent—he was to follow me. And I was going to go right over to the automobile. He was to get in and that was it, we were off to wherever we were going.”

  “You’ve got my vote,” Clyde Merryman, an exercise boy at Pimlico Race Track, told Wallace.

  Just then, Arthur Bremer jumped from the second row of spectators and yelled, “Governor, over here!”

  “He [Wallace] just went right to Bremer, and of course the configuration of the protective circle changed,” Breen says. “Bremer opened up on him and shot him.”

  The first .38 caliber bullet tore into Wallace’s midsection. Bremer fired five more times. All but one shot hit its mark.

  The governor, coatless under the afternoon sun, fell backward on the pavement. There were red stains on his blue shirt. His wife, Cornelia, rushed to his side, crying and cradling his head in her hands. Her beige suit was smeared with blood.

  “Jimmy Taylor, who was the agent in charge of the detail, and I were the first to Wallace, and we got him on the ground,” Breen says.

  “Governor, this is Bill. You’ve been shot. You’ll be all right,” Breen whispered into his ear.

  Secret Service agents and Alabama state troopers pounced on Bremer. Besides Wallace, Bremer had wounded Alabama trooper E. C. Dothard, Secret Service Agent Nicholas Zarvos, and Dora Thompson, a Wallace campaign volunteer. Although Wallace survived, he was paralyzed, and he dropped out of the race.