First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (37 page)

“Mr. President, we’re having a national security briefing today,” Allen said.

“Okay,” the President replied, his voice still soft and weak.

“There it is, and you’ve had your national security briefing. Congratulations, Mr. President.”

They both laughed. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, what’s that in there?” Reagan asked, pointing to the bulging briefing folder.

“These are cards from the kindergarten class of Oakridge Elementary School in Arlington, Mr. President.”

“Let me see them.” Allen handed the folder to him and the President looked at each and every card. Allen said there must have been twenty-five of them.

“Which one’s your daughter’s?” the President asked.

“It’s this one.” Allen handed him her card that read, “President Reagan, Please get better, Love, Kim Allen.” The President asked for a pen and wrote beneath it, “Dear Kim, forgive me for using your card for my answer, but I wanted to let you know how very much I appreciate your good wishes and your lovely card, Love, Ronald Reagan, April 15, 1981.”

After the shooting, Nancy no longer resented the constant presence of the Secret Service in their lives. “If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have a husband,” she said.

Nancy walled herself off in the White House, especially after the assassination attempt. When her assistant Jane Erkenbeck saw Nancy speak about her husband and his Alzheimer’s at the 1996 Republican National Convention, she called her up. It was the first convention that Nancy attended alone, and she was deeply depressed. “It was just wonderful to see you cry like that because that’s the real Nancy Reagan and that’s the Nancy Reagan no one ever got to see,” Erkenbeck told her. Nancy replied, “Well, Jane, when I was in the White House I built a wall around myself. That’s the only way I could exist.”

Very few people ever get to see that vulnerable side of any first lady, especially Nancy. Decades after the death of White House Doorman Freddie Mayfield, Nancy remembered getting the call that he had passed away and being “shocked and saddened” by the news. She was deeply hurt when the actress Katharine Hepburn, a good friend of her mother’s from her acting days,
ended their friendship. “I’m terribly busy,” Hepburn told Nancy. “And besides, I don’t know what we’d have to talk about. After all, you’re a staunch Republican and I’m a staunch Democrat.” When President Reagan was having his portrait painted by artist Everett Raymond Kinstler, Nancy noticed several paintings of Hepburn on the wall of his studio. “She’s my oldest and dearest friend,” she told him wistfully. Kinstler offered to call Hepburn, but when he went to hand the phone over to Nancy she pushed it away—intimidated by the star—and said, “No, you talk to her first.”

F
IRST LADIES TRAVEL
around the country and the world and seem to live glamorous lives. But at a moment’s notice their Secret Service agents may tell them to duck and run as fast as they can. On a trip to Venice, Italy, after the assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, Rosalynn Carter and her daughter, Amy, had to wear bulletproof vests. Rosalynn was frustrated because the vest was so bulky and heavy, and it must have been terrifying to watch her young daughter put one on under her small blue windbreaker.

Because so much of the first family’s security is cloaked in secrecy, even the first lady does not always know why she is being asked to do certain things. Agents will make strange requests, like having all of the heavy glass ashtrays removed from tables in a banquet hall in Hawaii before the first lady enters, or pushing the furniture on one side of a living room to another in an Iowa farmhouse before the first lady walks in. “I never understood that and wouldn’t have known about it if one of my press advance persons hadn’t mentioned it on the plane on the way home,” Rosalynn mused about the last-minute furniture repositioning in Iowa.
Just weeks after the U.S. bombed Libya in 1986, Nancy Reagan took a trip to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, a country with close ties to Libya at the time. A Secret Service officer told Erkenbeck that they were bringing body bags on the plane in case something happened. “I wished for a broken leg or something to keep me off of that trip,” Erkenbeck said. After the bombing, hordes of angry Libyans had taken to the streets and shouted, “Down, down USA! Death to all Americans!” Nancy, a constant worrier, went ahead bravely with the trip to globally promote her “Just Say No” antidrug campaign.

Security is an endless concern and it starts well before the White House. After they get their party’s nomination—and sometimes earlier—major candidates and their spouses are assigned Secret Service protection. This practice was established after the assassination of Robert Kennedy while he was campaigning in California in 1968.

Agents tell the candidates and their families on the campaign trail that they should lightly touch people’s hands and not clasp them, so that no one could lock hands with them and pull them off a platform and into a crowd. If someone hands them a gift or a note, they must hand it to an aide immediately. Once they’re in the White House, the only time they are without agents is when they’re on the second and third floors. As soon as they step off the elevator from those floors, an agent “picks them up” and escorts them to their office. If they’re at Camp David, agents watch them unobtrusively. Once, Rosalynn Carter was enjoying a quiet stroll on the beautiful, leafy grounds of Camp David with her mother.

“Who else is here this weekend?” her mother asked.

“No one,” she said.

There was a long pause and her mother looked at her with wide eyes and said, “I know there’s somebody else here because
someone is following us.” She’d heard the rustling leaves behind them. It was Rosalynn’s Secret Service agent.

“Just don’t look back, Mother, and you’ll forget they’re here!” Rosalynn told her husband the same thing when he complained about the presidential motorcade, which can include as many as forty cars.

Daryl Wells co-owns Van Cleef hair salon in downtown Chicago, where Michelle Obama had been getting her hair done since she was a high school senior. He remembers the first time she came into the salon after her husband won the Iowa caucuses. Secret Service agents came to the salon an hour before she arrived, to sweep the building and look for exits. “Where’s the closest fire department?” they asked Wells. “Why?” “In case a bomb goes off,” they told him. While Michelle does not love being trailed by Secret Service agents all the time, she was furious when uninvited guests crashed the Obamas’ first state dinner and she understands why they need the protection. “How does this happen? I live here with my girls,” former Obama adviser Anita Dunn remembers hearing her say after the gate-crashing incident. Michelle used to sneak out of the White House more, but ever since security lapses occurred in 2011 and 2014 she has ventured out less. “I wouldn’t say she sneaks out a lot but you don’t need to sneak out a lot to keep your head screwed on straight,” said an Obama administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. When asked where she goes, the staffer said he couldn’t say because it would curtail her freedom even more. He would hate for her to feel even more like a prisoner than she already does.

In 2011 a White House maid was the first person to discover a broken window and a chunk of white concrete on the floor of the Truman Balcony. Because of her discovery the Secret Service investigated and realized that someone had actually fired at least
seven bullets at the residence several days before. (The Secret Service knew a shooting had occurred but initially concluded that the shots were fired by rival gangs in a gunfight and were not intended to hit the White House.) Michelle’s mother, Marian, and the Obamas’ younger daughter, Sasha, were in the residence at the time the shots were fired. The President’s top aides decided they would tell the President first and let him tell his wife. But the President was on a trip and the First Lady was home, and she was not happy about being kept in the dark about the incident. She was understandably furious when she heard the news from Assistant Usher Reginald Dickson, who assumed she already knew. When she summoned now-former Secret Service director Mark Sullivan to the White House to discuss the enormous security lapse, she was shouting so loudly she could be heard from the hallway. On September 19, 2014, an even more unbelievable incident happened when a man armed with a knife scaled the White House fence, sprinted across the North Lawn, ran past several Secret Service officers, and made his way into the White House. He ran past the stairway leading to the second floor of the residence and went into the East Room. The intruder was finally tackled by an off-duty agent near the doorway of the Green Room. It was terrifying for the First Lady to think that, had he known the floor plan of the White House better, he could have run up the stairs to the family’s inner sanctum on the second floor instead of running into the East Room.

Her family’s safety was one of Michelle’s biggest concerns when her husband first started talking about running for president. In a 2007
60 Minutes
interview, Michelle was asked by journalist Steve Kroft if she worried about her husband being shot by “some crazy person with a gun.” “I don’t lose sleep over it,” she said, “because the realities are that, as a black man, Barack can
get shot going to the gas station . . . you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. We just weren’t raised that way.”

Her family has gotten so used to the constant presence of the agents that daughters Sasha and Malia call them the “secret people.” Former Deputy White House Press Secretary Bill Burton says the President’s safety weighs heavily on the First Lady’s mind. “The first time I went on the helicopter with the President I looked out the window and I saw the two decoy helicopters that were with us.” At first Burton marveled at how amazing it was to be part of a helicopter motorcade. “But then comes the realization that there are other helicopters in the air because someone would actually like to kill the person you’re sitting next to. So just imagine that that’s your husband.” He said that thought crossed his mind on every single trip he took with the President around the country. “You can see that he’s a guy who knows that he’s in mortal danger but he’s kind of come to grips with it. He’s not going to let that affect him. . . . His fate, in some ways, is not in his hands, and that to him that’s not a scary thing, it’s just the reality of his life.”

Even a simple dinner outdoors is not so simple for the President and the First Lady. “When the President is on the Truman Balcony we serve him behind the columns so nobody can see him,” says former Maître d’ George Hannie, who served the President and First Lady hundreds of times. “Same for the First Lady. If they’re together they’re on opposite ends.” If there are too many people down around the gate at the far end of the South Lawn, the butlers encourage the President and the First Lady to eat inside. The White House has always been exposed. After Robert Kennedy was killed, Lady Bird and her daughter Lynda sat outside on the Truman Balcony in the early evening, seeking some fresh air
on a day that was a painful reminder of JFK’s assassination five years earlier. Suddenly Lady Bird was aware of how visible they were from the roof and dining terrace of the nearby Washington Hotel. “Not that I myself ever feel any fear at all,” she wrote in her diary. “It is absolutely foreign yet for me, or even really for Lyndon. But maybe neither of the Kennedys felt it either.”

Three former residence staffers—Chief Electrician Bill Cliber, Maître d’ George Hannie, and Usher Worthington White—say they are deeply concerned about the safety of the Obamas. In an effort to save money, they say, the White House is relying on more and more part-time workers, known as SBAs, an acronym for “service by agreement.” These staffers do not have the lengthy full-field security clearance that the full-time staffers have, they say. Investigations into the backgrounds of full-time workers can take up to six months and include in-person visits from agents to their homes to interview their friends and family members, and even to talk with their pastors, to make sure that they would never try to harm the first family. Agents also want to make sure that the prospective employees are not involved with drugs or anything else that could make them a target for blackmail. For a contract worker the vetting can take a few weeks, according to former staffers.

These former residence staffers say they’ve lost sleep worrying about the growing number of contract workers who are in the same room with the President and the First Lady, and in the kitchen as the full-time staffers prepare meals. White says that everyone blends in when the workers are wearing tuxedos, and so the Secret Service would not know who was full-time and who was there just to help out that night. Full-time staffers like the engineers, electricians, and others who volunteer to help at big events like state dinners keep an eye on the contract workers, but now there are simply not enough full-time staffers who work at
these events, White says. Cliber says that full-time staffers have been alarmed by contract workers who ask personal questions about the President and the First Lady. One man who worked in the kitchen washing pans was caught selling drugs and did not return, Cliber said. “If you have a bad element in your life then somebody could use you to accomplish something.” At the end of the Bush administration more contractors were hired, and during the Obama administration, according to White and Hannie, it has gotten so that contract workers almost outnumber full-time staffers at state dinners.