In the President's Secret Service (13 page)

“He wanted to do something spectacular in the Spokane area so he could go back to jail and be reunited with the other man,” Dowling says.

As Reagan was running for reelection in 1984, a New York state trooper spotted an old Buick sedan going twenty-five miles an hour on the New York State Thruway where the speed limit was sixty-five. The trooper pulled the man over and immediately noticed an array of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition on the floor and front passenger seat.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the officer asked.

“I’m going to kill the people running against Reagan,” the man replied.

The officer arrested the man, who was committed to a mental hospital north of New York City for observation. Because the man had threatened to kill presidential candidates, two Secret Service agents, at the direction of the Secret Service Intelligence Division, were dispatched to interview him. At first, the patient’s psychiatric manager balked at the idea of a law enforcement interview. He then relented as long as the agents removed their guns and handcuffs and did not bring radios or briefcases.

“The man said he was glad to see us,” one of the agents says. “He said he loves the Secret Service and was willing to tell us everything.”

But first, the man asked the agents to pray with him.

“We folded our hands and bowed our heads at the interview table and prayed with the man,” the agent says. “At that moment, the psychiatrist walked in. It’s a wonder he didn’t have us committed.”

When the news broke that Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart was having an affair with Donna Rice, Reagan was returning to the White House from an evening event.

“We were in the elevator going up to the residence on the second floor of the White House,” says former agent Ted Hresko. “The door
of the elevator was about to close, and one of the staffers blocked it. The staffer told Reagan the news about Donna Rice and Gary Hart.”

Reagan nodded his head and looked at the agent.

“Boys will be boys,” he said.

When the door of the elevator shut, Reagan said to Hresko, “But boys will not be president.”

I
F 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 Pierce, 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 have to search for the errant magazine at Washington newsstands, which invariably had not received their copies.

One sunny afternoon Pierce brought some mail to Nancy in the first family’s west sitting room on the second floor of the White House. Nancy’s dog Rex, a King Charles spaniel, was lying on the floor at her feet.

Pierce was old friends with Rex, Ronald Reagan’s Christmas gift to his wife, or so he thought. During the day, the usher’s office—just inside the front entrance on the first floor of the mansion—is often a napping place for White House pets. But for some reason, Rex was not
happy to see Pierce this time. As Pierce turned to leave, Rex bit his ankle and held on. Pierce pointed his finger at the dog, a gesture to tell the dog to let go.

Nancy turned on Pierce.

“Don’t you ever point a finger at my dog,” she said.

From the start of his political life, Reagan was stage-managed by Nancy.

“Did I ever give Ronnie advice? You bet I did,” Nancy Reagan wrote in
My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan
. “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 aide over administration of the White House. “Her sole interest was the advancement of her husband’s agenda.”

It turned out that 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.”

Code-named Rainbow, Nancy was “very cold,” a Secret Service agent in the Reagan White House 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.”

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 official vehicle while it was stopped in traffic. She viewed her detail as a nuisance.

“On one visit to New York City, she was with movie actor Peter Strauss, whom she was dating at the time,” Albracht 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,” Albracht says. “She started treating us better.”

Another agent says 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,” the 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.”

“There was a dog out the ranch, and the agents used to play with the dog, and the dog barked,” says Albracht, relaying what an agent on the scene told him. “One night the dog was barking and Nancy got mad, and she told the president, ‘You go out there and you tell the agents to leave that dog alone.’”

Apparently, the barking was interrupting her sleep. Nancy was as persistent as the dog’s barking, so Reagan said he would take care of it and left the bedroom.

“He went to the kitchen, and he just stood there,” Albracht says. “He got a glass of water, went back to bedroom, and said, ‘All right, I took care of it.’ He just didn’t want to bother the agents. He was a true gentleman.”

On the day Reagan left office, he flew to Los Angeles on Air Force One. Bleachers had been set up near a hangar, and a cheering crowd welcomed him while 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 steward Palmer says of the Reagans. But they also got mad at each other over what to eat and other small issues. Moreover, Palmer says Nancy could only push the president 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.”

Palmer says 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.

Nancy tried to restrict her husband’s diet to healthy foods, but he reverted to his favorites when Nancy was not around.

“She was protective about what he ate,” Palmer says. “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.’”

For all the spin from the Carter White House about not drinking, it was the Reagans who drank the least.

“I may have served the Reagans four drinks, maybe, with the exception of a glass of wine,” Palmer says.

When they were at the ranch, the Reagans would ride horseback together every day after lunch. Despite his cinematic roles in Westerns, he rode English, in breeches and boots. He usually rode El Alamein, a gray Anglo-Arab given to Reagan by former president José López Portillo of Mexico. Reagan had a routine he would follow.

“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 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 he went into the house to get her. He came out with her looking unhappy. At that point, 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 have been off the hook, and the technician wanted to check. Chomicki allowed the technician to enter the home. The technician 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, 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.”

Besides riding at the ranch, Reagan rode at the Marine Corps Base Quantico southwest of Washington, at Camp David, and in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. Agents assigned to his detail were trained in horseback riding by the U.S. Park Police. One of the agents, Barbara Riggs, was a skilled equestrian and required no training. Sworn in in
1975, Riggs was the tenth female to become a Secret Service agent. The first female agents—five in all—joined the agency in 1971.

Riggs was on a first-name basis with Reagan. When she fell off one of her own horses and suffered a concussion, he called her upstairs to the living room of the White House after she returned to work. Reagan handed her a book called
The Principles of Horsemanship and Training Horses
. With a wink, he suggested she reread it.

“Yes, I encountered sexual harassment, barriers, and attitudes that women should not be law enforcement agents,” Riggs says. “There were some who did not believe women were capable, either physically or mentally, of doing the job. But I also encountered many individuals who acted as my mentors and gave me great opportunities.”

In 2004, Riggs became the first female deputy director of the Secret Service. The Secret Service now has three hundred eighty female agents.

“You are always going to find a dinosaur in the bunch,” says Patricia Beckford, the eighth female agent hired. “You did have to prove yourself. But at a certain point, they realized that our .357 Magnum shot just as well as theirs.”

I
T GOES WITH the territory that an agent may have to take a bullet for the president. But the actual instruction to trainees is a little more complicated.

“What we are trained to do as shift agents is to cover and evacuate if there is an attack,” an agent says. “We form a human shield around the protectee and get him out of the danger area to a safer location. If an agent is shot during the evacuation, then that is something that is expected. We rely on our layers of security to handle the attacker, while the inside shift’s main function is to get the heck out of Dodge.”