In the President's Secret Service (5 page)

After another state prisoner wrote a threatening letter to Bush, an agent arranged to meet with him. After driving three hours to the prison, the agent asked him if he knew why the agent was there.

“Yep. When do I go to federal prison?” the man said.

The prisoner added that he hoped to “see the country” and, since he was serving a life term, this would be his best opportunity. When the agent explained that he would be serving his state term first, the man said he had heard that threatening the president was the way to be transferred to a federal prison.

“I could have strangled him,” the agent says.

A Class I individual—the least serious threat—may have blurted out at a bar that he wants to kill the president.

“You interview him, and he has absolutely no intention of carrying this threat out,” an agent says. “Agents will assess him and conclude, ‘Yeah, he said something stupid; yeah, he committed a federal crime. But we’re not going to charge him or pursue that guy’ You just have to use your discretion and your best judgment.”

In most cases, a visit from Secret Service agents is enough to make anyone think twice about carrying out a plot. When Pope John Paul II visited Saint Louis in January 1999, the Secret Service, which was protecting him, received a report about a man seen driving a camper in the city. On the sides of the camper were inscriptions such as “The Pope Should Die” and “The Pope Is the Devil.”

Through the reported license plate number, the Secret Service tracked the man to an address, which turned out to be his mother’s home not far from Saint Louis. When interviewed by Secret Service agents, the man’s mother said her son was driving to the mountains in western Montana near Kalispell to see his brother.

Norm Jarvis, the resident agent in charge, drove to the Kalispell area where the brother was supposed to be living. The forested area is vast. Like many who live in the area, the brother did not have an address. Jarvis hoped local law enforcement would know where he could start looking.

“I was driving down the road, and lo and behold, coming the other way down the street, is this camper,” Jarvis says. “The Pope Should Die” and “The Pope Is the Devil” were written on the sides of the vehicle. The man driving the camper fit the description of the suspect. Jarvis could not believe his luck.

“I spun my car around and turned on my lights and siren,” Jarvis says. “I got up alongside him and waved him over.”

With the man’s wife sitting beside him, Jarvis interviewed the
man, who said he had been in mental institutions and was off his medication. The man had no firearms, and Jarvis decided he was not capable of harming the Pope. Thus, he was a Class II threat. Jarvis took his fingerprints and photographed him. He warned him to stay away from Saint Louis during the Pope’s visit, and he suggested the man get some help.

Jarvis called headquarters to report his contact with the suspect and the results of his initial findings. Within a few days, he finished writing a report and called the duty desk to say he was going to be sending it.

“They told me the guy had killed himself with his brother’s pistol,” Jarvis says. “His brother reported that he was so shook up after talking to me that he decided to end his life. He felt that he couldn’t escape the devil; the devil was going to find him. And then he shot himself.”

I
F LYNDON JOHNSON was out of control, the Secret Service found Richard Nixon and his family to be the strangest protectees. Like Johnson, Nixon—code-named Searchlight—did not sleep in the same bedroom with his wife. But unlike Johnson, who consulted Lady Bird on issues he faced, Nixon seemed to have no relationship with his wife, Pat.

“He [Nixon] never held hands with his wife,” a Secret Service agent says.

An agent remembers accompanying Nixon, Pat, and their two daughters during a nine-hole golf game near their home at San Clemente, California. During the hour and a half, “He never said a word,” the former agent says. “Nixon could not make conversation unless it was to discuss an issue…. Nixon was always calculating, seeing what effect it would have.”

Unknown to the public, Pat Nixon—code-named Starlight—was an alcoholic who tippled martinis. By the time Nixon left the White House to live at San Clemente, Pat “was in a pretty good stupor much of the time,” an agent on Nixon’s detail says. “She had trouble remembering things.”

“One day out in San Clemente when I was out there, a friend of mine was on post, and he hears this rustling in the bushes,” says another agent who was on Nixon’s detail. “You had a lot of immigrants coming up on the beach, trying to get to the promised land. You never knew if anybody’s going to be coming around the compound.”

At that point, the other agent “cranks one in the shotgun. He goes over to where the rustling is, and it’s Pat,” the former agent says. “She’s on her hands and knees. She’s trying to find the house.”

Pat, he says, “had a tough life. Nixon would hardly talk. The only time he enjoyed himself was when he was with his friends Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp, when they would drink together.”

Nixon often spent time with Abplanalp on his friend’s island, Grand Cay in the Bahamas.

“Just to give you an idea of his athletic prowess, or lack of it, he loved to fish,” a former agent says. “He’d be on the back of Abplanalp’s fifty-five-foot yacht, and he would sit in this swivel seat with his fishing pole. Abplanalp’s staff would hook Nixon’s hook and throw the hook out. And Nixon would be just sitting there, with both hands on the pole, and he’d catch something, and the staff would reel it in for him, take the fish off, put it in the bucket. Nixon wouldn’t do anything but watch.”

During Watergate, “Nixon was very depressed,” says another former agent. “He wasn’t functioning as president any longer. [Bob] Haldeman [Nixon’s chief of staff] ran the country.”

Milton Pitts, who ran several barbershops in Washington, would go to a tiny barbershop in the basement of the West Wing to cut Nixon’s hair.

“Nixon talked very little,” Pitts told me. “He wanted to know what the public was saying. We had a TV there. But he never watched TV. All the other presidents did.”

During Watergate, Nixon would ask Pitts, “Well, what are they saying about us today?”

Pitts would say he hadn’t heard much news that day.

“I didn’t want to get into what people were saying,” Pitts said. “I’m not going to give him anything unpleasant. He was my boss.”

One afternoon, Alexander Butterfield, who would later reveal the existence of the Nixon tapes, came in for a haircut just before Nixon did. Motioning to the television set, Butterfield said to Pitts, “Leave that on. I want him [Nixon] to see what they are doing to us.”

But as soon as Nixon walked into the barbershop, “He pushed the button, and the TV went off,” Pitts says. “He said, ‘Well, what are they saying about us today?’ I said, ‘Mr. President, I haven’t heard much news today, sir.’”

As the Watergate scandal progressed, “Nixon got very paranoid,” a Secret Service agent says. “He didn’t know what to believe or whom to trust. He did think people were lying to him. He thought at the end everyone was lying.”

While Nixon rarely drank before the Watergate scandal, he began drinking more heavily as the pressure took its toll. He would down a martini or a manhattan.

“All he could handle was one or two,” a Secret Service agent says. “He wouldn’t be flying high, but you could tell he wasn’t in total control of himself. He would loosen up, start talking more, and smile. It was completely out of character. But he had two, and that was that. He had them every other night. But always at the end of business and in the residence. You never saw him drunk in public.”

In contrast to the blustering in his taped conversations, Nixon in private seemed passive and often out of it, although he did have a sense of humor. After spending a weekend at Camp David, Nixon stepped out of his cabin with Pat to get into a Secret Service limousine that would take them to Marine One, the president’s helicopter.

“Secret Service agents were at the ready to move,” says one of Nixon’s agents. “The agent who was driving was checking everything
out, making sure the heater was properly adjusted. Nixon paused to talk to Pat. The driver accidentally honked his horn, and Nixon, thinking he was being impatient, said, ‘I’ll be right there.’”

At his San Clemente home, Nixon was watching television one afternoon while feeding dog biscuits to one of his dogs.

“Nixon took a dog biscuit and was looking at it and then takes a bite out of it,” says Richard Repasky who was on his detail.

Nixon would walk on the beach wearing a suit—all his suits were navy blue—and dress shoes. Even in summer, he would insist on having a fire burning in the fireplace. One evening, Nixon built a fire in the fireplace at San Clemente and forgot to open the flue damper.

“The smoke backed up in the house, and two agents came running,” says a former agent who was on the Nixon detail.

“Can you find him?” one of the agents asked the other.

“No, I can’t find the son of a bitch,” the other agent said.

From the bedroom, a voice piped up.

“Son of a bitch is here trying to find a matching pair of socks,” Nixon said, poking fun at himself.

One agent will never forget a reunion for Vietnam prisoners of war held outside Nixon’s San Clemente home.

“This POW did a series of paintings of Hanoi camp scenes,” the former agent says. “He was quite good. He presented Nixon with a big painting of POWs. Later that evening, after everyone had left, Nixon was going back to his home. It was a warm night. His assistant turned to Nixon and said, ‘What do you want me to do with the picture? Should I bring it in the house?’”

“Put that goddamned thing in the garage,” Nixon said. “I don’t want to see that.”

The former agent says he shook his head and thought, “You smiled and shook hands with these guys, and you couldn’t care less. It was all show.”

“Monday through Friday, Nixon would leave his home at twelve-fifty-five
P.M.
to play golf,” Dale Wunderlich, a former agent on his detail, says. “He would insist on golfing even in pouring rain.”

Occasionally, Nixon’s son-in-law David Eisenhower, grandson of former president Dwight Eisenhower, went with him. Agents considered the younger Eisenhower the most clueless person they had ever protected. One day, the Nixons gave him a barbecue grill as a Christmas present. With the Nixons inside his house, Eisenhower tried to start the grill to char some steaks. After a short time, he told Wunderlich it would not light.

“He had poured most of a bag of briquets into the pit of the grill and lit matches on top of them, but he had not used fire starter,” Wunderlich says.

“Do you know anything about garage door openers?” Eisenhower asked another Secret Service agent. “I need a little help. I’ve had it two years, and I don’t get a light. Shouldn’t the light come on?”

“Maybe the lightbulb is burnt out,” the agent said.

“Really?” David said.

The agent looked up. There was no bulb in the socket.

“We did a loose surveillance, or tail, on David Eisenhower when there were a lot of threats on the president, and he was going to George Washington University Law School in Washington,” a former agent says. “He was in a red Pinto. He comes out of classes and goes to a Safeway in Georgetown. He parks and buys some groceries. A woman parks in a red Pinto nearby. He comes out in forty-five minutes and puts the groceries in the other Pinto. He spent a minute and a half to two minutes trying to start it. Meanwhile, she comes out, screams, and says, ‘What are you doing in my car?’”

“This is my car,” he insisted. “I just can’t get it started right now.”

The woman threatened to call the police. He finally got out, and she drove off.

“He was still dumbfounded,” the former agent says. “He looked at us. We pointed at his car. He got in and drove off like nothing had happened.”

Subsequently, Eisenhower bought a new Oldsmobile and planned to drive it from California to Pennsylvania to see his grandmother Mamie Eisenhower, who was code-named Springtime. In Phoenix, the car gave out. Eisenhower called a local dealership, which said it would fix the car the next morning. After staying overnight in a motel, Eisenhower went to the dealership where the car had been towed. The dealership told him the problem had been fixed: The car had run out of gas and needed a fill-up.

Near the end of Nixon’s presidency, his vice president Spiro Agnew was charged with accepting one hundred thousand dollars in cash bribes. Agnew had taken the payoffs when he was a Maryland state official and later when he was vice president. Agnew pleaded nolo contendere and agreed to resign, leaving office on October 10, 1973.

What never came out was that the married Agnew, a champion of family values who made no secret of his disdain for the liberal press, was having affairs while in office. One morning in late 1969, Agnew asked his Secret Service detail of five agents to take him to what is now Washington’s elegant St. Regis hotel at 923 Sixteenth Street NW.

“We took him in the back door and brought him to a room on the fourth floor,” says one of the agents. “He asked us to leave him alone for three hours. The detail leader understood he was having an affair with a woman.”