Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President (2 page)

As I stood behind my potential targets, I began running scenarios through my head, playing the “what if” game. There really was only one “what if” in this case. If the Syrians drew their Skorpions, I would per my training shoot each of them twice with my Sig Sauer pistol until the threat was neutralized, I had expended all ammunition, or I was out of the game.

I repositioned myself a bit in order to ensure that President Clinton and Assad would not be in my line of fire in the event I was forced to shoot and actually missed at such close range. As bad as a shootout in this small room would be, it would be catastrophic beyond imagination if a Secret Service bullet from my pistol struck either POTUS or Assad.

Obviously and thankfully the Syrians did not draw their Skorpions and I was not forced to kill them, nor they me. It could have easily happened, however, and the incident was a cold reminder of what is expected of Secret Service agents throughout their careers.

Who are these men and women that protect the president of the United States, and where does America find such people willing to not merely face danger but to sacrifice themselves if necessary for the office of the presidency? The answer begins with the search for men and women who are worthy of trust and confidence.

WORTHY OF TRUST AND CONFIDENCE

Almost every organization has a motto. The motto of the Marine Corps is “
Semper Fidelis
,” or “Always Faithful”; the FBI motto is “Bravery, Fidelity, and Integrity.” For the United States Secret Service, the motto is “Worthy of Trust and Confidence.”

All Secret Service agents carry with them a walletlike object known as a commission book; when opened, it reveals a badge and a photo ID and contains an inscription proclaiming agents’ authority under federal law to carry firearms, make arrest for offenses against the United States, and provide protection to the president of the United States. It also states that the bearer is “Worthy of Trust and Confidence.” The United States of America can trust the bearer of the commission book in all matters of national security.

These Secret Service agents deemed worthy of trust and confidence are frequently depicted as menacing, large-biceped bodyguards with no sense of humor hiding steely eyes behind dark glasses. This image is not reality but only urban legend.

On the surface, to the casual observer, Secret Service agents are in many respects like anyone else. They are fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters. They are your neighbors, friends, relatives, coaches, PTA members, and fellow citizens. Under the surface, however, they are quite different from the average citizen. The difference lies in their unique profession and in what each is prepared to do in order to preserve our form of government and way of life. The men and women who carry the commission book proclaiming them to be worthy of trust and confidence are willing and have been trained to forfeit their lives without hesitation for the office of the presidency. Their willingness to do this is without question, their outstanding and continuous training assures it. This primary mission of keeping the president alive at any cost distinguishes both the Secret Service agent and the Secret Service itself from all other government agents and agencies.

My career was not unique. By substituting others’ names for mine, this book could be about any one of several hundred, if not several thousands, of agents who since 1902 have been found worthy of trust and confidence and afforded the honor of protecting the president of the United States with their own lives. This book, then, is a typical agent’s story, but it is one that has seldom, if ever, been told in such detail.

CHAPTER 1

The Death of a President and the Birth of a Career

From May 16, 1983, until May 16, 2004, I served as a special agent in the United States Secret Service. There I was afforded both the honor and the tremendous responsibility of protecting three sitting presidents.

In the span of that career, I learned above all else that there is no such thing as a routine day in the Secret Service. Anything was possible, from the boredom of answering telephones in the office to flying on board Air Force One or perhaps going for a morning run with the president of the United States. On some days I was afforded the chance to do all of these things.

Through the years, many people have asked how and why I chose the Secret Service as a career. The answer is complex but lies in the inescapable fact that children are highly impressionable creatures. When I was only eight years old, the murder of President John F. Kennedy and the global changes it brought about created impressions that would transform my life forever.

Over the course of that fateful weekend in November 1963, an idealistic third grader named Dan Emmett made the decision that one of his career goals was to become a Secret Service agent, one of the men who protected the president of the United States. Two decades later that was precisely what I did. This is the story of that career, first imagined as a child. Through a great deal of hard work and a bit of good fortune, my dream flourished into reality.

BEGINNINGS

Secret Service agents, like most men and women in armed law enforcement, tend to come from the middle class and upper middle class. My upbringing was very similar to that of thousands of others who chose the same career path I did, with the only differences being specific dates and the names of towns and relatives. If you wish to truly understand the mind-set of people in this profession and why they chose their respective career paths, you need to examine their formative years.

The third of three sons, I was born in 1955 at the end of the baby boom in the small town of Gainesville, Georgia, located about fifty miles northeast of Atlanta. My brothers and I were each born six years apart; no two of us were in college at the same time. That is how carefully my parents planned things. In their lives nothing happened by chance, and this is one of the most important lessons I learned from them. Always plan ahead and have both a backup plan and a backup to the backup. From the time I could understand language, I often heard Dad remind my brothers and me, “Prior planning prevents piss-poor performance.” As with most things he said during the forty-four years I was privileged to be around him, I have found this to be sound advice.

While neither of my parents progressed in formal education beyond the high school level, both were determined that my two brothers and I would all graduate from college. They made sacrifices characteristic of their generation, and we all did.

My father and mother were born in 1919 and 1920, respectively, and were products of the Great Depression. Both had grown up in families with little money, but through hard work and good financial planning, they accomplished amazing things together in their fifty-nine years of marriage. That partnership ended only after Dad passed away in 1999, with Mother following him in 2013.

My father was a very serious, self-made man who never really had a childhood. The son of a cotton mill worker who was also a Baptist minister, Dad was forced to drop out of high school at the age of sixteen in order to help support his family of two brothers and four sisters by working in the mill.

Partial to dark suits with white shirts and dark, thin ties, he greatly resembled former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, complete with wire-rimmed glasses and swept-back dark hair. A World War II veteran of the Pacific theater of operations, he was extremely patriotic and was an active member of both the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Dad loved God first, his family second, and baseball third, although the order could vary at times depending on what teams were in the World Series.

After marrying my mother in 1940, Dad discovered, largely as the result of her promptings, that he possessed a talent for business, and he escaped his dead-end career as a millworker by becoming a furniture salesman. In 1950, Dad started his own furniture business, appropriately named Emmett Furniture Company, which he owned for over sixteen years prior to moving on to other successful business ventures.

My mother was the quintessential mom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Always perfectly attired, she vacuumed and cleaned our immaculate home while dressed somewhat like June Cleaver. In spite of her hectic schedule, she always had dinner on the table each evening promptly at six o’clock when my father arrived home from work.

As a child, I spent a lot of time at Dad’s furniture store—“the store,” as we referred to it. Most days during the school year, Dad dispatched one of his two deliverymen, Robert or Reeves, to pick me up from school and transport me to the store, where I would do homework, play in the large area of the rug department, or watch the newest Philco black-and-white TVs until it was time to go home. I remember one of the best parts of being at the store was the drink machine, which, for a dime, provided to me by Dad from the cash drawer, would produce the coldest Cokes and 7Ups in the world in wonderful glass bottles.

The old building that housed Emmett Furniture was built in the 1920s and smelled of new furniture and fresh floor wax. There were always a lot of interesting people coming and going, including policemen, local politicians, businessmen, and just about anyone you could think of. Dad was a friend of Congressman Phil Landrum from our Ninth Congressional District, and one day as I sat watching cartoons, he appeared. This was during the early 1960s. Unlike today, constituents generally held congressmen in high esteem, and I recall feeling very special as this important man sat and talked with me for a few minutes.

Other days one of Dad’s deliverymen would drop me off after school at the public library, where my mother worked part-time. There I would do homework and immerse myself in books about World War II or anything else I could find related to the military or guns. Considered cute at the time, I was fussed over by Mom’s coworkers, who loved to give me dinner-spoiling treats and seemed to delight in patting me on my blond crew-cut head.

I attended Enota Elementary School within the Gainesville, Georgia, city school system. The quality education found within this system has over the years produced two astronauts and many doctors, lawyers, and engineers, as well as a couple of Secret Service agents. It was a time in America when, due to lack of government interference, many public schools provided a quality education found only today in private schools. Corporal punishment was still alive and well within the public schools, and disciplinary transgressions were met with a ruler impacting the palm of the hand or the principal’s pledge paddle across the backside.

Each day we diligently studied reading, writing, arithmetic, and American history as it actually occurred, with no one lecturing, for example, that Pearl Harbor was the fault of the United States. The Supreme Court had yet to order religion removed from public schools, so we recited the Lord’s Prayer during morning devotional, along with Bible verses and the Pledge of Allegiance. No one refused to join in any of these activities, and there were no complaints from any parent about the curriculum of hard academics, God, and patriotism.

At recess, we cultivated healthy competitive spirit by playing a variety of violent and sometimes injury-causing games, including tackle football with no pads and dodge ball, now banned in many schools. While almost everyone received a bloody nose and got scraped up from time to time, not everyone received trophies for every sporting activity. Those who lost in dodge ball or other sports did not seem to suffer permanent physical injury from the bloody noses or a lack of self-esteem.

Political correctness and a phobia of anything gun-related had yet to seize the country, and I recall one very interesting show-and-tell day in the sixth grade. One of my classmates brought to school a fully automatic .30-caliber M2 carbine provided to him by his father, a police captain. The captain had procured the weapon from the armory of the Gainesville Police Department for his son’s show-and-tell. The school was not put on lockdown, and everyone, including the teacher, enjoyed the presentation on the history and functioning of the weapon. At the end of the day many pedestrians and people in vehicles watched unconcerned as my eleven-year-old friend walked across the school grounds with his carbine slung over his shoulder on his way home.

In addition to the challenging academic curriculum, we also trained for the likelihood of nuclear war.

During the early 1960s, especially after the Cuban missile crisis, everyone, including the school systems of America, was concerned about a seemingly inevitable thermonuclear war with Russia. Unlike many schools in the early 1960s, my grammar school did not practice the insane act of “duck and cover,” which had students hiding from thermonuclear destruction under their desks. Desks provided no more cover from a nuclear explosion than they would a falling light fixture. Instead we practiced evacuation drills.

The idea was that if we were all to be vaporized, maybe some of us could at least make it home and die with our families or in our own homes and yards. Traveling the great circle route, it would take an ICBM about twenty minutes to travel from the Soviet Union to its designated detonation area over the United States. That at least gave us some time. Better to be on the move and die rather than huddled like rats under a desk. I vividly recall that on at least one occasion, upon the given signal, all students formed up into groups and walked home. It was a useless exercise but a lot more exciting than duck and cover, and we got most of the day off from school.

Guns played a large role in my upbringing, and I always seemed to have an affinity for understanding their function as well as a natural talent for using them. My father advised me very early in life to “never point a gun at anything you do not intend to shoot.” Later the marines would modify that lesson to “never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to kill or destroy.” At the age of eight, with my Daisy BB gun in hand, I roamed our neighborhood with other gunslingers for hours on end. We tested our skills by pushing our Daisys’ maximum effective range to their utmost limits. It was not unusual to see a group of boys walking down the street in our neighborhood with their BB guns, and on some days we sported actual firearms, usually .22 rifles. Other than the bird population being thinned a bit, no damage was done as a result of our possessing these weapons, and no one shot out an eye. It was during this time that I learned about adjusting sights for windage and elevation, as well as the basic fundamentals of shooting. By the time I entered the Marine Corps some years later, I was already self-trained to the point that firing expertly with the M16 rifle and M1911 pistol came easily.