by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
“Uh, I think the president just put my hand on the First Lady’s [bum].”
“You think that was funny, the president kept, like, rubbing my back!”
Aghast, we didn’t know what to make of it. We received the picture in the mail and still laugh about it. Everyone looks awkward—because we were! But don’t get me wrong, that was classic President Clinton. He was never dull.
The First Lady had a different sort of liveliness. She once threw a Bible at an agent on her detail, hitting him in the back of the head. He bluntly let her know it wasn’t acceptable. He told me that story himself. Assignment to her detail was a form of punishment handed down by passive-aggressive middle management.
She hated smokers, even seeing them. In high-stress jobs, even among her own staffers, smoking was popular. One of my UD buddies on the South Lawn always kept a single cigarette, a big long Benson & Hedges, for when Mrs. Clinton walked by. He would step out of his booth and light one up just so she could see him blowing big plumes. Without making eye contact, he would flick it so she saw it.
When her detail passed, Mrs. Clinton expected everyone else to disappear. She didn’t want to see anyone in the White House halls, as if the whole place were her personal Executive Mansion. It was insulting. People scurried as if in a giant game of hide-and-seek. An agent traveling ahead of her would direct people to disappear, usually into a nearby closet or alcove.
Once when the First Couple stayed at a hotel, the SA ahead of their detail grabbed another officer and me to duck into a tiny, cramped, kitchenette-like area. “This is ridiculous,” I complained.
“Just the way it is. Suck it up,” said the agent.
“What are we here for? How am I supposed to protect the president, her, or anyone else if I’m in a closet? Are we here to do a job or not?”
I waited for the First Couple’s detail to radio when they approached before emerging to stand my post—to perform my duty. They passed. The First Lady ignored my existence. The SAs behind her glared at me as if they wanted me to spontaneously catch fire.
“Big shot, huh?” said the agent, exiting the kitchenette.
“Just doing my job,” I said. “It’s insulting that I should just disappear because the very sight of us bothers her.”
8.
CLINTON WORLD
When Bill Clinton arrived in January 1993, so did a new presidential chief of staff. Mack McLarty was a longtime Clinton friend and political ally from Hope, Arkansas, but he was simply in over his head in his new job, and he quickly lost control of a grossly immature White House staff, whose idea of propriety fluctuated somewhere between that of a political campaign office—and of an empty-pizza-box-strewn college dorm. Sloppy, disrespectful Clinton staffers spilled so much coffee and soda in West Wing offices and hallways that the stains overwhelmed General Services Administration staff. GSA finally gave up on cleaning the carpets and replaced them wholesale.
The president set the tone, wanting to keep his Oval Office door open all the time. That was his style. He’d welcome each colleague or staffer directly into the office, hearing them out directly. He loved granting everyone open access. But his approach destroyed any sense of hierarchy. Soon it obliterated what little sense of decorum had previously existed. It created chaos. Staffers often didn’t see the need to go through his personal secretary, Betty Currie, or anyone at all.
How the Clintons even managed to run Arkansas I never knew.
Betty and Appointments Secretary Nancy Hernreich found themselves shooing away his campaign staffers, who massaged their own egos by treating a sitting president of the United States like an old slap-on-the-back pal. Some kept referring to him as Governor or Bill rather than as Mr. President. At first, Mr. Clinton, a great schmoozer, enjoyed the laid-back camaraderie, but it wasted his time and left him unfocused. Staffers from all over the White House loved to loiter in the West Wing because it gave them a sense of being important and needed. The atmosphere made our hallways noisy and crowded. When things got tough—as when scandals needed clamping down—there were people everywhere.
Early on, while Mack McLarty remained chief of staff, the president scheduled an Oval Office address to the nation. Cameras and teleprompters stood ready to roll. As the doors behind the president closed, a staffer came sprinting down the hallway. Her surname was Rodham, just like Hillary’s maiden name, and she may have been a cousin of some sort. The Clintons seemed to like her. Usually I had no problems with her other than having to remind her to wear her pass and keep it right side up.
Today she was going too fast for me to worry about just her pass. Ms. Rodham was heading hell-bent-for-leather for the Oval Office.
“Whoa! Just stop!” I ordered her, physically blocking her path.
“Move!” she commanded, maneuvering to get past me.
“They’re broadcasting. I can’t let you in.” I couldn’t believe she would just barge in at will.
“This is the correct speech,” she fumed, waving a computer disk. “They have the wrong speech!”
I blocked her again. Her story didn’t pass the smell test—on any level. “How could that be right?” I asked, and emphasized that by entering now, she’d risk jolting a cameraman and ruining a presidential address—she might even trigger a minor national panic if she knocked the camera over. I steered her over to Betty, whom I trusted to discreetly sort it all out. Thankfully, Ms. Rodham was wrong. It was she who had the wrong floppy disk.
I wish that incident was unique. In July 1994, Leon Panetta replaced Mack McLarty. He cleaned house and restored order. The free world was safer—and so was the White House carpeting.
Panetta was widely respected and by reputation quiet, formidable, serious, passionate—neither a blowhard nor an ideologue. Our first interaction sent shivers down my spine. Inside the Roosevelt Room, Panetta conferred with Rahm Emanuel, George Stephanopoulos, and assorted other Clinton heavyweights. It was an informal meeting, and Panetta was getting a feel for everyone and letting it play out as if he were a fly on the wall. I saw someone with their feet propped up on a table. President Clinton entered, and Panetta stood to greet him—the only one to do so. The pair of feet resting on that table remained at ease.
The president departed, and Panetta quietly ripped into his staff. I’ll never forget it. I never heard him curse or yell, but he certainly had a way of being heard: “The next time one of you doesn’t stand when the president enters—I don’t care what your reason is or what you did to get the president here—it is unacceptable. And that’s all.”
The next day the White House was more serious and focused, yet less frenzied, as if it was finally getting down to work! It was great. Someone had dared to issue marching orders. Panetta expected results.
Congressional elections approached. It’s strange how command-and-control structures take their cue from the top. The Clintons didn’t create the political correctness movement, nor did they invent “noncombative combatant” mindset. But diversity encroached on merit. Professionalism degraded. As these plagues became more blatant, they became more contagious. Office promiscuity, DUIs, unprofessionalism, leadership from behind, and unethical behavior had all existed well before the Clintons. Now they accelerated. After the Clintons arrived, interoffice politics were exacerbated—not because of Panetta but because of the president.
On September 13, 1994, the federal Assault Weapons Ban became law. It accomplished nothing beyond humoring gun control advocates. It protected no one. What difference did it make (to borrow a phrase from Mrs. Clinton) if the month before that a potential assassin like Francisco Duran attacked the White House with a regular SKS or with a 1911? None. But what did I know? I was only trained in firearms by one of the most elite federal agencies.
Leon Panetta walked up to me outside. “Hey, Officer. They’re about to sign. You want to come in and see? Come on in.”
“Thank you, Mr. Panetta, but I’m fine out here. It’s not really Uniformed Division policy.”
“Oh, c
ome on.” He waved me into the jam-packed Oval Office.
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate that, but to be honest it’s not really my cup of tea.”
I was honored, however, that he asked. He knew my name and thought to make small talk. He is a great man, and you bet I shared that story with other UD officers. I believe Leon Panetta genuinely placed America’s well-being first and foremost. I never took his politics personally.
While I did my job and kept my head down, a series of scandals tarnished the Clinton brand and presidency. They weighed on the administration, but they were never (at least, then) my problem.
They commenced, of course, long before Inauguration Day 1993. During the preceding election, a cabaret singer and former Little Rock TV news reporter named Gennifer Flowers revealed that she had been candidate Clinton’s mistress for twelve years. Other women quickly emerged from the woodwork, stirring a media frenzy. Some were mistresses. Some alleged they were victims of sexual harassment—even rape. There were actresses, career businesswomen, and former employees. It seemed too strange not to be true, but not everyone believed them. The Clinton pattern was deny-deny-deny. Behind the scenes, the Clinton Machine slut-shamed accusers, impugned their integrity, and supposedly even paid them off and intimidated them.
The major scandal emerged in 1994. Paula Corbin Jones, an Arkansas state clerical employee, sued now-president Clinton for sexual harassment. It all seemed like unpresidential celebrity news gossip. Again, this didn’t involve me, so I didn’t care.
And then there was Whitewater, with a lot of money moving around in unethical ways. The Clintons had invested about $200,000 in Arkansas’s Whitewater Development Corporation, losing $67,000 of it when the feds shuttered Whitewater for cooking its books and acting as a money-laundering front for local politicians and favor-seeking businesses. How the Clintons could invest so much money while wallowing in $50,000 of campaign debt still mystifies me.
Operating Whitewater was Jim McDougal, an Arkansas power player and former congressional candidate with ties to the Clintons, though supposedly he never involved either Clinton in his illegalities. To defend himself against federal charges, McDougal engaged Mrs. Clinton’s former law firm, Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm. Afterward McDougal, out of the goodness of his heart, hosted a fundraiser to erase Clinton’s campaign debts. Authorities finally convicted McDougal of multiple felony conspiracy charges. Other scandals followed.
Meanwhile, a real under-the-media-radar, tough-on-corruption judge, Ken Starr, a man I later learned to both respect and loathe, took up the Whitewater investigation. I’d never heard of him before, but Starr’s name soon was in every newspaper. He was a bloodhound, locking on the Clintons’ scent, though I still shrugged everything off as mere tall talk.
Nothing revealed President Clinton’s lax attitude toward his personal security more than his jogging routine. Nobody could get a straight answer from him on the Shakespearean question: “To jog—or not to jog?” Nobody could. Not even the armored vehicle squad who would trail him if he did. Not the military liaison who safeguarded the nuclear “football,” the satchel enabling the president to launch a nuclear strike when away from the White House.
Each morning PPD and UD hovered near the Executive Residence entrance to spy his attire. Running clothes and sneakers or a suit? A suit and we returned to our normal posts—we knew he was on his way to the Oval Office. Sneakers, and all hands on deck. Agents had to devise ways to jog with enough concealed firepower to protect him and also to adapt to his spontaneous choice of route. Officers and agents had to adjust their PT schedule to his whim. We struggled to avoid endangering or snarling regular D.C. traffic while covering him as best we could. The Service’s version of SWAT teams stayed as close as possible, but it was a shit show.
Once, UD officers stationed on the lawn spied President Clinton heading out for a jog, but his PPD wasn’t in sight. A friend of mine on entry-control duty pursued the president in full gear at breakneck speed until the PPD finally caught up with both of them.
UD personnel made arrests, questioned suspicious people, and occasionally, when President Clinton outpaced his motorcade and his protecting agents, also sprinted after an essentially isolated and completely unprotected chief executive. He just didn’t care. In his book, Within Arm’s Length, Special Agent Dan Emmett even detailed a frightening near-assassination attempt during one of these reckless jogs.*
If, however, the president wasn’t jogging, we hurriedly stowed our gear, redressed, returned the motorcade cars, PT’d if possible, and hiked back on regular posts all in a manner of minutes—a freaking nightmare. Finally, someone donated money for a private jogging track on the South Lawn’s circular roadway.
The First Lady also jogged. I was posted on the South Roadway and she emerged from the Executive Mansion wearing a ball cap, gloves, gray sweatshirt, and black jogging pants. She was clearly fuming about something.
“Evergreen walking down South Lawn looking like she’s heading to the gate,” I heard in my ear from the officer at the gate. It sent the signal to me: Where’s her SA detail?
“Be advised, FLPD [First Lady’s Protective Detail] is aware. They are on their way.”
I can’t forget the look on one of their faces—he was a big muscular guy still wearing his suit—as he looked at us, rolled his eyes, and flung his hands up in the air, as if to say Here we go again! He sprinted across the lawn to catch up. A few more agents, still struggling to don jogging attire, followed his lead. Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton neared an exit gate. The officer manning it agonized over what to do if she demanded that he open it. Or whether he should abandon his post and fall in behind her if he did!
Some agents literally went mad. Many turned to alcohol, drugs, performance enhancers, affairs (sometimes at the workplace), and even prostitutes and other dangerous habits. A “f—it” mentality trickled down.
Our intel briefings provided us with no-nonsense intelligence agency data on international and domestic terrorism developments. They always referenced Osama bin Laden. We also learned which morons had tried to hop the fence, attempted suicide at entry posts, or swung at a Secret Service agent, a Metro police officer, or a UD, and how each incident had unfolded. We discussed suspicious types snapping photos and the like. All of our national monuments and, of course, the president were top terrorist targets. That’s public knowledge. But much more remains classified.
I can, however, disclose details of two very well-known events. I wasn’t on post either day—for which my colleagues never ceased giving me crap.
It was the evening of September 12, 1994. A good friend of mine, a Secret Service Emergency Response Team (ERT) officer I’ll call Keith, guarded the South Lawn. He spied a single-prop Cessna plane swooping just over the tree line, heading straight for him. After shitting his britches, Keith sprinted and hopped over some bushes to reach some safety alongside the building. That was all he could do. BAM! The Cessna crashed, wedging itself, contorted and mangled, against the doctor’s office in the Executive Residence. Keith was the first to arrive at the crash. He yanked open the Cessna’s door. The pilot’s head had rotated nearly 180 degrees! He was obviously dead. Fuel poured over the lawn, but duty—and training—compelled Keith to check for a pulse.
Posing as a tourist, the dead pilot—Frank Corder—had conducted a pre-advance, reconnoitering the grounds from the South Lawn fence line. Corder calculated distances, what dotted the ground, clearances, and so on. He wasn’t trying to crash the plane or pull a suicide attack; he was trying to land the plane safely for an international stunt, copying daredevil German pilot Mathias Rust, who had taken off from Finland and landed in Red Square, Moscow, to expose Soviet vulnerabilities. Rust had been promptly arrested. Corder promptly died.
Ironically, Corder posed relatively little immediate threat to the First Family. With the White House undergoing renovations, the First Family was temporarily residing across the avenue at Blair House.
On October 29, 1994, a trench coa
t–clad man loitered by the North Lawn fence—a definite red flag. UD eyed him, but he hadn’t yet reached “reasonable suspicion” level. Meanwhile, a political office staffer (instead of the usual Tours Section officer) detoured a special guest tour from its typical route to view the North Lawn staircase—a rare privilege and clearly outside of protocol. The UD officer manning the moat area warned that staffer against taking the tour through there. The staffer insisted. A tourist beyond the Pennsylvania Avenue fence line pointed at a tall, gray-haired man who was a part of the tour group and screamed, “Look! There he is!”
Francisco Martin Duran, the man in the trench coat, thought the gray-haired man was President Clinton. From under his coat, he whipped out a Chinese-made SKS magazine-fed rifle, spraying twenty-nine AK-47 caliber rounds over the lawn and hitting the West Wing Press Lobby, where an officer scrambled to prevent the journalists from jumping out the window for a better view.
“You can’t stop us. We’re the press!” one shouted as he tried prying himself through a window.
A bullet struck that window. A moment sooner, it could have struck him.
Duran kept firing from the hip while jogging backward—there’s a YouTube video of it. It was a panic. Even Duran wasn’t sure whether to continue firing or to escape. With any tactical training he could have easily gunned down several of the officers or even the president—if that gray-haired man really were the president. Officers didn’t have a clear shot. What you can’t see in the video are civilians near Duran freezing and running after the shock of the gunfire. Out of ammunition, Duran dropped his magazine on the sidewalk and retrieved another from his coat pocket.
Three civilian bystanders tackled him. Watch the YouTube home-video vacation footage turned impromptu assassination evidence, and you’ll see a man in a comically tall and wide cowboy hat tackle Duran exhibiting zero regard for his own life and safety. What most people don’t know is this: that Texan was ironically well known to us as a frequent White House “caller” who demanded to see the president. I’d dealt with him before, but that day he rose above and beyond the call of any civilian’s duty.