by Crisis of Character- A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience
How could I ever master that? My dyslexia and ADD were things I couldn’t keep secret for long, I knew. I worried that failing my initial Tours testing and training (if I ever got that far) might reveal my learning disabilities to other placements.
But Genny never gave up on me or let me give up on myself. She was my savior. Each day when I came home, she grilled me on what I needed to know. Fortunately for me, the test was oral. The final test was two hours of stress and pain but simple, and it reflected whether you could do the job. You’d give a tour to the other White House Tours officers, answer their questions as if they were expert visitors, and if you did it right, you passed. Quite the novel idea: If you could do the job, then you could do the job.
That being said… I failed the Tours test more than once. Things grew tense but the guys could tell I was a people person and how much I wanted this, so they gave me another chance at passing their very high standards. They didn’t want me to fail, but they were not about to compromise the Tours’ mission either. To them it was about preserving American history; the White House depended on it. With each test tour and practice with Genny, I found that she had engrained herself into every detail of the White House. When I saw whom I was giving the tour to, it was as if I were giving the tour to half a dozen Gennys.
That helped to keep my nerves from pouring out of my stomach and having to replace yards of carpet—particularly historic White House carpet. I have a strong constitution but not a strong stomach. Suddenly everything clicked. It seemed that as soon as the tour started, I blinked, opened my eyes, and we were at its merciful end. I had the job. Finally I had largely escaped from the Oval Office, departing my full-time duties there in autumn 1997. My American dream was evolving. I looked forward to my new normal.
Around Christmastime 1996, I was officially transferred to Tours. Such a grand feeling. The White House staff outdid itself just as it did for all major events: the White House Easter Egg Roll, New Year’s, Thanksgiving, Independence Day. Its members never slept. They knew how important they were to the White House and how important the White House was to the nation. For me, the Christmas celebration was almost as giant a cause for celebration as it was when I made Tours. I often found myself standing in front of a window looking out on D.C., the snow falling on the park, seeing our booths covered in snow and the “booth creatures” and marveling at how lucky I was to be one of them, an officer of the Uniformed Division and the U.S. Secret Service, and how lucky I was to be here at Tours. And by the way, with a Byrne baby in the works, the incredible amount of overtime that came with the holidays was very welcome.
Oh, yes, sometimes it was stressful. A simple mix-up of words can set dominos into motion that lead to front-page headlines and national embarrassments, but I wanted to be back under the radar. I readied myself for a very big tour, escorting the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). I was honored that management selected me. As I left the break room, a UD Tours friend of mine warned me not to screw up, but actually he ensured that I would.
Above the fireplace in the State Dining Room on a mantel is a quotation cut in marble, a prayer from John Adams after he had spent his first night in the Executive Mansion. During the NAACP prayer I recited the prayer aloud from memory—just as I had to hundreds of groups. Only this time it came out: “I Pray Heaven to Bestow the Best of Blessing on this house, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but Honest and White Men ever rule under this roof!”
One of the NAACP members leaned over to me. “Does it really say ‘white men’ in the White House prayer?”
I stopped the tour. Red-faced, I asked if I had indeed made the mistake. I had. I told them how mortified I was and then explained the story of how a friend had tried to trip me with his joke and how I had actually tripped—and that the term I replaced was “wise men.” I stopped breathing, waiting for their response. I could see an avalanche of user-friendly sensitivity training hurtling our way. This was the blue-glove incident on steroids.
I didn’t laugh, but thank God they did. Imagine the New York Times headline: “Racist Secret Service Guard Insults NAACP Delegation” or “Are All UD Officers Racists?” The big, historic wooden door of the White House would hit Officer Gary Byrne on his way out. Old “friends” would distance themselves from me. The agency would paint me as a bad apple they had promptly kicked out of the barrel.
Fortunately, the NAACP members had a great time and thanked me for my tour; I guess they had their own workplace humor. No “ado” was made of it, although I’d seen much ado made over smaller things. I get goose bumps just thinking of it.
I had seen the NAACP when I had been posted outside the Oval Office. The president, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other NAACP officials entered the hallway. The various reverends decided we should all pray together, and before I could weasel away, the next thing I knew we were all holding hands and bowing our heads. Was I supposed to bow my head or stay alert, on guard? An agent too far away to get suckered in snickered at me and later said he knew I’d never stop getting crap for it.
“Dear Lord…”
While at Tours, I got a call from a friend at my home from his home phone. “The Oval Office logbook is new, Gary. Just a heads-up, Ken Starr’s investigation subpoenaed the old logbook,” he said.
We talked about it for a while. “Thanks for the heads-up,” I told him and we knew what we were in for.
We were screwed.
Maybe, just maybe, everything would go away and leave us alone. But the Clintons couldn’t help themselves. They couldn’t keep their hands out of the cookie jar. Despite having such a great man as Leon Panetta as his chief of staff, President Clinton insisted on having outside unofficial dealings with the shadowy political figure and pollster Dick Morris, whom you now see peddling retirement plans on TV infomercials. After the White House wound down for the day, I and other UD officers on the late night rotation would occasionally allow Morris, a close friend of Hillary, in for unofficial policy meetings. It placed the Secret Service in yet another delicate position.
Morris was essentially a Republican (he’d worked for GOP Senate leader Trent Lott). The Clintons snuck him in by night—never by day when Panetta was there. We didn’t quite comprehend that Hillary was undermining Panetta, and we certainly couldn’t insert ourselves into these mysterious visits to sort out their true meaning. Morris (the Clintons called him Charlie to hide his visits), Bill, and Hillary met frequently, mostly in the Executive Residence, though once Bill and Morris met alone in the Oval Office. It all translated into Dick Morris’s functioning as President Clinton’s shadow chief of staff, blindsiding Leon Panetta on issues Panetta thought had previously been decided. “Over the course of the first nine months of 1995, no single person had more power over the president,” George Stephanopoulos later concluded of Morris.*
Hillary could not readily intrude on her husband’s official meetings with Panetta, but she could easily participate at these intimate, secret sessions with Morris. Her true power was of the night—not the daylight. Increasing Morris’s power meant increasing her power.
But these hush-hush meetings weren’t so much about governing as they were about branding and politics and polling—and Dick Morris and Hillary Clinton were masters at that game. I found confirmation of it all in Leon Panetta’s autobiography, Worthy Fights:
Unbeknownst to me, Clinton had been secretly reaching out [to political advisor] Dick Morris, in an attempt to take stock of the nation’s politics. Clinton surely sensed I didn’t like Morris—he was right about that—so even though Morris started doing polling on the very issues the White House staff was working on, Clinton didn’t share the results, or even the facts of the polls with me.…
It was actually Hillary Clinton who had asked Morris… to resume working for the president. The Clintons admired Morris [who] openly disdained the substance of policy. He was about winning.*
So the Clintons were sneaking around the able
st assistant they ever had, Leon Panetta. Then again, President Clinton was good at sneaking.
While at Tours I still felt I needed to put an even greater distance between myself and the debacle the presidency had become. By now I had lost my ability to provide these professional scandal makers with any benefit of the doubt. Eleanor Mondale and Monica Lewinsky could not satiate the president’s horndog sexual desires. There were many others. I saw plenty of awkward run-ins and drama with other officers and staff. President Clinton had difficulty managing where he saw his many mistresses, whether it was at the White House or on the road. It baffled the Uniformed Division as to how he could manage all these women without any of them realizing there were so many others. We wondered how he got any work done and joked that he would have been better at running a brothel in a red-light district than the White House.
And why didn’t the president’s staff and supporters believe Paula Jones’s allegations of sexual harassment? Why did they take the president at his word about his other sexual scandals when they knew he was a cheater? But his luck was bound to run out. He had lit too many fuses, and I knew that at least one was sure to explode in his face. The Clintons had attained the White House by manufacturing an image of being bright, shining stars who cared deeply for the little guy. The truth is they wallowed in mud and were willing to drag numerous little people with them to retain power.
Over the radio around dusk, December 6, 1997, I heard that Monica was at the Northwest Gate. I shook my head. “Here we go,” I told myself. The president was having a private session at the White House.
Monica visited on the pretense of seeing Betty Currie to have Betty convey a number of Christmas presents to the president. By this time every single person in the White House, except perhaps the First Lady, knew the deal between Monica and the president. The Northwest Gate officer, a friend of mine, wouldn’t let her in. Betty had instructed them to delay her entrance. Everyone had already heard of my awkward run-in with Eleanor Mondale in full display with the president in the Map Room—and the Library Room. We knew the score.
“The president is still with another appointment”—or something to that effect was what Betty informed the Northwest Gate officer. Normally, if someone was scheduled to see the president and he was running late (a pretty normal occurrence), they’d be let in to wait in the West Wing Lobby.
But the White House didn’t employ Monica at this point. I wasn’t involved in her being “transferred” to the Pentagon in July 1996 or swept under the rug by her “mentor,” but if I could have dragged or kicked her off the premises, I would have. By now, Betty and the gate officer knew enough not to let Monica on the White House grounds at all. She could stay in the security booth, but she was not allowed beyond that. She was left standing.
Still the president signaled to her that she was welcome, and she visited by scheduling “appointments” with Betty. She would have been welcome that night except for the president’s conflicting “engagement.” Somehow—whether through the president’s top-secret military staff or through trusted employees—Monica had remained in contact with the president and Betty.
It was only around five o’clock on a weekday. A normal person would assume the president would still be working, but it wasn’t so.
I don’t know how Betty felt about it, but the president put her in a hell of a jam. The Northwest officer’s initiative was part smart decision and part unofficial protocol quietly backed by Secret Service upper management; he told Monica she couldn’t enter and had to wait. In our minds, Monica never had a job beyond mere busywork; she hadn’t been a real employee before and had been “transferred” across the Potomac—and everyone knew why. She was only the president’s mistress, as far we were concerned, and we didn’t appreciate being part of the president’s nonsense. Monica, however, still regarded herself quite favorably as the president’s singular mistress. So now she was pissed off. She pressed the officer about the delay and wanted to know why she was left standing in his security booth. He lashed back.
“You have to wait. He’s with his other piece of a–. Wait till he’s finished,” the officer said—or something to the same effect.
That was not the answer she wanted. She became irate when she heard whom the president was with.
“What’s he want with her when he has this?” and she made some gesture to herself.
The officers relayed the story to me after and how incredibly awkward it was for them. UD screens for dangers, but this was a constant hazard of the president’s own making. I kept thinking, Please don’t let her up. Betty, the Northwest Gate officer, and everyone had the right idea. Inevitably the president was going to get his meetings crossed up and there would be a wild domestic dispute. The First Lady was typically either one floor up in the West Wing, in the Executive Mansion, or just walking around.
But that wasn’t the only problem. The president and Betty had a different take. The problem to them wasn’t that they now couldn’t keep his mistresses in line and safely separate. Someone in UD had leaked to one of the mistresses (Monica) that the president was meeting with another mistress.
I received a call from my watch commander. He wanted my opinion about how high this incident would blow. But who could tell in this topsy-turvy world of the Clinton White House? One thing I knew: These Northwest Gate officers were protected by a fear of mutual self-destruction on the part of upper management. Management couldn’t discipline them without formally detailing the issue in writing—and nobody wanted to do that. But that was only half the game. Would the UD and Betty start finger-pointing at each other? Or worse, somehow at me?
Betty Currie wasn’t the real problem. The Northwest Gate officers weren’t the real problem. Monica wasn’t the real problem. The real, the massive, the central problem was Bill Clinton.
That being said, after everyone had simmered down and thought things through, we felt terrible for Betty. I even felt bad for Monica because I knew how powerfully charming President Clinton was. He was the master. That charm can’t be fully understood or described unless you’ve seen it, unless you’ve been in the same room with the man. He’s incredibly endearing. I saw the effect he had on people.
I was glad to have moved off my main posting. Ken Starr turned up the heat. Subpoenas for logbooks and people started flowing like an errant stream.
After just a year at Tours, I put in for a transfer to the Secret Service’s James J. Rowley Training Center (JJRTC).
In 1998, my transfer was quickly approved, much faster than I had any right to expect. No doubt Monica and Bill had something to do with that. I was a thorn in their side. Now I was gone.
My commute was much shorter and I was back in Beltsville, Maryland. I had landed a spot on the security detail for the JJRTC, a 660-acre mix of dense woods, swamps, fence line, interstate highway, dynamic firearms ranges, indoor ranges, and office buildings. We secured the grounds and the facility. This even included taking care of the beaver and poacher problems JJRTC was having, in addition to dealing with any infiltrations, police issues, reporters, panicky people, and the like. It was a great job. I immediately fell in with the team. Much of my stress was gone. Life was simple. No burn bags, no special towels, no seedy interns; just the facility, good people, and Maryland woods. It was just like Air Force Security Police.
The year was 1998. I liked my job immensely, along with the woods, the clean air, and no more colds and office bugs going around. My sinuses cleared up. It was as if I could smell for the first time. I was free from all the stress. I didn’t throw up anymore. I slept better. When I awoke my sheets and pillowcases were no longer drenched in sweat.
I had put in for my real dream, to become a JJRTC firearms instructor. My life was firearms, and what better way to fulfill my dream than by passing on my passion to others? Firearms clicked with who I was. They made sense. It was the one thing I wasn’t just good at, I was extremely good at. I should have been a shoe-in, and I waited for a spot to open up.
; I’d only been at JJRTC a couple of weeks when my dreams of a new—a normal—life vanished as quickly as they had appeared. My calm wasn’t a calm at all: I was in the eye of the biggest storm the presidency had yet witnessed.
It was the night of January 17, 1998, and two supervisors and I had crammed into a Chevy Tahoe for a road trip to a nearby military base, Fort Dix, New Jersey, hoping to obtain some extra ATVs and light vehicles to assist in our patrolling duties.
We had just left the fort’s surplus site after tagging some equipment and were flying 85 mph down the New Jersey Turnpike in our unmarked federal vehicle listening to The Howard Stern Show on the radio. Stern started talking about a media leak website called the Drudge Report. It was a million laughs—until my blood ran cold, and I almost drove off the road. Stern was telling us about a White House intern turned Pentagon intern turned paid White House employee, who had been having an affair with the president. They mentioned oral sex, the Oval Office, and the Secret Service.
The Drudge Report had broken the story of the president’s cheating and lying, his lack of professional integrity, and how he lied on a legal affidavit. Newsweek had the original scoop but didn’t have the guts to publish it. Everyone knew the Drudge Report had credibility.
I knew immediately this was going to be a disaster involving everyone, that it would tear apart the Secret Service—and maybe the nation itself. I knew it would involve many of my friends and me. The public would rip at us the way a dog tears a toy to get at the squeaker. As Howard spoke, I knew that I alone could prove the president had lied on a sworn affidavit and committed an impeachable offense.