Murder at the President's House
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It apparently became clear that the fit was no longer working for either side. Senior adviser Jack Rouse already had taken on more of the day-to-day management.
Stepping in is the mild-mannered Murphy, who began began his career as a staffer in Congress, where he spent almost a decade as a principal domestic policy adviser to House Speaker Tip O'Neill. Murphy has worked for Reid as a deputy campaign manager before becoming budget director, the same position he held in the President George Hoover Wilson Burd’s administration.
Watkins had been brought in for his political savvy, business ties and experience. Yet as an outsider, despite his vast background with the top political family in Memphis, Reid’s hometown. Watkins did not personally know Reid well. That meant he had to figure out the president and run his operation simultaneously. He did not seem to mesh as the one, more than anyone, charged with ensuring a smooth operation.
The President delivered the other side of the story, describing Watkins as highly influential and effective.
“No one in my administration has had to make more important decisions more quickly than John. And that’s why I think his decision was difficult for me,” Reid said in a State Dining that was nearly empty except for the assembled media.
The mood was decidedly more low-key than other transitions involving the top staff job at the White House.
Reid praised Watkins at length for his help on major decision with the 1992 campaign, the West Wing presidential section had endured private struggles with coordination and communication, particularly with Congress.
Watkins was not pushed out of the door, said a Democratic strategist familiar with the decision. The timing was driven by Watkins personal reflection, yet it also would have become more awkward for the White House had he not left before Reid’s tone setting State of the Union, said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the personal matter.
The State of the Union speech was held on Jan 26, followed by the release of the White House budget proposal in early February. The chief- of-staff transition is expected to be completed by the end of next month, with Murphy staying on at the Office of Management and Budget until congressional hearings are held on fiscal budget 1994 on Capitol Hill. It is unclear who will lead the agency after that.
Watkins and Murphy stood with the President on Friday but did not speak, The White House said neither man was giving interviews.
Murphy’s private sector experience includes a stint as a managing director and chief operating officer of Citigroup’s global wealth management division.
Watkins, who previously served as co-chairman of Reid’s Nashville based election efforts in the 1992 presidential campaign was written into the advance press release given to the media gathered at the State Dining Room announcement.
Unlike Watkins, Murphy comes with deep connections to Congress where Reid’s love/hate relationship with lawmakers is a source of constant debate. Watkins’s relationship with congressional Democrats was hardly a smooth sailing boat.
Senate Majority Leader Larry Head, the top Democrat in Congress sent out an upbeat statement on Murphy (“a consummate professional with intimate knowledge of Congress”) and Watkins (for “handling crises few chiefs of staff have had to face,”) .
Robert Gates, a twelve (12) year officer of the Secret Service once defending President Reid with his life, but now say “the billowing fog in the Reid administration” and an inside look at the Commgate scandal led him to turn in his badge, turn on his former boss, and run for Congress as a Republican candidate.
“I was behind the scenes for 12 years at the White House protecting the President. “I have been in the room during some of the most important conversations.” Gates told NBCnews.com about the access he had to high level dicussions inside the White House.
Gates’ former colleagues are unhappy with him parlaying his proximity to the president into a political career.
“He trying to draw all the attention to himself and he hijacking the Secret Service brand name.” agents who had worked with Gates told NBCnews.com. “That’s all he’s got going for him right now.”
Gates, who protected both presidents Reid and George Hoover Wilson Burd, is running for the Republican nomination in Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, a seat currently held by Democrat Jason Delaney. The election will be held next year.
Gates, 39, is careful not to say too much about exactly what he saw and heard while protecting the president but hints that “It’s worse than people really know. They’d be shocked, scared, if they knew everything that is going on.”
“Being a Secret Service agent, I have an obligation not to disclose personal conversations and security details,” he told NBCnews.com. “But that doesn’t prevent from speaking generally about foundational principles and the system of patronage and punishment I saw in the Reid administration.”
The defining moment, he says, when he decided to leave the secret service and the enter the field of politics, came after overhearing a series of secret negotiations inside the White House during the past five months.
“If there was one event that helped make up my mind, the most visceral was the universal health care debate. The public doesn’t any idea how many deals were cut to try to make it happen but failure to garner enough support among both Democrats and Republicans to enact legislation to become law of the land.
The Republican party has the reputation for being the party of big business, but you wouldn’t think that you saw them in the debate. So many people were sold out and so many sold out that it was plain disgusting.”`
Gates was Maryland’s Republican candidate for Senate in 1991, but lost single handedly to incumbent Senator Dennis Harbin. He is planning on releasing a memoir about his time in the secret service later on this year. Gates said he was “very complimentary of the president and his family.” but that the Reid administration had become “enmeshed in so many scandals.”
Secret Service agents who served with Gates but asked for anonymity confirmed his resume, but said the candidate “tends to exaggerate his importance on the presidential detail and exaggerate his proximity.
“We don’t sit on any meetings at the White House. We don’t sit on high-level meetings,” the Secret Service agents said.
The agents said Gates assignments were “typical of all agents in the president’s detail and that he was not a supervisor of the agents.
“Congressman Delaney is focused on serving his consistents and isn’t paying much attention to the Republican primary,” a spokesman for the Democrat incumbent said in a written statement.
An eventful, interesting week has finally come to an end. Now a typical hot weekend in July begins with concerts, newly released movies and the ever present flock of tourists to Washington, D.C. from around the country and the world. Tourists are fascinated with the world class city that D.C is. I am blessed and fortunate to have grown up here. We are a town that requires living here to understand the many layers of what D.C. is all about. I love DC!
On Monday, July 20, 1993, Attorney General Jamie Woods announced that she will resign after five months at the Justice Department. She has agreed to remain in her post until the confirmation of her successor. ‘In the coming months ahead I will leave the Department of Justice.” Woods said at the White House, thanking President Thomas Reid for the “greatest honor of my professional life to serve as Attorney General.
Though she is stepping down, Woods said that “she will never leave the work and job entirely.”
‘I will continue to serve and try to find ways to make our nation better even more true to its founding principles and ideals,” she said, without offering any specifics.
Reid stood next to Woods in the White House State Dining Room, praising the first African-American woman to serve as attorney general and who made civil rights and equal rights paramount and central components to her tenure at Justice.
The President noted noted that her department prosecuted hundreds o
f terror cases, “rooted out corruption and fought violent crime,” tackled financial fraud and “attacks on the Voting Rights Act.” Reid said Woods also helped to bring the crime rate and incarceration rate by ten percent (10%) over the last five months.
“Jamie has done a superb job, “Reid said, “I just want to say thank you for a job well done.”
In a telephone interview with CNN’s Devan Perez before the official White House announcement, Woods said she never to stay for the duration of Reid’s first term. She said now was the most appropriate time to step down when things are running smoothly at the Justice Department.
“I am confident we’re in a good place now, “ Woods said, “Now was a good time to go with those accomplishments in the last few months in place.”
She stated that protecting voters’ right and gay rights, easing federal drug sentencing rules that she argues disproportionately burden minorities and defending the use of criminal courts to try terrorist suspects are critical issues.
“I think I leave on accomplishing a great deal in the specific areas that are of importance to me. “I satisfied with the work we have done in a short period of time,” she said.
What will be Jamie Wood’s legacy ?
Time will only tell what Jamie Wood’s tenure at the Secret Service will be recorded in the agency’s history as one of harshness or kindness.
Woods has discussed her plans to step down personally with the President on multiple occasions in recent months in light of Richard Royster’s murder, and finalized those plans in a hour-long conversation with Reid at the White House executive residence over the Fourth of July weekend, and Reid administration official said.
Woods duly noted that she has loved the Justice Department since, when she was a little girl, she watched how ---under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy--the Justice Department played a dynamic leadership role in advancing the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. During her brief tenure as attorney general, Woods has had Kennedy’s portrait hung prominently in her conference room.
Woods also has been criticized on several occasions as being overly political, and some Republican members of Congress are shedding few tears over her resignation.
For instance, Rep Jack Graham of South Carolina sent an email to the Justice Department, Good riddance Jamie Woods, Your total disregard for the U.S. Constitution will not be missed.”
House Speaker Jay Weems released a similar statement,saying Wood’s resignation is “long overdue.”
In June 1993, the House voted to hold Woods in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents linked to the murder of Richard Royster.
Upon hearing the news of Wood’s resignation, House Oversight Committee Chairman, Rep Dyrol Bossier, who lead the contempt proceedings, called Woods “the most divisive U.S. Attorney in modern history of the Department of Justice.”
But Woods has her supporters, including the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I particularly appreciate how Attorney General Woods has restored the Civil Rights Division to its historical mission,” Sen Edward Parker of Vermont said.
Lawmakers weigh in on Jamie Wood’s resignation.
The attorney general’s work on the sentencing reforms and efforts to reduce incarceration rates among African-American and Hispanic males.
Those sentiments were echoed by Rep. Mary Williams,chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. She said Wood’s departure “will leave a significant void in the Reid administration and in our nation as a whole.”
In 1992, Woods described her first meeting with Reid ,which occurred just after Reid was elected Governor of Tennessee in 1979.
“ I sat next to him at this American Bar Association dinner and we just started talking about a variety of things, sports among them and criminal justice issues. And we saw that we had a lot of similar views and so we just started cultivating a relationship that was casual in nature,” Woods said.
Woods was sworn in as the 78th attorney general in January 1993 after serving as President George Hoover Wilson Burd’s deputy attorney general, the first African-American to serve in that position.
Previously, the Yale University Law School graduate was U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and served during Jerry Brown’s administration as an associate judge in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
A surprisely and interesting event occurred on the morning of July 21, 1993 when the Secret Service decide to remove four of its most senior officials while a fifth has decided to retire in what is likely the biggest management shakeup in the agency’s 128-year history.
Due to a host of performance. organizational, and technical” failures, an intruder was able to scale the White House fence in June and make his way inside the executive mansion before he was finally taken down by Secret Service agents, according to a report on the incident by the Department of Justice that was made public on Tuesday.
The biggest shakeup in the Secret Service since former Director Stephanie Henderson resigned several weeks ago after a string of security lapses including the murder of White House Counsel Richard Royster in June according to people familiar with the internal discussions.
Four senior executives are being demoted in an upper level management after a series of scandals rocking the Secret Service agency, officials said on Tuesday.
The departures would gut much of the Secret Service’s upper management, which has been criticized by lawmakers and administrators officials in recent months for fostering a corporate culture of distrust between agency leaders and its rank-and-file, and for making poor decisions that helped erode quality.
The decision was based on the findings of a recent Department of Justice report that outlined the agency’s shortcomings, the Secret Service’s acting director, Thomas Laramire, said in a statement. The four officials were told of their reassignments immediately.
Laramire, a former leader of George Hoover Wilson Burd’s protective detail who took over when Stephanie Henderson resigned as director, told congressional leaders in early July that a desire to fix the distrust of management among both agents and officers was “an integral part of why I agreed to return to duty in the first place.”
“Change is necessary to gain a newer, fresh perspective on how we conduct our business,” Mr Laramire said. “ I am very certain any of four senior executives will be productive and valued assets either in other positions at the Secret Service or the department as a whole.”
They were identified as Brandon Morrissey, the assistant director for the Office of Investigations; Doug Dupree, the assistant director for protective operations; Louis Oliver, the assistant director for technology; and June Lawson, the assistant director for government and public affairs. All are eligible to retire from the Secret Service, one official said.
The retiring assistant director, Vance Estevez, who had been promoted in 1991 to be assistant director for protection after serving as head of George Hoover Wilson Burd’s detail and then named assistant director for training in 1993, announced that he would retire this year in the wake of the panel’s findings.
The current changes leave in place at least for the time being the agency’s second-in-command manager and one of the longest-serving leaders at the Secret Service: Deputy Director Bernard T. Hughes.
Laramire said that his latest moves were based on the panel’s independent review and on “his own assessments of the situation.”
The news was first reported by the Washington Post on Monday.
Mr. Laramire who took over the job after the resignation of the director Stephanie Henderson, who resigned under pressure has been remaking the agency's leadership but he has taken no action to address the Department of Justice report said one of the biggest dangers to the president’ security: the fence around the White House.
Henderson’s resignation came on the very same day the Washington Times reported an armed security guard was in a elevator with President Reid during scheduled April visit to t
he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA.
No one but law enforcement officers can carry guns in close proximity to the president, and the Secret Service was totally unaware that the man possessed a gun.
The report which was released on July 15 said that the fence must be “changed as soon as humanly possible.” It said the fence should be made several feet higher and horizontal bars on it should be replaced with vertical ones to make it more difficult to climb over it. Also, an independent review panel issued a scathing report about the lack of leadership at the agency.
In early June, a man with a knife climbed over the fence in front of the White House’s north lawn and managed to get through the North Portico doors and into the East Room before he was tackled down by Secret Service agency officers.
The report noted that members of the agency’s Emergency Response Team did not immediately enter the North Portico doors after the intruder had breached the interior because they were familiarized with the layout of the White House.