We rolled along like that for a couple of minutes before the president wanted to know: “Has he arrived?”
I got on the radio again, was told, “Not yet,” and related that to the president. Decidedly not pleased, he now said, “Joe, stop the motorcade.”
I looked back at him and thought, This is really going to be interesting. I got on my radio and repeated his order, “Stop the motorcade.”
For the Japanese, who don’t deal with change well even in minimal things, this was major. By coincidence, when I told the lead car to stop the motorcade, we were within a block of the New Otani Hotel, where some of the G-7 leaders, their staffs, and the press were staying. The Japanese police, knowing that the hotel had been secured for the summit and that the parking lot was sealed off, made a very good decision to pull the entire motorcade into the parking lot. As we rolled to a halt, agents in the follow-up car jumped out and surrounded the limousine. And there we sat.
Turning around to tell the president that we would both remain in the car, I spotted the inimitable Helen Thomas—doyenne of the White House correspondents—getting out of a press van and sprinting toward the limousine. She didn’t get very far before agents escorted her back to the van. But stopping a motorcade like this was unprecedented, and she, along with the other reporters, clearly thought something was very wrong. The obvious assumption was that the president was involved in a medical emergency. The doctor was also out of his car and coming toward us. I got a message to him that there was nothing to worry about, then told the shift leader, “Keep everybody in the cars. Don’t let anybody out.”
Locking down the press didn’t please them, and they quickly turned hostile. Thomas demanded to know what was going on and refused to understand why she couldn’t get out of the van to find out for herself. If the president was not well, she knew, this was a major story. And she wasn’t alone in thinking that. None of the media appreciated the Secret Service telling them they had to stay put, but they did stay put because they didn’t have a choice, and so did the rest of the motorcade.
The Japanese police were still blocking traffic through most of Tokyo, but there was nothing I could do about that. I was too busy on the radio trying to find out where the Mitterand motorcade was.
The president was soon getting anxious, too, asking repeatedly, “What’s going on?”
When I finally had an answer for him it was “Mitterand hasn’t even left his hotel.”
The president mumbled something under his breath, then said, “Let’s go.”
I gave the order to load back up, and off we went to the Akasaka Palace.
There is a regular routine for the arrival of the presidential limousine. The supervisor sitting in the front right seat stays in the car with the president until the agents in the follow-up secure the area and surround the limousine. There’s no rush to get the president out of the car. Even on those occasions when we pulled into a protected site—such as an underground garage or one of those specially constructed tents that we use to mask an arrival site—I would never get out of the car myself until everybody else was ready. Only after I made certain that everybody was in place would I open the door to let the president out.
Now, at the palace, when I opened the car, Jim Kuhn was waiting for us. He had worked for Henkel as part of his advance team until 1985, when the president appointed him to be his aide. A really good guy, with a terrific sense of humor, Jim handled all of the president’s personal business. By arrangement with the Japanese, only the American president and the French president were permitted to have an agent with them upstairs. But the Japanese also agreed to allow Jim to go upstairs, too. So Jim and I accompanied the president to the room where the plenary session was taking place. We stayed with him as he walked around the big conference table shaking hands with the other leaders. Everyone was there except Mitterand.
The press pool was in the room taping the arrivals. President Reagan took his place and sat down, and I positioned myself immediately behind him, intent on staying there until the press left. The president began reading some documents. A few minutes later, Mitterand made his grand entrance. He, too, walked around the conference table saying hello to the other leaders, each of whom stood up to greet him—except Ronald Reagan. The president kept his eyes glued to the papers he was reading until Mitterand walked up to him and extended his hand. The president suddenly looked up, as if he’d been surprised, said, “Oh,” but stayed seated while he shook Mitterand’s hand. I’m sure Mitterand got the message. Jim and I certainly did.
The press left, Jim and I left, and the doors were closed. A small detail of Japanese police, together with the French security officer who’d accompanied Mitterand, were already in the anteroom when Jim and I got there. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, the doors to the conference room flew open, and Mitterand came through on his way to the bathroom. Instantly, everyone in the anteroom jumped to their feet, except Jim and me. We just sat there as Mitterand walked past. He looked at us, and so did the French security guy hurrying after him.
We were amused by our boyish sense of “follow-the-leader,” but the question now became, What are we going to do when Mitterand comes back? I was the one who said, “We need to be consistent. If we stand now, we give in.”
So Jim and I agreed we would just sit there. And sure enough, a few moments later, when Mitterand headed back into the conference room, everyone else in the anteroom jumped to his feet, except for us. That earned us a very unfriendly glare from the French president.
When the meeting ended, Jim climbed into the limousine with the president for the trip to the New Otani, where there was a luncheon. As the motorcade moved through Tokyo, Jim and I told the president what we’d done. Or, more correctly, what we hadn’t done.
“In fact,” Jim admitted, “it happened not once but twice. And you didn’t stand up either.”
His hearty laugh and the twinkle in his eyes was the president’s way of saying, “Way to go, fellas.”
Reagan had been in that morning meeting for several hours and hadn’t gone to the men’s room, and I knew that once he got into the luncheon, neither of us would have a chance for another several hours. So just before we arrived at the hotel, I asked the president if he wanted to make a stop. He said he did, and I radioed ahead. This time we arrived last, because the Japanese were controlling all the motorcades from the palace and Mitterand had no control over when he showed up.
The first thing I spotted when we pulled up to the front door were hundreds of Japanese police, in plainclothes, all over the place. It was too many people, and we couldn’t be sure who they all were. Someone could have gotten into the middle of this group and the Japanese police might not know them either. The area was too crowded, and it wasn’t supposed to be like that. So I asked the president to wait in the car until I got out and looked around. In front of me was a sea of black-haired men in dark blue suits. I waited several seconds before opening the president’s door. He was also surprised to see so many people at the arrival site and wanted to know, “Are these all police?”
I said, “Yes, sir, they are.”
He whispered in my ear, “If a firecracker goes off, we’re dead.”
We stepped inside the hotel, and an agent steered us to the men’s room, just off to the side of the lobby. It was already secured. Normally, I would go in with him to assure myself that it was empty, then step out. But this time, I also had to use the bathroom. He walked up to the urinal, and I started thinking to myself, What do I do now? Once he was ready, he wouldn’t look to see where I was; he’d wash his hands, assume I was with him, and leave. So I went up to him at the urinal and said, “Mr. President, would you do me a favor?”
He turned to me with a startled look, as if to say, What could you possibly want me to do at this moment? “Joe?”
I said, “Would you please wait for me?”
His face lit up. “Oh … sure.”
It doesn’t sound like much, but I don’t know how many othe
r presidents would have reacted the same way. He was a considerate man, and in his mind, just because he was president of the United States, that didn’t mean he couldn’t wait a few seconds for another guy and even laugh about it.
Throughout those years with him, I collected dozens of photographs of us together. But the one I would have loved to have is one from the back, of the two of us, standing there in that men’s room.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE TWO OF THEM
While he was the most powerful man in the world, they were the most visible couple in the world.
Nancy Reagan was a class act.
Some people at the White House feared her, and behind her back they chided her concerns about the president, belittling them with the expression, “mommy watch.” I think it might have been coined by the then chief of staff, Don Regan, who did not get along with Mrs. Reagan. Other books have described his feelings about her and her feelings about him, but I don’t know what went on between them. I do know, however, that Don Regan wasn’t particularly well liked by many people at the White House.
Personally, I found the term “mommy watch” distasteful. Yes, she was very protective of her husband. Yes, she was profoundly loyal to him. And yes, she was deeply involved in everything that he did. But her concern for his safety is an understandable reaction to the fact that her husband had been shot and nearly killed. I never found her unreasonable, never found her intimidating, and never saw her show her temper. In fact, the Nancy Reagan I got to know was a warm, considerate person, exactly like her husband.
Michael Deaver later wrote that the secret to dealing with Mrs. Reagan was “Treat her like a human being, and most important, tell the truth.”
It never dawned on me that there was any other way. In my dealings with her she was always accommodating, easy to get along with, and always a lady. There were stories in the press describing her as extremely difficult, and perhaps with some people she was, but I never saw that. Whenever she expressed herself to me, particularly about the president’s safety, her views were reasonable. She would tell me what she wanted—as when she wanted her husband to wear the armored vest—and it was usually in line with my own thinking.
President Reagan never liked wearing the vest—no president does—because it’s heavy, cumbersome, and uncomfortable. Had he been wearing it when John Hinckley shot him, it might not have prevented his injuries because of the way the vest wraps around the chest and where the bullet hit him. But there were times when we’d insist on it, and there were times when she’d insist on it, and he’d always comply. He would complain about it and say, “I hate this,” but he would be complaining while he was taking off his shirt. It wasn’t as if he was asked to wear it at every event. I think we were fairly judicious in our requests, and over the course of four years it might have happened only a dozen times. And I certainly couldn’t blame him for not liking it, because I hated it, too. Agents on the detail were required to wear the vest every time we left the White House with the president. It’s made of Kevlar and weighs around four pounds, although after a few hours on a hot day it feels more like a hundred pounds.
His armored coat was another matter. When I first came onto the detail, the president was wearing a London Fog trench coat that had an armored lining. It didn’t fit him well and didn’t look very presidential. None of us liked it, including Mrs. Reagan. But he kept it and wore it because it did the job. I finally suggested that the Secret Service buy him a cashmere topcoat, and Mrs. Reagan liked that idea. So I went to a very fine men’s store in Washington, bought one off the rack—44 long—and arranged with the manager to have his tailor sew in the armored lining that we provided. When it was ready, I brought the store manager and his tailor to the White House, and upstairs into the private residence, for a fitting. While the tailor was making his chalk marks, I glanced toward the president’s closet and noticed his suits—about fifteen of them—hanging there, each of them carefully separated by an inch or two. The president saw what I was looking at and proudly explained that he would select a different suit every day, going right down the line until he got to the end, and then he would start at the beginning all over again. He explained, “I wear them in order, and the only time I go out of order is when I need a suit for a big event and a brown suit is up. I skip the brown suit and go to the next one, a blue or a black suit.”
A few of the suits were specially made slightly large to wear over the armored vest, but all of his clothes were beautiful. He looked really great in this coat, which was heavy, but he was strong enough to handle it, and that’s the coat he wore to the inaugural in 1985. The one thing I will say that struck me odd about his dress sense was that President Reagan never wore an undershirt. But then, a lot of men don’t. Maybe it’s a California thing. Years later I read stories about him never updating his wardrobe, hoarding clothes until they were threadbare. If he did, none of them were hanging in that closet that night. Nor did he ever wear them while I was around. He had beautifully tailored clothes and looked good in everything, even a T-shirt and jeans.
I also read somewhere that he was a superstitious man. Bill Henkel told me that he always carried a lucky charm, but I never saw it. Some people say that he knocked on wood—I guess sometimes he might have—and that he made a habit of tossing salt over his shoulder. But I never saw that either. They also say that he never walked under ladders, which I guess is true.
Over those years, too, you couldn’t help but read criticism in the press about Mrs. Reagan. She was a better dresser than he was, but as he was admired for it, there were times when she was criticized for it. Early on in the first administration, Mrs. Reagan was labeled by some factions in the media as little more than a California socialite whose main interests were designer clothes and the adoration of her husband. Well into the second administration they were still writing about “the gaze”—that special look she always had whenever she watched her husband make a speech—and still chastising her for borrowing gowns from designer friends. Maybe criticism just goes along with the role. Mrs. Reagan herself has since become very philosophical about it. More than sixteen years after leaving the White House, she told Katie Couric on NBC’s Today show, “I’d been first lady of California for eight years and I thought well, surely, you know, I’ve seen it. The, ‘it’ can’t get any worse than this, but it did and it does. I mean, you’re really, really in a fishbowl.”
Throughout her years in that fishbowl, there were reports in the media that her poll numbers—her popularity in the country—were never anywhere near as high as Jackie Kennedy’s, and were, in fact, among the lowest of any modern first lady. And yet, for three of those eight years, Nancy Reagan was voted the most admired woman in America.
First ladies have their own Secret Service detail, and that’s a tough assignment. It’s not as high profile as the president’s, but then there are different considerations. For instance, the probability of assassination is lower whereas the probability of some kind of kidnapping is higher. Being on a smaller detail means that agents get closer to their protectee. It concerned me as a supervisor that some agents had a tendency to get too close. The same problem can work in reverse, too, that spouses can get attached to their agents.
One of Mrs. Reagan’s junior agents ingratiated himself to her by doing little favors, helping her when he wasn’t expected to help, paying attention to her concerns when they really weren’t any concern of the Secret Service. There’s a film called Guarding Tess that describes the bond between a former first lady and her agents pretty well. Keeping professional distance is not always easy, and lots of agents work hard to maintain that distance. It’s important for agents to understand the concept and to accept the fact that the protectee is not their friend. Some agents want to get close and think it is in their best interest as a way to progress professionally. It’s a no-win situation for the agent in question, and a no-win situation for the other agents, because it creates an unhealthy work atmosphere.
This junio
r agent never did anything that might be labeled inappropriate for a friend to do, but he wasn’t the first lady’s friend, he was there to protect her. I spent the better part of a year and a half trying to transfer him. It wasn’t easy. The first lady didn’t want him to leave. The closer he got to her, the more inclined she was to say, I like him, I’ve been with him long enough that he knows how I like to do things and I don’t want to break in someone else. So I’d arrange to get him moved to another assignment, he’d drop a hint to her that he might be transferred, she’d express her concern about his leaving, and he’d stay. When I eventually moved him away, it didn’t please either one of them, but it was the right thing to do.
The job of first lady is a full-time occupation, and Mrs. Reagan worked very hard at that job. From her office in the East Wing, she launched and managed her Just Say No campaign against drug abuse in young people, which took her to sixty-five cities in thirty-three states. In 1985 she hosted a conference at the White House for first ladies from seventeen nations to help focus their attention on drug and alcohol abuse problems. She worked to support the Foster Grandparent Program, stressed education through the Nancy Reagan Foundation, and introduced young performers to the American public through a public television series In Performance at the White House.
Unlike some modern first ladies, Mrs. Reagan didn’t do a lot of personal things like shopping. But even if she had wanted to, Mrs. Reagan couldn’t shop often because she was so recognizable. In theory, taking the first lady out of the White House on her own is a surveillance job. But on those few occasions when I was aware that Mrs. Reagan went out for an afternoon like that, it usually turned into more than anyone had bargained for because she would invariably attract a huge crowd.
Although we never had this problem with her, one of the difficulties of shopping with a protectee is deciding what happens with the shopping bags. Agents don’t carry packages. They aren’t there for that purpose and can’t do their work if their arms are encumbered. Not all protectees understand this issue. I remember there were concerns when we started protecting Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. We worried that he might treat us like servants, and get out of the car and leave his bags for us to carry. But Rockefeller never did that. He carried his own bags and never expected us to carry anything. Not every protectee was as considerate. Several would leave their bags for us, and our response was just to walk away, leaving the protectee to find a staff guy to carry them.
Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service Page 7