From Phoenix, we flew to Los Angeles and helicoptered from the airport to a landing pad on top of the Los Angeles police garage. Our cars were waiting there to take us to the nearby residence. We came in without any problems, and for a few seconds, I even allowed myself to think that maybe we could leave the city without any problems. I was wrong.
The first of two problems came up at the Coliseum. While waiting in the holding room with the pope before he went to the altar, I was told by radio that one of the banks of magnetometers had lost power. As I recall, there were ten mags in a bank, and each bank could handle ten thousand people an hour. Rather than delay the mass, I told the command post—and this was controversial—just keep magging people as if the machines were working. I was sure that no one in the crowd would know that they weren’t operating. If, periodically, officers pulled people out and searched them, the nonworking mags would still be a deterrent. Some UD officers were upset and thought it was a bad decision. But I felt it was a risk we could take because anyone carrying something dangerous would see the metal detectors and not try to get past them.
Interestingly enough, over the ten days of the pope’s tour, putting more than a million people through magnetometers, we only turned up a few knives, some Mace, and a couple of weapons that belonged to off-duty police officers. As far as I know, no one was ever arrested.
Later that evening, we returned to the residence where the pope was going to have supper. Cardinal Roger Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles, escorted the pope and Dziwisz up to the third-floor dining room, but it was empty. There was no staff, so he told the pope to stay there and went to find the waiters. For some reason, we’d taken the staff off the third floor and had assembled them downstairs. I don’t remember why. When Mahony couldn’t locate any waiters or cooks, he went back to the dining room and by this time, the pope and Dziwisz were gone, too. He found them in the kitchen, too hungry to wait, helping themselves.
The second problem was on our way out of Los Angeles. Our agreement with the Vatican was that, upon leaving a city, fifty people of our choosing would be permitted to stand at the base of the airplane’s stairs to shake hands with the pope. It was a photo opportunity that the pope very graciously granted to thank certain people for their help with the visit. We’d have a range of local dignitaries there, such as the U.S. attorney, the chief of police, the mayor, some city councilmen, and sometimes agents with their families. But as we got to the LAPD garage, we found the helicopter landing zone filled with two hundred police officers lined up in formation. I couldn’t believe it, and neither could Tucci, who ran up to me, wanting to know what was going on. I located a senior officer and was about to ask him who these people were when he asked, “Do you mind if I work the pope here?”
“To work the pope” meant to be at his shoulder on a rope line. I looked at him and said, “You’ve got to be out of your mind. It’s out of the question. What is this?”
The pope was still in the car, and a now nervous Father Tucci was pacing back and forth, mumbling, “We don’t have time for this. Our schedule is too tight. What’s going on?”
The LAPD had decided, on its own, to do a photo op and chose the officers to say good-bye to the pope. Unfortunately for us, the pope had already noticed these people and, in his mind, thought this was supposed to happen. He never ignored anyone, and there was no way now that he would ignore them. Tucci wanted to get through it as fast as possible, so he leaned into the car and told the pope, in Italian, just walk through and touch hands, don’t shake hands. The pope nodded, got out of the car, and quickly moved through the group of officers.
As soon as we could, we got the pope into the helicopter, lifted off, and flew to Los Angeles International, where, according to the rules, only fifty people were waiting at the base of the stairs. He shook those hands, got on the plane and we took off for Monterey. While we were in the air, I received a situation report by radio from the agent at the landing site to say that, among the people waiting to greet the pope, was the mayor of Carmel, Clint Eastwood. I was about to share the information with Tucci, who was also getting situation reports from the arrival site, when he announced that there were three busloads of police officers we had missed in Los Angeles on their way to Monterey to say good-bye to the pope. I was stunned. That’s when he started to laugh and confessed that he was just kidding.
During our stop at the Carmel Mission near Monterey, while the pope was speaking to a couple of hundred people, an agent said that a nun needed to speak to me. I went outside to find ten Carmelite sisters standing behind a rope line. The head of this little group announced, “We would like to sing the Angelus to the pope.”
Having grown up with nuns as teachers, my natural inclination was to help. Dressed as they were, all in white, they were angelic. But I had to inform her that it wasn’t my decision. She gave me one of those looks that I knew all too well, and I promised I’d do my best. I found Lynch and urged him, “Come on, they’re nuns, and the pope will love this.” He didn’t need much convincing and said, “It’s okay with me as long as it’s okay with you.”
The pope believes that the Blessed Mother saved his life after the assassination attempt and prays to her all the time. The Angelus is sung in honor of her. Because I believed it was low risk, I escorted the nuns into a corner of the tent near the car. It was the only time in ten days that I permitted anyone to get that close to the pope without going through a metal detector. I stationed agents near the nuns, and as I brought the pope out to the car, they started singing. He was surprised and turned to them. They sang beautifully. When they finished, he said he wanted to thank them. I walked him to the corner of the tent and he greeted each of the nuns. Later, Lynch said he was surprised I’d allowed that. “You’ve been so tough on this trip.”
I said, “They were Carmelite nuns. If it had been anyone else I would have said no.”
“You’re starting to give in.” He shook his head, “A part of you is still that little Catholic boy in grade school.”
For the fifty-five-minute helicopter ride from Monterey to San Francisco, I was sitting next to the pontiff. Within ten minutes of takeoff, I looked around, and everyone else—Dziwisz, the archbishop of San Francisco, and Chabin—had fallen asleep. Those helicopters have a numbing effect on people because they’re much too loud to have a normal conversation, and they vibrate. Besides that, it was late, and everyone was tired. I fought to stay awake because I didn’t want the pope to see me asleep. But when I glanced at him, he was looking down, lost in his own world, praying the rosary, one bead at a time. I watched him out of the corner of my eye for the entire flight. If he’d wanted to nod off, he could have. Instead, he prayed for the entire trip. I was in awe of the depth of this man’s spirituality.
By the time the pope celebrated mass in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, I was running on sheer adrenaline and a lot of things were getting to be routine. Except those words he repeated to me every night, “Mr. Petro, thank you very much.”
By now, too, I was starting to realize that this extraordinary experience was coming to an end. We rode around Candlestick Park Stadium with tens of thousands of people cheering and screaming—they were even doing the wave—and I remember thinking to myself, You must never forget this moment. I haven’t.
From there we went to Detroit, where the visit was going to end. I’d arranged for my family to be there. For my mother-in-law, Mary Coccia, a devout Catholic who went to church every day, meeting the pope was truly momentous. At each mass, communion was distributed by hundreds of priests, stationed all over each stadium, while the pope gave communion to a hundred people in a special VIP section in front of the altar. At the Silverdome, my family was seated in that VIP section. And there are no words possible to describe the thrill of standing next to the pope as he served communion to my daughter, Michelle. Later, the Church put out a video of the trip to Detroit, and in the sequence showing communion, at the very moment Michelle was receiving the Host, the camera pa
nned over to the pope. It is a moment I cherish.
After the mass, I escorted the pope into the holding room so that he could change. One of the agents brought my family backstage. When we came out, I introduced the pope to them. He looked at Michelle, put his hands around the back of her head, and spoke to her quietly. And there I stood, as such a proud father, watching the little girl I called “Mich-Mich” being blessed by the Holy Father.
There was no doubt, by then, that he knew I was Catholic. But throughout the trip our relationship had been purely professional, based entirely on my position as the Secret Service agent in charge of his protection. He was friendly but never got personal. Except at the very end. As we were walking to the helicopter, he turned to me and said something I will never forget: “Mr. Petro, you have a very beautiful daughter.”
I left him at the base of the steps. We looked at each other. He took my hand between his. And for the final time he said, “Mr. Petro, thank you very much.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE QUAYLES
The Secret Service had never seen a family like the Quayles.
Dan Quayle misspelled the word “potato,” and for many people, that’s what they remember about him. In a very real sense, it defined his vice presidency.
He was visiting a grammar school in New Jersey, agreed to help conduct a spelling lesson, and was handed some printed flash cards by the teacher. Quayle began with a young girl, asking her to spell “president.” Next came a young boy, and the word was “potato.” On Quayle’s flash card, it was spelled “potatoe,” so when the boy wrote “p-o-t-a-t-o” on the blackboard, Quayle looked again at the flash card, decided it must be correct, and had him add an “e.”
More than a half hour passed before anyone, including the press pool covering the event, realized that “potatoe” was misspelled, and it was later still before anyone found out that the flash card itself was wrong. I suppose most people would have made the same mistake. Yet the videotape of the incident was played over and again on news programs around the world.
Throughout the Bush administration, Dan Quayle was ridiculed for making such gaffes and missteps, but the Dan Quayle I saw up close for three years was a different person.
When George H.W. Bush became president, the head of his vice presidential protective division—Hubert Bell—found his team protecting Dan and Marilyn Quayle and three children: Tucker, fourteen, Benjamin, twelve, and Corinne, ten. Normally, a family with kids isn’t a problem.
We’d protected lots of families with children before. But many of them were very young, like Carolyn and John Kennedy Jr., who were tots, and Amy Carter, who was just nine when her father was elected. And many of them were old enough to be considered adults, like the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford children. We didn’t see much of the Reagans’ adult four—Maureen, Michael, Patti, and Ron—although they occasionally visited their parents at Camp David or at the ranch. George H.W. Bush’s children were also adults when he was in the White House, and the Mondale teenagers were not intensely athletic.
The Quayle kids, like their parents, were the exceptions. They were active teenagers and outstanding athletes. As a family, all five Quayles were expert skiers, played great golf, played great tennis, went scuba diving, white water rafted, rode bikes thirty-two miles down the side of the crater at Maui, and ran. The two boys were also good lacrosse players. As athletes, they were chips off the old block. Dan Quayle ran three sub-eight-minute miles almost every day, while Marilyn Quayle ran well and rode horses even better. Protecting this family presented physical challenges. The task was made all the more difficult because none of them liked being protected.
Bell’s VPPD had grown used to doing things in a certain way for George and Barbara Bush, who were considerably older than the Quayles and didn’t go in for a lot of physical activities. Both were relaxed with protection. The VPPD was now forced to find ways to accommodate the Quayles and to do so without compromising its responsibilities. Unfortunately, the agents didn’t understand the Quayles, and the Quayles didn’t understand the agents. Making matters worse, the vice president’s staff wasn’t getting along well with the agents either. I was brought in to try to smooth things out.
From the moment I met the vice president in October 1989, it was obvious that there was an edge to him about protection. He was resigned to it because he didn’t have a choice, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. The problem is that when the people you’re protecting are fighting it, agents become self-conscious. They don’t want to be too intrusive, so there’s a tendency to drop back just a little. And relaxing even a little can have detrimental consequences.
One of the many things that his family found claustrophobic about protection, Quayle claimed, was agents standing outside their dining-room window. Their post was actually the front door, but agents don’t usually stay in one place; they walk back and forth. When the Quayles sat down to dinner, the agent would appear in the window, then disappear, then reappear again. I promised the vice president I’d look into it, and then I went to see his wife.
Marilyn Quayle argued that the residence was surrounded by uniformed guards and a fence with sophisticated alarms, so there was no need to have someone at her front door. But the agent was not there to confront problems outside, he was there to respond to an incident by coming into the house, finding the family, and getting them to a safe place. It took some negotiating, but she eventually agreed to let us create a space in the basement large enough for agents, desks, cameras, CCTV monitors, and alarms. And that way, her family never again had to eat a meal with people appearing in their dining-room window.
Being able to deal directly with her helped to improve our relationship with the entire family. But then, knowing who to talk to is one of the tricks of the trade. When it came to particularly important matters, it was often best to go straight to the spouse. It worked with Mrs. Reagan and it worked with Mrs. Quayle. In one specific instance, the vice president was making travel plans to a certain Latin American country that I felt it was too dangerous to visit. I couldn’t talk him out of it, so I explained to Mrs. Quayle why I was concerned. Guys are inclined to say, I’ll be all right, don’t worry. But wives do worry. She told her husband, I don’t want you to go, and the trip got canceled. So when I worried, I knew where to find a natural ally.
Early on in my dealings with her, the vice president’s staff hired Tom Pernice to be lead advance. He’d been a young advance guy on the Reagan staff. He had been trained by Bill Henkel, and had accompanied Bill and me on several trips. Because he and I had a history, we were able to find a lot of common ground. At the same time, I had the best administrative assistant in the entire Secret Service working for me. Barbara Finn ran our office and moved mountains. So, thanks to Tom and Barbara, things began to improve between the Secret Service and the Quayle staff. Curiously, though, as those relationships improved, some people at headquarters began to think that I was being too accommodating. At the same time, the Quayles often thought I wasn’t accommodating enough. That’s how I knew I’d probably found just about the right level.
Although I’m not sure that the vice president ever got used to being protected, his kids were never a problem. We took them to school and kept the agents there, but they didn’t follow them into classrooms. We gave them as much privacy as possible, especially when they hung out with their friends. If they wanted a little extra privacy, they soon figured out how to manage that.
But Mrs. Quayle was always pushing the envelope. On one trip through Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, as we pulled onto the tarmac, she spotted three stealth fighters parked five hundred feet from Air Force Two and asked if she could take a look. I stopped the motorcade a hundred feet away. She said she wanted to get out. We couldn’t find out if the fighters were fueled or had ordinance on them, so I said no. Mrs. Quayle then made a move for the door. I snapped, “Don’t argue with me. Stay in the car.” That’s as close as she got to those planes.
When she learne
d that we practiced horseback AOPs, she asked if she could take part in an exercise. To keep the peace, I allowed her to come along with us, once, in Washington. She played the victim and we carried her off on a stretcher. It was harmless. When she heard I was taking eight agents down to St. John, in the Virgin Islands, to work AOPs with the Coast Guard, she asked if she could come along. But this was dangerous, and I refused. We scuba dived with them, and because anything can happen when you’re in the water, we did a lot of specialized training. Although an assassination attempt in that environment is remote, we still practiced those. Mostly, though, we prepared for medical emergencies. I tried to make her understand that a controlled exercise in the District of Columbia was one thing, AOPs in water were something very different. I stuck to my decision. It was just as well, because on that trip we had a near-accident hoisting a stretcher onto the helicopter, and I was the one who almost got hurt.
If she wasn’t trying to work AOPs with us, she was trying to sign off protection. My response was always the same: Signing off protection was not a very good idea at any time, but if she wanted to decline protection, I’d get the letters prepared. For a spouse, protection is optional. My caveat was that she’d have to sign off permanently; we wouldn’t allow her to sign on and sign off at will. And there were good reasons for that, too, not least of which was the effect on agents’ morale. If she could leave agents home every time she wanted to go to the mall, it wouldn’t take long before agents began wondering, What am I doing here?
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