Zero fail, p.22
Zero Fail, page 22
Hillary Clinton went to her confidant Vince Foster, the president’s deputy counsel, to propose they replace the entire detail and perhaps bring back agents from the campaign detail. Foster urged against it, warning that such a drastic change would leak to the press and could make the Clintons look guilty when they’d done nothing wrong.
Then, on February 19, 1993, a column ran in the Chicago Sun-Times that infuriated the Clintons but also vindicated their suspicions about the agents. The item claimed the First Lady had a wicked temper and had thrown a lamp at her husband in the residence during an argument, according to an anonymous “White House source.” The couple convened a group of aides, including Foster, special assistant David Watkins, and others, to discuss replacing the entire detail. “They were both really hot about the way the Secret Service had handled the news reports about the lamp throwing,” Watkins said. “They wanted the agents in question transferred out of the White House at once.”
A few days later, Foster and Watkins visited Magaw at his office to privately discuss the Clintons’ grievances. When they walked back the few blocks from Secret Service headquarters, oddly, they were body-searched at the White House gate by a Secret Service officer using an electronic monitor. Both men were wearing their White House passes and IDs, but this was the first time either of them had been searched in this way. “It occurred to us at the time that Magaw must have thought that we were wired,” Watkins said. “We just couldn’t believe it; we were incredulous.”
After that incident, Foster grew paranoid, and the Clintons’ angst about the Service rose. There was one thing the president could change without being questioned: the director. “The Clintons couldn’t wait to get rid of Magaw,” said a former protection supervisor who worked with both of their details.
It was normal for a president, after about a year or more of getting to know the Secret Service staff, to choose a new director of his own, typically from among the senior assistant directors. “They want their own man in there guarding the family door,” said one retired senior leader who supervised details during Clinton’s era. But new presidents didn’t typically rush to change horses right away. They focused first on firming up their cabinet and key political appointees, learning the job and chalking up some priority accomplishments they’d promised voters in the campaign. The Clintons, however, felt they’d never be able to trust the Secret Service with Magaw at the helm.
An opportunity for change presented itself in late summer of Clinton’s first year. The Treasury Department was close to finishing its internal investigation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ tragically botched raid on the Branch Davidians’ religious compound in Waco, Texas. Considered one of the worst law enforcement failures in history, the raid was supposed to be a surprise seizure of a stockpile of illegal weapons. Instead, it led to a fifty-one-day standoff and ended in a deadly fire, set by the compound’s leader. The death toll was staggering. Four law enforcement agents and five residents died in the raid, and seventy-five compound residents, including twenty-five children, perished in the fire. Ron Noble, the assistant Treasury secretary who led the investigation, warned the White House that he’d found that ATF supervisors botched the planning, then lied to cover up their errors, and that the ATF director was reflexively defending his team. The White House would have to do some housecleaning at the ATF.
Noble, who also oversaw the Secret Service, suggested Magaw could leave the Secret Service to be the ATF’s new director. The Clintons jumped at the idea. “Ron Noble helped them figure out a way to unceremoniously dump him without looking uncharitable,” the retired senior supervisor said. Clinton then picked a director he felt some rapport with, Eljay Bowron. Then the assistant director for protection, the hulking former Michigan State football player was only forty-two—close in age to Clinton. Though he had grown up in Detroit, Bowron had a touch of the South in him. He had formerly headed up the Service’s Atlanta office.
The Secret Service culture is steeped in deference and discretion when it comes to the First Family. But many agents had a very negative reaction to the Clintons and didn’t work to conceal it from friends and co-workers. Politically, most Secret Service agents leaned Republican and law-and-order, so they didn’t see eye to eye with Clinton on his Democratic social agenda. Most of the agents had also served Republicans for the last twelve years, two presidents they very much admired. Still, despite some of Clinton’s early testiness about Secret Service protocol, most of Clinton’s political opposites on the detail came to enjoy, even admire, his personality. He could be warm and genuine, talking about his own life and asking agents about theirs. He had a knack for storytelling. He sometimes cursed at a mishap and then apologized later for his outburst. He didn’t hide his elevated station, but he put on no airs. One detail agent remembered Clinton drawing him into a lengthy policy debate on a longer-than-usual car ride to an event in the rural Corn Belt. The agent and the president heatedly went back and forth on the pros and cons of Clinton’s support for aid programs for impoverished families. Clinton said the support would grow more productive taxpayers. The agent said the results of welfare programs so far weren’t encouraging and they had created an enormous deficit for taxpayers.
“Don’t you care ’bout the chil’run?” Clinton teased the agent, trying to deescalate the argument by exaggerating his Southern drawl.
The agent had to chuckle. Clinton could charm anyone if he chose to. A retired supervisor on the presidential detail said Clinton was genuine with his agents—“not buddy-buddy” but respectful. He asked agents about themselves, thanked them at the end of a hard day. “He was just a guy who wanted to have a good time.”
The vast majority of the Secret Service, however, detested the First Lady. Some smarted at the difference between Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Bush. The former First Lady had treated her agents like extended family, inviting their wives and children to the family’s home for barbecues and swimming. Barbara Bush ran her family with a fierceness, but she was also grandmotherly to agents and was always sending out food and coffee to agents standing on post at the family compound or outside in the cold. The new First Lady chided and cursed her husband in private, and snorted at the idea of baking cookies when she was forging public policy. The way she rejected the traditional role of a wife rankled the conservative-leaning agents who were used to a warmer, more feminine mother figure in the White House. The dismissive way she treated agents made them quietly seethe. Several agents on Mrs. Clinton’s detail complained among themselves that she barely said a word to them after months and months of their being with her nearly every day—greeting her when she exited the residence each morning, helping her into her limousine, keeping a watchful eye on her back at every rope line. But it was hard to know who bore more responsibility for this chilly relationship and its rocky start. Had the agents’ early signals of loyalty to the Bushes, and their information leaks, made her understandably distrustful and standoffish? Or were her silent treatment and brusque manner just part of her dismissive manner with low-level staff? Whatever the answer, Mrs. Clinton became the Secret Service’s least popular First Lady on record.
A retired detail supervisor who helped protect Bill and Hillary Clinton said Mrs. Clinton ran roughshod over people when she sensed they were afraid of her. She was quick to dismiss or chew out the house stewards, career employees, and junior agents who couldn’t stand up to her. The few agents who had the temerity to disagree with her, however, she seemed to respect.
“Hillary is a mean person,” said one retired supervisor. “I get angry at people who disrespect the folks who clean your room. Guys who mistreat the people who can’t do anything for [them]. She was like that. She was the person in that crew who would cut a person’s heart out.”
Young agents arriving to the Hillary Clinton detail remember one of the detail supervisors, Faron Paramore, warning them about the First Lady’s sensitivities: “Whatever you do, just don’t touch her,” Paramore said. But good lead detail agents knew they sometimes had to grab the person they were protecting, to push them into a car quickly or to hold onto their belt in a rope line to be sure they didn’t get swept into a rowdy crowd. “She hates us, right?” one detail agent said. “But if she didn’t feel the agent right behind her on the rope line, taking care of her, she would look over her shoulder for him.”
Riding around with Mrs. Clinton, agents were shocked by her foul mouth and dual personality. Some of her assigned protectors found her not only unpleasant in private but also fake in public. One agent remembered Hillary Clinton bitterly complaining with her close aide in the back of a limousine about how she couldn’t stand a young female fundraiser they were moments away from meeting. She ridiculed the woman’s ignorance up until the moment the car came to a stop. When an agent opened the limo door and Mrs. Clinton stepped out, she greeted the object of her critique brightly. “Oh, Julie, it’s so wonderful to see you,” she said.
Word spread like wildfire through the White House and the Service in the early months of the administration about an awkward exchange between the Clintons’ thirteen-year-old daughter, Chelsea, and a member of her detail. The agent had walked up to the second floor of the residence and was waiting in a common hall for Chelsea, who was on the phone. It was time for the agent to take her to her high school, Sidwell Friends, a few miles away.
“I’ve got to go,” Chelsea said to her friend on the phone. “The pigs are here.”
The agent stood shocked for a moment. “Ms. Clinton, I want to tell you something,” he said. “My job is to stand between you, your family, and a bullet. Do you understand?”
“Well, that’s what my mother and father call you,” Chelsea said.
Many agents blamed the First Lady. They developed a new code name for Chelsea: Eagle Droppings.
Cheryl Montgomery, one of the tiny group of Black female agents in the Secret Service at the time, watched the macho agents who worked protection take an instant dislike to Mrs. Clinton before they knew much about her. She represented a major culture clash for the Service. Montgomery saw the First Lady as a sharp thinker who spoke to her husband as an equal and “was just trying to help him.” Other agents saw a ballbuster and a harpy who lacked personal warmth. Unlike Barbara Bush, this new First Lady wasn’t doting on her husband—or the agents.
“I don’t think she ever had a chance with them,” Montgomery said. “She wasn’t bringing them cake and leftover food. After a party, Barbara Bush would always bring them food or tell them, ‘Please have this.’ She treated them kind of like a mom. Who doesn’t like being treated that way? Hillary didn’t do that.”
But Montgomery found Mrs. Clinton to be a surprisingly forgiving person. In the middle of the 1992 campaign, Montgomery had been assigned to help on the Clinton detail. On one of her first days on the shift—a trip the governor took to Tampa, Florida—Montgomery made what she later realized was an inexcusable faux pas on a rope line where Clinton greeted a crowd of supporters. She had been responsible for clearing the path on the right side of Governor Clinton as he moved down the line, so there would be nothing blocking his way. But as Montgomery kept moving to the right, she found she kept bumping into the same woman.
The first time this random woman got in her path, Montgomery figured it had to be a staffer and told her to please move out of the way. The second time, she said it more forcefully: “Lady, you’re going to need to move.” The third time, Montgomery was about to physically pick the woman up and remove her from the agent’s path, but a state trooper who worked with the Clintons looked at Montgomery with a horrified, mouth-wide expression. So instead, the agent took both hands and placed the staffer next to Clinton. Of course, the “staffer” Montgomery had been manhandling was in fact the governor’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The next morning, Montgomery was back in Little Rock, sitting in a Secret Service car outside the governor’s mansion, waiting for the shift’s workday to begin. The First Lady of Arkansas came down the side steps from the house, walked over to the agents gathered outside on the drive, looking for Montgomery.
“Good morning,” Montgomery said anxiously, rolling down her window.
“Hi,” Clinton said, smiling. “I think we met in Tampa yesterday. I’m Hillary Clinton.”
“Hello,” the agent replied. “I’m…Cheryl Montgomery.”
“I wanted you to know I’ll be traveling with my husband from now on,” Clinton said.
The agent thanked her. Clinton smiled wide and the agent smiled back. They said goodbye.
“She did this very cool thing,” Montgomery recalled. “She could have complained and gotten me thrown off the detail,” but she didn’t. “When she got her own detail, the word was she asked for an all-female detail. They turned her down.” The Secret Service leadership said that that wouldn’t be possible. Montgomery was disappointed but not surprised that the macho all-male bosses felt that way. A vice presidential detail leader once compared the Secret Service to the National Football League when rejecting a female agent who applied for his shift, saying, “Women don’t play in the NFL.”
Hillary Clinton’s close friends and trusted aides said her rocky relationship with the Secret Service was unfortunate but doomed early on. She had ample reason to be suspicious in those early days. The Secret Service’s love affair with the Bushes was well known, and there was evidence that they were telling tales about her private life. She eventually developed close bonds with specific detail leaders and agents, especially the late Donnie Flynn. But she was wary of this bastion of Republican cops. Could they be trusted to keep the Clintons’ most sensitive secrets?
* * *
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CLINTON’S VORACIOUS APPETITE for contact with the public was a shock to the Secret Service’s system in the 1990s in the same way that Kennedy had floored the detail agents of the early 1960s. Both were young, vigorous men in their forties when they stepped into the White House. Both “Lancer” and “Eagle” had the energy to travel from early morning to late at night, and a drive to make public appearances nearly every day of the week. Both enjoyed throwing themselves headlong into crowds. Like Kennedy, Clinton did more than embrace the retail politics of chatting with the grinning townspeople waiting for them at airports and fairgrounds. He was addicted to it. And the crowds were addicted to him.
“I’ve never met anyone with the natural talent that Bill Clinton had,” said his former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes. “He could look into your eyes—man or woman—and make you feel, for however many minutes, that you were the only thing he cared about, that what you had to say was the most important thing to him.”
Pete Dowling, a supervisor who had been one of Clinton’s first agents on the presidential campaign and built a close rapport with him, was promoted to become the Secret Service’s assistant director of protective operations after Clinton’s election. He said Clinton’s desire to mingle drastically turned up the pace for his detail.
“It was a challenge,” Dowling said. “President Clinton was younger and more active than Presidents Reagan and Bush. They liked to spend quiet time at Camp David. He rarely went there. He liked getting out. I can remember once at Martha’s Vineyard we had to plead with him not to go out to get ice cream one Saturday night because it would have brought the town to a halt. One of the other guys went out and got the ice cream for him.”
Agents also quickly took note of Clinton’s wandering gaze and frisky winks to pretty women on nearly every rope line. Detail agents learned to spot his pattern of walking toward knockouts. Their job was to keep him from lingering too long with any one woman. “There was this blonde, jiggling everywhere, wearing a skimpy dress, big bust,” a former detail agent recalled about a later trip that exemplified his habit. “Oh, President Clinton. He’s going to her in a beeline. He thinks Hillary has gone to the car.”
Many agents who worked on Clinton’s detail and Secret Service officers who kept watch at the White House said they never directly witnessed Clinton having sex. But they also insisted they weren’t fools and they could tell the purpose of his secret meetings behind the doors they secured. Who couldn’t recognize the obvious signs of a man ducking off to be left alone undisturbed with a series of comely twentysomethings? Secret Service agents and officers were at the door when Clinton ushered pretty young female staffers into his office for extended periods of time, and they saw the disheveled women leaving thirty minutes or an hour later with blouses loosened, hair mussed. They got the alert over the radio when Clinton told his detail late at night that he wanted to be taken alone to another random, unknown address in the nearby Virginia suburbs or a private Georgetown row house.
“I don’t know how many times President Clinton would say, ‘I want to make an off-the-record movement tonight,’ ” said one retired senior agent who worked protection during the Clinton years. “He’d go visit so-and-so. We all knew why.”
Were detail agents so sure Clinton was sneaking off to have sex?
“Absolutely. No doubt,” the retired supervisor said. “POTUS would go into his private study late at night….You’d see women go in there. They aren’t going in to take dictation. He’d go visit certain people late at night. Eleven and twelve o’ clock at night. You’re not going to watch a movie.”
Few of the detail agents judged Clinton harshly for his extramarital activities; scores of married agents had their own history of dalliances on the road. Handsome and fit, Secret Service men had a reputation for drawing the admiring attention of women in whatever hotel bar they landed in after their shift ended. Some had multiple girlfriends in different cities. “The agents back then even had a rule: It’s not an affair—it’s not a real violation—if it’s four hundred miles out from home,” said one longtime protection agent who worked on Clinton’s detail. “There are so many agents who have had affairs on the road. They cover for each other. It wasn’t my business. But I saw it all the time.”
