Ronald Kessler - In the President's Secret Service

“Getting a number of applicants is not a problem. Getting qualified applicants is always a problem,” Johnson says. “Because of the [service’s] high standard, a large portion of the population wouldn’t qualify to be an agent. They’ve done various things trying to recruit good people, but the bottom line is that their policies are driving away the good people they already have.”

“They chew their people up,” says a former agent. “They treat agents like the Apache Indians treated their horses: They would take their best horse and ride it and ride it, and when it dies, they finally eat it.”

THE VICE PRESIDENT’S residence is a handsome 9,150-square-foot three-story mansion overlooking Massachusetts Avenue NW Complete with pool, pool house, and indoor gym, the white brick house was built in 1893 as the home of the superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Congress turned it into the official residence of the vice president in 1974 and gave it the address One Observatory Circle.

Vice President Mondale was the first to live at the residence. While Mondale’s predecessor Nelson Rockefeller could have moved there, he chose to remain in his Foxhall Road estate in Washington and use the vice president’s residence for entertaining.

During the day, at least five navy stewards attend to every personal need of the second family, including cooking, shopping for food, cleaning, and doing the laundry. At night, the stewards—known as navy enlisted aides—bake chocolate chip cookies and other goodies for the second family. They also stash leftovers from parties in the refrigerator.

The Secret Service has a separate building—code-named Tower—on the grounds. The vice president’s residence itself is referred to by agents simply as “the res.”

Back when George H. W. Bush was vice president, Agent William Albracht was on the midnight shift at the vice president’s residence. Agents refer to the president’s protective detail as “the big show” and to the vice president’s protective detail as “the little show with free parking,” because unlike the White House, the vice president’s residence provides parking for agents.

New to the post, Albracht was told by Secret Service Agent Pete Dowling, “Well, Bill, every day the stewards bake the cookies, and that is their job, and that is their responsibility. And then our responsibility on midnights is to find those cookies or those left from the previous day and eat as many of them as possible.”

At three A.M., Albracht, assigned to the basement post, was getting hungry.

“We never had permission to take food from the kitchen, but sometimes you get very hungry on midnights,” Albracht says. “I walked into the kitchen that was located in the basement and opened up the refrigerator. I’m hoping that there are some leftover snacks from that day’s reception,” the former agent says. “It was slim pickin’s. All of a sudden, there’s a voice over my shoulder.”

“Hey, anything good in there to eat?” the man asked.

“No. Looks like they cleaned it out,” Albracht said.

“I turned around to see George Bush off my right shoulder,” Albracht says. “After I get over the shock of who it was, Bush says, ‘Hey I was really hoping there would be something to eat.’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, every day the stewards bake cookies, but every night they hide them from us.’ With a wink of his eye he says, ‘Let’s find ’em.’ So we tore the kitchen apart, and sure enough we did find them. He took a stack of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk and went back up to bed, and I took a stack and a glass of milk and went back to the basement post.”

When Albracht returned to the post, Dowling asked, “Who the hell were you in there talking to?”

“Oh, yeah, sure, right,” Dowling said when Albracht told him.

Bush’s regular vice presidential detail played a prank on an agent who was on temporary assignment, telling him that it was okay to wash his clothes in the vice president’s laundry room.

“He went down and used the vice president’s washing machine and dryer,” former agent Patrick Sullivan recalls. “Mrs. Bush came down and said to the other agents, ‘He’s doing his laundry!’”

A supervisor heard about the incident. Mortified, he told Barbara Bush that it had all been a practical joke.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said.

In fact, at the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara Bush once strode to the Secret Service post and asked if agents had any laundry they would like her to do, since she was about to do a load anyway. She was so close to the agents that when Pete Dowling’s wife, Lindy was expecting a baby, the first lady instructed him to call her when the baby arrived, day or night.

As vice president, Bush flew to a fund-raiser in Boise, Idaho, during the 1982 election campaign. He was to have dinner at the Chart House seafood restaurant on North Garden Street on the banks of the Colorado River.

“The way we protected him, we had some agents inside, but typically what we’d do was situate ourselves at dining tables near him,” says former agent Dowling.

Dowling had been seated a few minutes when he heard a radio transmission that two white males in camouflage outfits with long weapons were low-crawling around the back toward their location. They had their weapons in their hands and were crawling on their bellies, moving themselves along with their elbows.

Just then, Dowling looked up and saw the two bad guys. He recalled intelligence reports that Libya had sent a hit squad to the United States to kill American officials. The agent instinctively jumped out of his chair and tackled Bush to protect him. As food flew everywhere, Dowling threw the vice president onto the ground and flopped on top of him.

“What’s going on here?” Bush asked.

“I don’t know, but just keep your head down,” Dowling replied.

Dowling looked up. He saw about a hundred law enforcement officers with their guns drawn—Secret Service agents, sheriff’s department deputies, and state troopers. They were on the scene as part of routine protection for a visit by the vice president. The two bad guys were kneeling with their hands clasped behind their heads.

“We evacuated the VP out of the restaurant to get him away from whatever danger may have still been there,” Dowling says. “You would think I had just thwarted an assassination attempt.”

As it turned out, the restaurant was near an apartment complex where the girlfriend of one of the two men lived.

“The guy had gone to see his girlfriend, and she was there with another guy,” Dowling says. “So the boyfriend got very angry. The other guy who was there with his girlfriend pulled out a knife, kind of slashed him, didn’t hurt him badly. So this fellow who had been cut decided that he and another guy were going to go back and kill the guy that night.”

Not knowing that the vice president was coming, they parked in the lot at the Chart House and decided to sneak through the woods to get to the apartment complex. They were tried and convicted on illegal weapons and attempted assault charges.

In contrast to many other presidents, Bush—code-named Timberwolf—treated Secret Service agents and everyone else around him with respect and consideration, as did his wife, Barbara. After Bush 41 became president, his twelve-year-old grandson, George Prescott Bush, was hitting tennis balls off the back of the White House tennis court. J. Bonnie Newman, assistant to the president for management and administration, and Joseph W. Hagin, deputy assistant to the president for scheduling, approached the court to play. The two White House aides had earlier reserved the court, but when they saw the president’s grandson playing, they turned away and began walking back toward the White House.