Ronald Kessler - In the President's Secret Service

“Oh, Mrs. Bush, I didn’t bring one. I didn’t realize it was going to be so cold here,” he said.

“George, we need to get this agent a hat,” Barbara said.

“Okay, Bar,” he replied.

She walked back into the house, got one of President Bush’s furry hats, and gave it to the agent.

“No, Mrs. Bush, that’s fine,” the agent said.

“Hey, don’t argue with Mrs. Bush,” Bush said.

The agent put on the president’s hat.

“That was Mrs. Bush,” Sullivan says. “She was everyone’s mother, and she didn’t want this forty-year-old man walking around at Kennebunkport without a hat on. She was a sweetheart.”

“Barbara and George Bush were genuinely in love,” former agent Albracht says. “They share a special bond of being married and being each other’s best friends that you don’t really see a lot of. I know there was a woman on the staff that Bush was always rumored to be having an affair with, but I’m telling you, I never saw it, and I was with the guy for four years.”

While Barbara “can be sweet and nice, you do anything to cross anybody in the family, and you are written off,” says a former agent on Bush’s detail. “I remember the Bushes had some friends that would come to visit them, and one of them had decided to vote for Ross Perot, and she wrote that person off. And President Bush would say, ‘Aw, Barb, that’s just politics.’ And she’d say, ‘No, that’s just not right.’ And if somebody divorced his wife and married a younger woman, she didn’t like that at all.”

RUNNING FOR REELECTION against Bill Clinton, Bush 41 was to give a speech on September 17, 1992, at the civic auditorium in Enid, Oklahoma. Agent Norm Jarvis was assigned to run intelligence investigations for the visit, and a detective from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation called him.

“He said that a woman who was a psychic had told her police contact, whom she worked with on a homicide case in Texas, that she had had a vision that President Bush was going to be assassinated by a sniper,” Jarvis says.

People call the Secret Service all the time reporting a vision they have just had about the president being shot. They are usually self-promoters. But in this case, the detective told Jarvis that this psychic’s visions had actually helped police find buried bodies and had provided useful leads in criminal investigations. Another seasoned law enforcement homicide investigator from Texas also told Jarvis that he needed to pay attention to her.

“She’s the real deal,” the Oklahoma detective said.

Jarvis remembered seeing the psychic on television. Sporting a beehive hairdo, she would don what she called a special pair of cowboy boots and then tell police not only where bodies were buried but how the victims had been murdered. The evening before Bush’s visit, Jarvis and his partner drove to the woman’s home in Enid. She invited them in, and Jarvis told her why they were there. The psychic confirmed that she had had a vision that Bush 41 was about to be assassinated.

“About that time, her husband comes walking into the house, and he looks at me and he says, ‘Has she had another one of them visions?’” Jarvis says.

“Yeah,” Jarvis said.

The man shook his head and walked through the living room and into the kitchen.

“I gave my partner the nod to go in and talk to him,” Jarvis says. “My impression was he was disgusted because he didn’t believe her.”

Jarvis asked the psychic what she had seen in her vision. The woman said the president was going to come to Oklahoma: He was going to get off the plane, and he was going to get in a limousine.

“I see him sitting behind the driver,” she said. “As they start to drive by an overpass, the passenger window is shattered, and he is killed.” The next thing she saw was Bush in front of the family home in Kennebunkport. At that point, he is no longer the president.

“How could he be killed, and then your vision down the line is that he’s no longer the president and he’s at Kennebunkport?” Jarvis asked her.

The woman wasn’t sure, but as Jarvis questioned her, she offered more details of her premonition. When Bush gets into his limousine, he does not have a suit on, she said. Instead, he is wearing a light jacket and an open-collar shirt.

Jarvis knew that when the president flew in on Air Force One, he always came out in a suit and tie, and the dress code for the visit was suit and tie. Moreover, when the president is in the limousine, he is not behind the driver; he is on the right rear side, the position of honor.

Just then, Jarvis’s partner came out of the kitchen.

“What did he say?” Jarvis asked.

“The husband said if she’s seen a vision, it’s going to happen,” the other agent said.

As a chill went up Jarvis’s spine, he asked the woman to describe the limo. She correctly said the car was already in Enid. The Secret Service always flies its vehicles to the sites of presidential visits on a cargo plane prior to the visit, storing them in fire stations or in hangars at the airport where Air Force One is to land. At that point, Jarvis himself did not know where the limo was being stored.

Jarvis asked her to pinpoint where the limo was. She said it was at the air force base near Enid. He asked if she could take him to it; she agreed.

As they drove to the base, Jarvis asked the woman a series of questions to see if she had learned the location of the vehicle through some other means besides her clairvoyance: Did she know anyone who worked at the base? Had anyone told her that they had seen a cargo plane unload a limousine at the base?

As they drove toward the five hangars on the base, the woman gave Jarvis directions.

“As we got close to this one hangar, she said to slow down,” Jarvis says.

“Something is in that building right there,” the woman said.

“What do you mean?” Jarvis asked.

“Something important is in that building there.”

“Okay, but not the limo?”

“No,” the woman said.

As they drove past another hangar, the woman said it contained the limo. She then identified another hangar as containing something important.

Jarvis’s hunch was that the limo was in the firehouse bordering the runways. As it turned out, he was wrong and the psychic was right. Secret Service agents guard the president’s limo until he steps into it. Jarvis checked with them and learned that the hangar identified by the psychic as housing the limo did indeed contain two presidential limousines.

Jarvis mentioned to the woman that the president usually sits on the right side. She insisted that he would be sitting behind the driver. As the woman walked back to Jarvis’s car, he asked the special officer in charge of security for the limos what was in the other two hangars she had identified as containing something important.

“He said one contains Marine One, and the other contains other important assets for the president in case of emergencies,” Jarvis says.

Jarvis immediately briefed supervisors at the Secret Service Intelligence Division duty desk in Washington.

“You guys are going to think I’m crazy,” he said, and then related the information about the vision and how the woman had correctly led him to the president’s limo.

As Jarvis saw it, “We deal in the bizarre all the time. Nothing’s too wacky that hasn’t come across the duty desk report sheet. You’re just straight up and lay it out the way you see it. And together you examine and turn the thing over and make a determination.”