Ronald Kessler - In the President's Secret Service

As a result, agents say, many of their colleagues are out of shape.

“Some of them, you just roll your eyes,” an agent says. “One agent cannot even do a sit-up. I know for a fact he can’t because his belly’s already up to his chin. Just look at some of the details, and you can really see where the standards have gone—downhill.”

“We had a post stander last weekend, a female agent, and I was in shock,” says an agent, referring to agents assigned to guard a specific area or site on a temporary basis. “Overweight, out of shape, just disgusting. And you look at this person and say, ‘If I’m going to go through a door with you to execute a search warrant, are you going to have my back? If I get shot, are you going to be able to carry me out? Or are you going to be able to get up four flights of stairs because I’m in a fight with somebody?’ Probably not.”

THE CURRENT LOCATION of the president is displayed by an electronic box at key offices in the White House and at the Secret Service. He is listed as POTUS, for president of the United States. Called the protectee locator, the box also shows the location of the first lady (FLOTUS), the vice president (VPOTUS), and the president’s and vice president’s children. If they are not in Washington, the locator box displays their current city. In addition, Uniformed Division officers stationed at the White House update one another by radio on the location of the president and first lady within the Executive Mansion.

When the Clintons were in the White House, “It was funny, because on the radio you’d hear that she went somewhere, and then you’d hear that he went to the same location, and every time he went to her, she would go somewhere else,” a former Uniformed Division officer says.

Like most other presidents, Clinton got a charge out of greeting his fans. One evening, he was to attend a high school reunion in Little Rock. The Secret Service had sealed off the floor of his hotel room and had checked out the hotel employees who would be given access to the floor. Two maids who had been cleared asked Agent Timothy Gobble if they could stay near the end of the hall to catch a glimpse of Clinton as he left for his motorcade. Already late, Clinton saw the two women waving at him and walked to the end of the hall to chat with them.

“You could see how thrilled they were,” Gobble says. “Here was the leader of the free world who took three minutes to talk to them. They thanked me profusely for giving them that opportunity. There were no cameras around, so it was not for show.”

Clinton not only loved greeting people but had a gift for remembering who they were. After a speech in New York at an AFL-CIO convention, Clinton was shaking hands. Agents noticed a busboy eyeing him and moving closer.

“Clinton saw him and called him by his name,” says an agent on his detail at the time. “The president shook his hand and asked how his father was. The busboy got teary-eyed and said his father had died. Commiserating with him, Clinton turned to an aide and said the man’s father had had cancer.”

“When presidents get into a crowd, they just seem like they feed on the energy from the people they are shaking hands with,” Albracht says. “They may be dragging from a long day of travel and campaigning, but when they hit the rope line, they start to get energized all over again. I’ve seen it time and time again. It seemed to have the strongest effect on Clinton. He’d replenish his energy from theirs and get charged up and ready to continue. They all did it, but it seemed to have the strongest effect on him.”

Clinton liked to go running, presenting the predictable security problems.

“There were people waiting for him to run every morning,” says Pete Dowling, who was second in command of Clinton’s detail during the first term. “So it was nice for him, but quite frankly, for us they were unwanted guests. They weren’t screened; we didn’t know who they were. People were trying to hand him water bottles, so we were really concerned about that. If the president were to run up the Mall every day with the same regularity it’d be pretty easy for a terrorist group, who would observe his actions, maybe to plant a bomb in a trash can. And if he didn’t run by that day? They’d just take it away and come back again. That kind of presented a threat to us that we hadn’t seen before.”

The Secret Service discussed its concerns with Clinton, but he continued to run. That changed after he fell walking down the stairs at golf pro Greg Norman’s house in Florida in the early morning hours of March 14, 1997. The Secret Service Joint Ops Center then woke agent Norm Jarvis at home to ask him to secure the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where surgery would be done on the president to reattach a tendon torn from his right kneecap.

Later that morning, Clinton arrived by motorcade from Andrews Air Force Base. Jarvis arranged for an agent to stand in the operating room throughout the surgery.

“I’m not sure if they knew we had guns on under our scrubs, but sharp cutting instruments so close to the president—even in the hands of a trusted military physician—needed a countermeasure in the hands of a trusted agent,” Jarvis says.

Clinton’s doctor, Admiral E. “Connie” Mariano, who traveled with the president, oversaw the operation. But Jarvis was startled to see an orderly line of dozens of surgeons in the operating room waiting to step up and do part of the knee reconstruction.

“Each one had a tool, probe, scalpel, or whatever, waiting to take their turn to poke, cut, or saw so they could claim they operated on the president of the United States,” Jarvis says. “After the anesthesia was administered, the first surgeon did the initial incision. The next exposed the tendon. Then another cut the tendon to even out the jagged remains. Another surgeon cleaned and exposed the kneecap. On and on it went for hours.”

In one form or another, Jarvis had seen this phenomenon played out dozens of times: For most people, any contact with a president is a highlight of their lives.

Clinton did not want to return to the White House in an ambulance, and Secret Service vans were not equipped to transport him in a wheelchair. Because Jarvis knew Sarah Brady, wife of the former Reagan press secretary James Brady, he asked if the Secret Service could borrow her husband’s wheelchair-accessible van for the trip.

Clinton faced about eight weeks on crutches and months of physical therapy. He had to wear an adjustable leg brace to restrict knee movement. After that incident, Clinton gave up running and started using exercise machines.

Meanwhile, the Secret Service tried to adapt to Clinton’s style.

“President Clinton would see a small crowd of spectators that may have gathered behind a rope outside our secure perimeter just to get a glimpse of the president, and he would head off to shake their hands,” says Jarvis. “Of course, this drove us to distraction because we didn’t want him to approach an un-magged crowd. We didn’t know if we had a Hinckley or Bremer in the crowd with a handgun. A person like that might be loitering in the area because he couldn’t get into the event.”

In fact, at one point, Jarvis was faced with just such a situation: Clinton had plunged into a crowd that had not been screened.

“I was in the lead on the rope line,” Jarvis says. “When you’re working a rope line, there are agents leading in the president’s direction, then there’s the president, and then others who trail behind, with others nearby.”