Ronald Kessler - In the President's Secret Service

To be sure, as Bush himself joked, he often did not speak English. His close friend Clay Johnson was in the Oval Office a few days before Bush was to speak at a radio and television correspondents dinner.

“I’m going to give the funniest speech you’ve ever heard,” Bush told “Big Man,” as he called Johnson. “They have this tape of ridiculous phrases I used in the [2001] campaign. I can’t believe that a candidate for president said those things.”

Bush recited some of the examples:

“Africa is a nation that…”

“Dick Cheney and I do not want this nation to be in a recession. We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work.”

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”

“The woman who knew that I had dyslexia—I never interviewed her.”

“I’ve never seen him laugh that hard,” Johnson says.

Secret Service agents appreciate the fact that Bush is punctual.

“Bush is down to earth, caring,” an agent says. The Bushes offer food to agents. “They are always thinking of people around them.”

But agents were always amazed at the difference between Bush in person and the way he came across at press conferences.

“He does not look comfortable in front of a microphone,” an agent who was on his detail says. “With us, he doesn’t talk like that, doesn’t sound like that. He’s funny as hell. Incredible sense of humor, and he’ll joke around. He’s two different personalities.”

Agents loved to run with Bush—code-named Trailblazer—and chop wood with him. The agency tried to assign its best runners to his detail so they could keep up with him. Because of bad knees, Bush later gave up running and took up biking, which he often did at the Secret Service training facility in Laurel, Maryland.

“He had this group of agents that were kind of jocks that he liked to associate with on the detail,” an agent says. “The guy is in phenomenal shape. He had guys on his detail that would push him, and they’d feed off each other. It was funny, though, because when he was diagnosed with bad knees and he switched to mountain bikes from running, he was out of control on that mountain bike. He would go too fast, and he’d have a wreck. He would just go full out on a trail, hit a log, and go flying off the bike. And he’d get off, dust himself off, and hop right back on and do it again.”

“You pretty much knew that you’re not supposed to pass him when biking,” another agent says. “He’s supposed to be in front. I was there when Lance Armstrong was at the ranch. The president was actually trying to compete with Lance Armstrong, to keep up with him. And I think Lance let him win.”

If agents thought highly of Bush, it was nothing compared to their feelings about his wife. “Laura has the undying admiration of almost every agent,” an agent says. “I’ve never ever heard a negative thing about Laura Bush. Nothing. Everybody loves her to death and respects the hell out of her.”

An agent who was assigned to the Bushes one Christmas remembers how caring Laura—code-named Tempo—is. She talked to him for thirty minutes and seemed apologetic about having to take him away from his family during Christmas.

“With Laura, what you see on TV is what you get in person,” another agent says. “She’s always smiling, and she actually gave my mother a compliment, which I’ll never forget. We were invited to the White House Christmas party, and my mother actually studied the type of dresses that Laura Bush wears and tried to get something similar. She walked in, and after my mother was announced by a military escort, Mrs. Bush called her by her first name and said, ‘Boy you look absolutely lovely this evening.’ My mother was on cloud nine.”

As an example of Laura’s positive approach to life, when Teresa Heinz Kerry said just before the 2004 election, “I don’t know that she’s [Laura’s] ever had a real job,” Laura brushed it off. After Heinz—who dropped the name Kerry after the election—apologized, Laura told reporters there was no need for her to do so.

“I know how tough it is, and actually I know those trick questions,” she said.

At the dinner table that night in the pale green family dining room, Laura took the same positive approach. As a butler passed cheese and chicken enchiladas, daughters Jenna and Barbara Bush expressed outrage at Teresa’s comment. Typically, Jenna was the most vocal.

“You know, Mom, she put down every woman who raised their children,” Jenna said. “She was saying that’s not a real job. That was what was so bad about it. Not that she forgot you had a teaching job, but that she was putting down raising children.”

As Pamela Nelson, a high school friend of Laura’s from Midland, selected an enchilada from a platter offered by a butler, Laura talked about how easy it was for words to be twisted and taken out of context.

“You know that comment, ‘Bring them on,’” Laura said, referring to Bush’s July 2003 statement challenging those who would attack American forces in Iraq. “It had so many political repercussions. Everything can be used a million times against you.”

“This has to be the meanest campaign ever,” Nelson said, referring to the 2004 reelection campaign.

“No, the leaflets they dropped when Lincoln was running that disparaged him and his family were horrible,” Laura said. “People blame everything that happens on this office.”

WHEN THE SECRET Service proudly shows members of Congress its James J. Rowley Training Center, it wows them with supposedly unrehearsed feats that bring down the bad guys and save the lives of protectees. But those scenarios are secretly rehearsed.

“Members of Congress were being escorted around the training complex, and we were doing building extraction scenarios with the protectee,” an agent who was there recalls. “We would be trying to move the VP out of a hotel. Say there’s a fire in the hotel, or there’s an explosion outside. We want to get him down into the motorcade and out of the area and move him to a secure location.”

On this particular morning when members of Congress were due to visit, “Everything changed,” the agent says. “Everything was rehearsed, everything was put together, and we’re like, ‘Why are we doing rehearsed scenarios? We should be doing practical scenarios and real training exercises.’”

The agents were told, “Well, there’s a congressional tour coming through.”

Normally, in a training exercise, “The bad guy can kill the agent,” the agent says. “You don’t know. You could see the agent get killed, you could see two agents stumble over each other down a stairwell, things could happen. If you’re putting on training that’s effective, it is a practical exercise in the sense that you let it run through to its end. But when the congressional tour came through, we did it as we had rehearsed to do it,” the agent says. In real training, “You never rehearse something like that.”

The practiced scenario did the trick, impressing the senators and representatives who watched. “They watched an attack on a principal and saw how agents responded, how the shift goes to the protectee, how the CAT team deploys, but they didn’t know that they spent the last couple days rehearsing that scenario.”

According to another current agent, the same thing happened when the Secret Service opened the Rowley center to a group of visiting U.S. Attorneys. Prior to their visit, the agents had rehearsed scenarios for two hours.