Ronald Kessler - In the President's Secret Service

After the incident at Chuy’s, Mike Young and John Zapp, the owners of the restaurant, apologized. “Usually, we wouldn’t have handled it the way it was handled,” Young admitted.

While the girls matured in college, they still resented having Secret Service agents around, even though the agents dressed in casual clothes and most people were unaware of their role. Jenna was particularly difficult. She would sometimes purposely try to lose her protection by going through red lights or by jumping into her car without telling agents where she was going. As a result, the Secret Service kept her car under surveillance so agents could follow her—a waste of manpower.

“One night I was working on her detail, and about three-thirty P.M. on a Friday, she steps out of the house all dressed to the nines and hops into her car,” an agent says. “We follow her in our vehicle. She drove to a bar and got there around four-fifteen.”

The bar was across the street from the Verizon Center at 601 F Street NW in D.C., and it turned out the Rolling Stones were playing there that night. Jenna was meeting friends for a party at a private box at the center. Such a public event requires special security arrangements and close to a hundred agents. But, the agent says, Jenna never told her agents.

“So we scrambled,” an agent says. “We’re trying to get guys from the Washington field office, and we’re trying to get guys into the Verizon Center. Whoever invited her to this box had sent emails to all his friends saying, ‘Hey Jenna Bush [now Jenna Bush Hager] is going to be there.’ We had no idea about this. We pulled people in from the Washington field office and said, ‘Dress for the Rolling Stones concert.’”

The agents asked the Verizon Center management for help.

“That’s the beauty of being a Secret Service agent,” the agent says. “Basically, we can go anywhere, show our badge, and say, ‘Listen, here’s what we’ve got going on. Please help us.’ So we said, ‘Listen, Secret Service, got a problem. Can’t tell you who’s going to be here, but somebody important’s going to be here tonight, and we need your help because we didn’t know about it.’ And management at the Verizon Center bent over backward that night and gave us whatever we needed.”

Since the center is private property with its own security force, the agents had to get permission to enter while armed. The center provided a room as an operations center.

Jenna “doesn’t like the protection whatsoever,” says another agent. “The supervisor of her detail was scared of her, because they were afraid that she was going to pick up the phone and call Dad.”

In fact, says the agent, Jenna called her father many times when she wanted the agents to back off. “The president would call the special agent in charge,” the agent says. “The SAIC would call the detail leader, the detail leader would call the guys and say, ‘Hey you’ve got to back off.’”

“How about us doing our jobs?” an agent says. “I mean, what if something happens to her? I think she has a hard time grasping how easy it would be to pick her up, throw her into a van, and next thing you know she’s on Al Jazeera. And we’re out there, we’re trying to do the right thing. And I don’t think she understands it. She definitely didn’t respect what we’re out there trying to do for her.”

At times, Bush chewed out the detail for not following his daughter. One afternoon at the White House, Jenna snuck out a back exit that leads to the Rose Garden, eluding her detail. Bush saw her leave and called the detail leader to complain that she was not being followed.

“She stepped up to the plate and said, ‘Daddy, I didn’t tell them where I was going,’” an agent says.

An agent on the counterassault team accompanied Jenna on a trip to Central and South America.

“She was really getting a hard time in Argentina because the paparazzi were following her around, and she really couldn’t go out and do the things that she wanted to do because of all these cameras following her around,” the agent recalls. “Typically, she would just start complaining [about the Secret Service following her]. She would actually sit in the car and start looking back, trying to pick out the counterassault guys. She would say, ‘Hey those guys are too close.’ Next thing you know, the cell phone rings and it’s the DL, the detail leader, saying, ‘Hey can you guys back off a little bit? She sees you.’”

One detail leader found he could give Jenna instructions, and she would listen.

“He could call her up on the phone and be like, ‘Jenna, what the hell are you doing?’ They were buddies. They were pals. He was strictly professional, but he knew how to deal with her. He could tell her, ‘Listen, Jenna, you’re killing me. You gotta tell me what’s going on.’ And she respected him, which was great.”

Still, says another agent, “Every day we’d run the risk of losing her. She never told us where she was going. It was rare. Sometimes she’d tell Neil [the detail leader], and Neil would get the scoop of what was going on, and Neil would try hard to get that information.”

Another agent says Barbara was almost as difficult as Jenna.

“She’d pick up the phone and call Dad and say that we’re getting too close,” the agent says.

When Barbara was attending Yale, she would sometimes jump into her car with friends and drive to New York, where she would stay overnight, never giving her agents advance warning.

“Agents learned to pack a bag with clothing, because it became a habit for both Barbara and Jenna to say ‘I want to go to the airport. I want to fly to New York,’” an agent says. “These guys were prepared to work an evening shift, and all of a sudden they’re going with just the clothes on their backs.”

“Instead of calling somebody to complain about us, just tell us what you’re going to do and we’ll make it work, but just work with us, instead of trying to play games with us, making our lives miserable,” says an agent who was on Jenna’s detail.

When Barbara spent time in Africa, the White House said she was helping children with AIDS. A member of the counterassault team who accompanied her says that while she did some volunteer work in places like Cape Town, South Africa, “Most of the time she was out on her own, doing her thing, partying. She went to a couple schools, but we ended up doing an African safari, and of course the American taxpayer paid for her protection. You never knew where she was going, and she was always calling and complaining.”

Meanwhile, at a 2005 Halloween party in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, Henry Hager, who was Jenna’s boyfriend and soon-to-be husband, became so inebriated that the Secret Service wound up taking him to Georgetown University Hospital.

“It was after a Halloween party, and they were all dressed up in their costumes,” an agent on her detail recalls. “She’s like, ‘Listen, Henry, we’ve got to get you out of this costume. We got to look dignified before we go to the hospital.’ At this point, I’m thinking to myself, yeah, she’s growing up a little bit when she’s thinking about having to look dignified before going to the hospital, as opposed to looking like a sloppy drunken mess in a Halloween costume.”

Another time, Hager became drunk with Jenna in a Georgetown bar and picked a fight with several other patrons. Agents had to intervene to avoid a brawl.

“He was getting out of control and starting to pick a fight,” an agent says. “Agents pulled him aside and they said, ‘You realize that you are with the president’s daughter? You know the situation you are putting her and us in because of the way you’re acting?’”

“When she got around her friends, she was out of control,” an agent who was on her detail says of Jenna. “She was a party girl, smoking cigarettes, drinking a lot, burping, loud, and sort of obnoxious. I couldn’t believe that she was a schoolteacher during the day.”