Ronald Kessler: In the President's Secret Service

Johnson’s drinking only fueled his outbursts.

“We were serving roast beef one time,” says MacMillan. “He [Johnson] came back in the cabin. Jack Valenti [Johnson’s aide] was sitting there. He had just gotten his dinner tray. On it was a beautiful slice of rare roast beef.”

Johnson grabbed the tray and said, “You dumb son of a bitch. You are eating raw meat.”

Johnson then brought the food back to the galley and said, “You two sons of bitches, look at this. This is raw. You gotta cook the meat on my airplane. Don’t you serve my people raw meat. Goddamn, if you two boys serve raw meat on my airplane again, you’ll both end up in Vietnam.”

Johnson threw the tray upside down onto the floor and stormed off.

A few minutes later, Valenti went back to the galley.

“Sorry about your dinner, Mr. Valenti,” MacMillan said.

“Do we have any more rare?” Valenti asked.

“We have plenty of rare,” MacMillan said.

“Well, he won’t be back. He’s done his thing. Don’t serve me any fully cooked meat.”

Gerald F. Pisha, another Air Force One steward, says that on one occasion when Johnson didn’t like the way a steward had mixed a drink for him, he threw it onto the floor.

“Get somebody who knows how to make a drink for me,” Johnson said.

At his ranch in Texas, Johnson was even more raunchy than at the White House. At a press conference at his ranch, Johnson “whips his thing out and takes a leak, facing them [the reporters] sideways,” says D. Patrick O’Donnell, an Air Force One flight engineer. “You could see the stream. It was embarrassing. I couldn’t believe it. Here was a man who is the president of the U.S., and he is taking a whiz out on the front lawn in front of a bunch of people.”

A Secret Service agent posted to his ranch recalls that Johnson would take celebrities on a tour of the ranch in a car that—unknown to them—was amphibious. As he approached the Pedernales River, he would drive the vehicle into the river, terrifying his guests.

At six one morning, the agent was posted outside a door that led directly to Johnson’s bedroom.

“I’m looking at the sun coming up and listening to the birds, and I hear this noise,” the former agent says. “I turn around, and here’s the most powerful man in the world taking a leak off the back porch. And I remembered a saying down in Texas that I heard when I first got on that detail: When LBJ goes to the ranch, the bulls hang their heads in shame. This guy had a tool you wouldn’t believe.”

The former agent was present when LBJ held a press conference with White House pool reporters as he sat on a toilet, moving his bowels. He had discarded his girdle, which he wore to hide his girth.

“I just couldn’t believe that this stuff was going on,” the former agent says. “But this was an everyday thing to the guys that were with him all the time.”

After Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, an agent was told to wake Johnson in the morning so he could meet with his press secretary.

“I tapped on his bedroom door,” the former agent says. “Lady Bird said to come in.”

“He’s in the bathroom,” she said.

“I tapped on the bathroom door,” the former agent says. “Johnson was sitting on the can. Toilet paper was everywhere. It was bizarre.”

“If Johnson weren’t president, he’d be in an insane asylum,” former agent Richard Roth says he thought to himself when he was occasionally on Johnson’s detail.

Johnson kept dozens of peacocks at his ranch.

“One night at midnight, one of these peacocks was walking around,” says David Curtis, who was temporarily assigned to Johnson’s Secret Service detail at his ranch. “It was a moonlit night, and an agent picked up a rock just intending to scare the darn thing. He lobbed it over in the direction of the peacock and hit him right in the head. The peacock went down like a ton of bricks.”

After an agent relieved him at his post, the agent told other agents, “Oh, my God, I’ve killed a peacock. What do you think we should do?”

“The consensus was, there were so damn many of them around, no one would miss one,” Curtis says. “Just drag him down to the Pedernales River and throw him in. So that’s what they did.”

At the break of dawn, the day shift relieved the midnight people. One of the day shift agents called the command post on the radio.

“My God, you’ve got to get out here!” the agent said. “Looks like a drunken peacock. He’s all wet. He’s staggering from one foot to the other, feathers askew. He’s walking back up toward the house.”

Somehow, the peacock had recovered and managed to drag itself out of the river. Johnson never found out about the incident.

“Johnson was the grand thief,” Gulley his White House military aide, says. “He knew where the money was. He had us set up a fund code-named Green Ball. It was a Defense Department fund supposedly to assist the Secret Service to purchase weapons. They used it for whatever Johnson wanted to use it for. Fancy hunting guns were bought. Johnson and his friends kept them.”

All the while, Johnson fostered the image of a penny-pincher who was saving taxpayer money. As part of an economy drive, Johnson announced he had ordered the lights turned off inside the ladies’ room in the press area.

When Johnson left office, Gulley says he arranged for at least ten flights to fly government property to Johnson’s ranch. O’Donnell, the Air Force One flight engineer, says he flew three of the missions, shipping what he understood were White House items back to the Johnson ranch.

“We flew White House furniture back,” O’Donnell says. “I was on some of the missions. The flights back were at seven-fifty or eight-fifty P.M. and early in the morning. … I think he even took the electric bed out of Walter Reed army hospital. That was a disgrace.”

Johnson’s greatest achievement was overcoming Southern resistance to passage of civil rights legislation, yet in private, he regularly referred to blacks as “niggers.”

After Johnson died, Secret Service agents guarding Lady Bird were amazed to find that even though their home was crammed with photos of Johnson with famous people, not one photo pictured him with JFK.

EVERY DAY, THE Secret Service receives an average of ten threats against any of its protectees, usually the president. Ironically, until after the Kennedy assassination, murdering the president was not a federal crime. Yet in 1917, Congress made “knowingly and willfully” threatening the president—as opposed to killing him—a federal violation. As later amended, the law carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000, or both. The same penalty applies to threatening the president-elect, the vice president, the vice-president-elect, or any officer next in the line of succession.

To ensure that an attack on a protectee—called an AOP—does not take place, the Secret Service uses a range of secret techniques, tools, strategies, and procedures. One of those tools is the extensive files the Secret Service Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division keeps on people who are potential threats to the president.

To most potential assassins, killing the president would be like hitting the jackpot.

“We want to know about those individuals,” a former agent who worked intelligence says. “Sooner or later, they will direct their attention to the president if they can’t get satisfaction with a senator or governor.”

The Secret Service may detect threats anywhere, but those directed at the White House come in by email, regular mail, and telephone. Upon hearing a threatening call, White House operators are instructed to patch in a Secret Service agent at headquarters. Built in 1997, Secret Service headquarters is an anonymous nine-story tan brick building on H Street at Ninth Street NW in Washington. For security reasons, there are no trash cans in front of the building. An all-seeing security camera is attached below the overhang of the entrance.