Ronald Kessler - In the President's Secret Service

“He may be missing an element, like a guy who honestly thinks he can kill a president and has made the threat, but he’s a quadriplegic or can’t formulate a plan well enough to carry it out,” says an agent.

Class II threats usually include people who are confined to a prison or mental hospital. According to a virulent rumor in state prisons, if a prisoner threatens the president and is convicted of the federal crime, he will be moved to a federal prison, where conditions are generally more favorable than in state prisons. For that reason, the Secret Service often encounters threats from prisoners. For example, in November 2008, Gordon L. Chadwick, age twenty-seven, threatened to kill President George W. Bush while serving a four-year state prison term in Houston for threatening a jail official. As happened in Chadwick’s case, a federal prison term for threatening the president is tacked on to the state prison term.

After another state prisoner wrote a threatening letter to Bush, an agent arranged to meet with him. After driving three hours to the prison, the agent asked him if he knew why the agent was there.

“Yep. When do I go to federal prison?” the man said.

The prisoner added that he hoped to “see the country” and, since he was serving a life term, this would be his best opportunity. When the agent explained that he would be serving his state term first, the man said he had heard that threatening the president was the way to be transferred to a federal prison.

“I could have strangled him,” the agent says.

A Class I individual—the least serious threat—may have blurted out at a bar that he wants to kill the president.

“You interview him, and he has absolutely no intention of carrying this threat out,” an agent says. “Agents will assess him and conclude, ‘Yeah, he said something stupid; yeah, he committed a federal crime. But we’re not going to charge him or pursue that guy’ You just have to use your discretion and your best judgment.”

In most cases, a visit from Secret Service agents is enough to make anyone think twice about carrying out a plot. When Pope John Paul II visited Saint Louis in January 1999, the Secret Service, which was protecting him, received a report about a man seen driving a camper in the city. On the sides of the camper were inscriptions such as “The Pope Should Die” and “The Pope Is the Devil.”

Through the reported license plate number, the Secret Service tracked the man to an address, which turned out to be his mother’s home not far from Saint Louis. When interviewed by Secret Service agents, the man’s mother said her son was driving to the mountains in western Montana near Kalispell to see his brother.

Norm Jarvis, the resident agent in charge, drove to the Kalispell area where the brother was supposed to be living. The forested area is vast. Like many who live in the area, the brother did not have an address. Jarvis hoped local law enforcement would know where he could start looking.

“I was driving down the road, and lo and behold, coming the other way down the street, is this camper,” Jarvis says. “The Pope Should Die” and “The Pope Is the Devil” were written on the sides of the vehicle. The man driving the camper fit the description of the suspect. Jarvis could not believe his luck.

“I spun my car around and turned on my lights and siren,” Jarvis says. “I got up alongside him and waved him over.”

With the man’s wife sitting beside him, Jarvis interviewed the man, who said he had been in mental institutions and was off his medication. The man had no firearms, and Jarvis decided he was not capable of harming the Pope. Thus, he was a Class II threat. Jarvis took his fingerprints and photographed him. He warned him to stay away from Saint Louis during the Pope’s visit, and he suggested the man get some help.

Jarvis called headquarters to report his contact with the suspect and the results of his initial findings. Within a few days, he finished writing a report and called the duty desk to say he was going to be sending it.

“They told me the guy had killed himself with his brother’s pistol,” Jarvis says. “His brother reported that he was so shook up after talking to me that he decided to end his life. He felt that he couldn’t escape the devil; the devil was going to find him. And then he shot himself.”

IF LYNDON JOHNSON was out of control, the Secret Service found Richard Nixon and his family to be the strangest protectees. Like Johnson, Nixon—code-named Searchlight—did not sleep in the same bedroom with his wife. But unlike Johnson, who consulted Lady Bird on issues he faced, Nixon seemed to have no relationship with his wife, Pat.

“He [Nixon] never held hands with his wife,” a Secret Service agent says.

An agent remembers accompanying Nixon, Pat, and their two daughters during a nine-hole golf game near their home at San Clemente, California. During the hour and a half, “He never said a word,” the former agent says. “Nixon could not make conversation unless it was to discuss an issue…. Nixon was always calculating, seeing what effect it would have.”

Unknown to the public, Pat Nixon—code-named Starlight—was an alcoholic who tippled martinis. By the time Nixon left the White House to live at San Clemente, Pat “was in a pretty good stupor much of the time,” an agent on Nixon’s detail says. “She had trouble remembering things.”

“One day out in San Clemente when I was out there, a friend of mine was on post, and he hears this rustling in the bushes,” says another agent who was on Nixon’s detail. “You had a lot of immigrants coming up on the beach, trying to get to the promised land. You never knew if anybody’s going to be coming around the compound.”

At that point, the other agent “cranks one in the shotgun. He goes over to where the rustling is, and it’s Pat,” the former agent says. “She’s on her hands and knees. She’s trying to find the house.”

Pat, he says, “had a tough life. Nixon would hardly talk. The only time he enjoyed himself was when he was with his friends Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp, when they would drink together.”

Nixon often spent time with Abplanalp on his friend’s island, Grand Cay in the Bahamas.

“Just to give you an idea of his athletic prowess, or lack of it, he loved to fish,” a former agent says. “He’d be on the back of Abplanalp’s fifty-five-foot yacht, and he would sit in this swivel seat with his fishing pole. Abplanalp’s staff would hook Nixon’s hook and throw the hook out. And Nixon would be just sitting there, with both hands on the pole, and he’d catch something, and the staff would reel it in for him, take the fish off, put it in the bucket. Nixon wouldn’t do anything but watch.”

During Watergate, “Nixon was very depressed,” says another former agent. “He wasn’t functioning as president any longer. [Bob] Haldeman [Nixon’s chief of staff] ran the country.”

Milton Pitts, who ran several barbershops in Washington, would go to a tiny barbershop in the basement of the West Wing to cut Nixon’s hair.

“Nixon talked very little,” Pitts told me. “He wanted to know what the public was saying. We had a TV there. But he never watched TV. All the other presidents did.”

During Watergate, Nixon would ask Pitts, “Well, what are they saying about us today?”

Pitts would say he hadn’t heard much news that day.

“I didn’t want to get into what people were saying,” Pitts said. “I’m not going to give him anything unpleasant. He was my boss.”