Ronald Kessler - In the President's Secret Service

One afternoon, Alexander Butterfield, who would later reveal the existence of the Nixon tapes, came in for a haircut just before Nixon did. Motioning to the television set, Butterfield said to Pitts, “Leave that on. I want him [Nixon] to see what they are doing to us.”

But as soon as Nixon walked into the barbershop, “He pushed the button, and the TV went off,” Pitts says. “He said, ‘Well, what are they saying about us today?’ I said, ‘Mr. President, I haven’t heard much news today, sir.’”

As the Watergate scandal progressed, “Nixon got very paranoid,” a Secret Service agent says. “He didn’t know what to believe or whom to trust. He did think people were lying to him. He thought at the end everyone was lying.”

While Nixon rarely drank before the Watergate scandal, he began drinking more heavily as the pressure took its toll. He would down a martini or a manhattan.

“All he could handle was one or two,” a Secret Service agent says. “He wouldn’t be flying high, but you could tell he wasn’t in total control of himself. He would loosen up, start talking more, and smile. It was completely out of character. But he had two, and that was that. He had them every other night. But always at the end of business and in the residence. You never saw him drunk in public.”

In contrast to the blustering in his taped conversations, Nixon in private seemed passive and often out of it, although he did have a sense of humor. After spending a weekend at Camp David, Nixon stepped out of his cabin with Pat to get into a Secret Service limousine that would take them to Marine One, the president’s helicopter.

“Secret Service agents were at the ready to move,” says one of Nixon’s agents. “The agent who was driving was checking everything out, making sure the heater was properly adjusted. Nixon paused to talk to Pat. The driver accidentally honked his horn, and Nixon, thinking he was being impatient, said, ‘I’ll be right there.’”

At his San Clemente home, Nixon was watching television one afternoon while feeding dog biscuits to one of his dogs.

“Nixon took a dog biscuit and was looking at it and then takes a bite out of it,” says Richard Repasky who was on his detail.

Nixon would walk on the beach wearing a suit—all his suits were navy blue—and dress shoes. Even in summer, he would insist on having a fire burning in the fireplace. One evening, Nixon built a fire in the fireplace at San Clemente and forgot to open the flue damper.

“The smoke backed up in the house, and two agents came running,” says a former agent who was on the Nixon detail.

“Can you find him?” one of the agents asked the other.

“No, I can’t find the son of a bitch,” the other agent said.

From the bedroom, a voice piped up.

“Son of a bitch is here trying to find a matching pair of socks,” Nixon said, poking fun at himself.

One agent will never forget a reunion for Vietnam prisoners of war held outside Nixon’s San Clemente home.

“This POW did a series of paintings of Hanoi camp scenes,” the former agent says. “He was quite good. He presented Nixon with a big painting of POWs. Later that evening, after everyone had left, Nixon was going back to his home. It was a warm night. His assistant turned to Nixon and said, ‘What do you want me to do with the picture? Should I bring it in the house?’”

“Put that goddamned thing in the garage,” Nixon said. “I don’t want to see that.”

The former agent says he shook his head and thought, “You smiled and shook hands with these guys, and you couldn’t care less. It was all show.”

“Monday through Friday, Nixon would leave his home at twelve-fifty-five P.M. to play golf,” Dale Wunderlich, a former agent on his detail, says. “He would insist on golfing even in pouring rain.”

Occasionally, Nixon’s son-in-law David Eisenhower, grandson of former president Dwight Eisenhower, went with him. Agents considered the younger Eisenhower the most clueless person they had ever protected. One day, the Nixons gave him a barbecue grill as a Christmas present. With the Nixons inside his house, Eisenhower tried to start the grill to char some steaks. After a short time, he told Wunderlich it would not light.

“He had poured most of a bag of briquets into the pit of the grill and lit matches on top of them, but he had not used fire starter,” Wunderlich says.

“Do you know anything about garage door openers?” Eisenhower asked another Secret Service agent. “I need a little help. I’ve had it two years, and I don’t get a light. Shouldn’t the light come on?”

“Maybe the lightbulb is burnt out,” the agent said.

“Really?” David said.

The agent looked up. There was no bulb in the socket.

“We did a loose surveillance, or tail, on David Eisenhower when there were a lot of threats on the president, and he was going to George Washington University Law School in Washington,” a former agent says. “He was in a red Pinto. He comes out of classes and goes to a Safeway in Georgetown. He parks and buys some groceries. A woman parks in a red Pinto nearby. He comes out in forty-five minutes and puts the groceries in the other Pinto. He spent a minute and a half to two minutes trying to start it. Meanwhile, she comes out, screams, and says, ‘What are you doing in my car?’”

“This is my car,” he insisted. “I just can’t get it started right now.”

The woman threatened to call the police. He finally got out, and she drove off.

“He was still dumbfounded,” the former agent says. “He looked at us. We pointed at his car. He got in and drove off like nothing had happened.”

Subsequently, Eisenhower bought a new Oldsmobile and planned to drive it from California to Pennsylvania to see his grandmother Mamie Eisenhower, who was code-named Springtime. In Phoenix, the car gave out. Eisenhower called a local dealership, which said it would fix the car the next morning. After staying overnight in a motel, Eisenhower went to the dealership where the car had been towed. The dealership told him the problem had been fixed: The car had run out of gas and needed a fill-up.

Near the end of Nixon’s presidency, his vice president Spiro Agnew was charged with accepting one hundred thousand dollars in cash bribes. Agnew had taken the payoffs when he was a Maryland state official and later when he was vice president. Agnew pleaded nolo contendere and agreed to resign, leaving office on October 10, 1973.

What never came out was that the married Agnew, a champion of family values who made no secret of his disdain for the liberal press, was having affairs while in office. One morning in late 1969, Agnew asked his Secret Service detail of five agents to take him to what is now Washington’s elegant St. Regis hotel at 923 Sixteenth Street NW.

“We took him in the back door and brought him to a room on the fourth floor,” says one of the agents. “He asked us to leave him alone for three hours. The detail leader understood he was having an affair with a woman.”

The agents waited in Lafayette Park, two blocks from the hotel and across the street from the entrance to the White House. They then returned to the hotel to pick up the vice president.

“He looked embarrassed,” the former agent says. “Leaving him in an unsecured location was a breach of security. As agents, it was embarrassing because we were facilitating his adultery. We felt like pimps. We couldn’t look her [his wife] in the eye after that.”

In addition to that incident, Agnew was having an affair with a dark-haired, well-endowed female member of his staff. Agnew would not stay in hotels overnight unless the Secret Service arranged for her to be given an adjoining room, a former agent says. The woman was the age of one of Agnew’s daughters.