Ronald Kessler - The First Family Detail

“The gun was left unattended accidentally for it sounds like less than a minute, and the AP found it,” a Romney aide says. “This woman was the dedicated press agent, so this woman lives with the press and spent all day every day helping them and giving them updates. A few reporters repaid her kindness and flexibility by having a meeting, and they decided that since two or three of the press corps couldn’t seem to leave it alone, and they didn’t want to get scooped on this non-story, several of them would write it. So the woman was transferred off of her post because of her mistake. Governor Romney was on her side and requested that she not be moved out.”

In fact, Romney made the request personally to Director Mark Sullivan. But the Secret Service has a policy of not acceding to such personal requests by protectees, because allowing protectees to intervene in personnel matters would tend to undermine management and possibly weaken protection.

On election night, when Romney called Obama from his suite at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston to concede that the president had won, “one of the agents was in tears,” a Romney campaign aide recalls. “He was so sad that he lost. The agents became part of the family.”

The next morning, before the agents departed, Ann Romney made buttermilk pancakes, which Mitt served them on paper plates in their vehicles outside the Romneys’ townhome in Belmont, Massachusetts.

As is common with all campaigns, the Secret Service and Romney campaign aides engaged in a constant negotiating process that sometimes led to friction. Campaigns want the candidate accessible to supporters, while agents want fans kept at bay.

If fifty or more people were to attend an event, the Secret Service wanted to create a physical buffer between them and Romney. Romney aides wanted the partition to be a rope line. The Secret Service wanted to employ bike racks. Romney aides wanted the campaign plane to be fueled immediately as Romney’s plane landed and he gave a speech at the airport. The Secret Service did not want airport personnel near the plane until they could be passed through magnetometers.

In many cases, the agents and the aides compromised: Bike racks would be set up as barriers for gatherings of a hundred people or more. Both sides understood that they were trying to do their jobs, which had competing goals. None of the issues rose to the level of importance of what had happened when the Reagan White House insisted that unscreened crowds be allowed near the president as he left the Washington Hilton.

“Typically staff wants the crowd as close as they can get to the stage,” an agent says. “We obviously have to have enough of a buffer there to make it safe to move around. A good starting point is ten feet. But staff always wants to push it in, and unfortunately for us, we have management that folds to staff and doesn’t articulate why we need this for security reasons. They always end up giving back some and shrinking it back to eight feet.”

Despite the friction, the Romney aides came to admire agents for their professionalism. But what the aides could not understand was the refusal of Secret Service headquarters to provide enough magnetometers at events. As a result, especially during the last three months of the campaign, Romney would give a separate speech to those who were outside events and had not been passed through magnetometers, jeopardizing his safety just as surely as Reagan’s safety was jeopardized.

“We had hour-long waits to get in because of the number of magnetometers they would provide,” an aide says. “They had this wrong calculation, that four hundred fifty people go through a magnetometer in one hour. We did our own calculation and found the average number was two hundred to two hundred fifty. We would spend tremendous amounts of time arguing for more resources.”

Privately, Secret Service agents confirm that the lower number is more realistic. But headquarters, always trying to save money, refused to budge to accommodate the Romney crowds. Besides prompting Romney to give speeches to unscreened crowds, the Secret Service would create what Romney chief strategist Stuart Stevens refers to as a two-tier system, allowing nonscreened crowds to sit farther away from Romney at events.

“Especially as we got bigger, the crowds started growing,” Stevens says. “But there was always this problem of getting people into the event. The Secret Service went to having two tiers with people who were not screened with magnetometers. In addition, Mitt would come out and talk to the people outside who were not magged.”

“Near the end, we usually had three events a day and had to do two speeches each time,” an aide says. “If we had a thousand people outside and a thousand inside, the governor would say to his detail leader he was going outside. The governor would walk to the parking lot and give an impromptu speech. Of course, he’d be ticked if he had to do two speeches instead of one. But we were not going to walk out of Des Moines with mad voters. These people outside events had not been screened with magnetometers and could have had firearms.”

In addition to calculating how many people actually go through a magnetometer in an hour, the Romney campaign dispatched aides to observe Obama events. Being president, Obama was provided with enough magnetometers so that most people could enter events before they started, the aides found. As a result, Obama’s events came across on television as better attended.

“Basically the president’s detail gets first whack at everything, and all the other details, there’s kind of a pecking order, and it’s hard to say it, but they get a lesser level of protection the further down the pecking order you go,” a former agent says. “There’s not enough bodies to go around, not enough budget, not enough resources.”

Romney aides pointed out to the Secret Service that their magnetometer calculations were off. They would argue about whether the Secret Service would provide four or six magnetometers at an event. “They would say, ‘Well, this is expensive equipment that had to be flown in,’” an aide says.

As a result, a country that spent $113 million in fiscal 2012 to protect the presidential candidates would not scrape together funds to provide enough magnetometers at events held by a possible future president. The same kind of corner cutting ordered by the Reagan White House led to the shooting of President Reagan.

If Romney had been taken out by an assassin with a handgun in a parking lot or with grenades in an unscreened area of an arena, the Secret Service’s failure to provide enough magnetometers would have been exposed as a shameful dereliction of duty. Like so much else about the Secret Service, that shortsightedness has remained a secret until now.

The misplaced priorities go back to an entrenched Secret Service management culture that boasts that the agency “makes do with less” and that dismisses criticism with the cavalier explanation that the Secret Service has “always done it this way.”

As a Washington Post reporter covering the social scene for twenty years, Roxanne Roberts thought she had seen it all—until one evening at the White House.

Covering the state dinner for Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday, November 24, 2009, Roberts looked up from the guest list and saw a couple who looked exactly like Michaele and Tareq Salahi. With her long blond mane, Michaele—wearing a striking red-and-gold traditional Indian lehenga —was hard to miss.

Going back to 2005, Roberts had been writing the Post ’s Reliable Source gossip column with Amy Argetsinger. Over the years, they had reported on legal wrangling over the Salahis’ Oasis Winery in Hume, Virginia, and on complaints that patrons had been ripped off by a polo championship the Salahis ran. More recently, Roberts and Argetsinger had written about the couple’s effort to be selected for Bravo’s Real Housewives of D.C .