Ronald Kessler: The First Family Detail

In training new agents, the FBI Academy teaches that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Yet over and over, voters have ignored warning signs of poor character and candidates’ track records and focused instead on their promises, their celebrity, and their acting ability on television. It’s a blindness that they would never extend to choosing a friend, a new employee, an electrician, or a plumber. Yet in entrusting the country and their security to a president, they are making a far more important decision.

Each time, voters have regretted disregarding those clues to character. When running for vice president, Richard Nixon became embroiled in an ethics issue when the New York Post revealed he had secretly accepted $18,000 from private contributors to defray his expenses, an issue Nixon addressed in what became known as his Checkers speech. It should have come as no surprise that Nixon ended up driven from office by the scandal known as Watergate.

Almost as if they feel undeserving of honorable, trustworthy politicians, Americans too often fall for the phony argument that so long as they do not influence public acts, flaws in a candidate’s character are nobody’s business. But human beings do not consist of two spheres, public and private. Poor judgment, hypocrisy, ruthlessness, deceit, arrogance, and corruption displayed in one’s personal life inevitably manifest themselves in public life.

Character is who we are. To disregard that is to court disaster. Once a candidate becomes president, any character flaws are magnified. It is difficult to imagine the pressure that being president of the United States imposes and how readily the power of being president corrupts. To be in command of the most powerful country on earth, to be able to fly anywhere at a moment’s notice on Air Force One, to take action that affects millions of lives is an intoxicating experience that only people with the most stable personalities and solid values can handle. Inviting a friend to a White House party or having an assistant place a call and announce that “the White House is calling” has such a potent effect on people that presidents and White House aides come to believe that, like Superman, they are invincible.

“I would see CEOs make asses of themselves trying to ingratiate themselves with presidents,” a former agent says. “They revert back to fourth graders. They stumble over their words. They flush with embarrassment. It never fails.”

“Their egos get so big they can’t believe anybody could tell them what to do, and they can’t control themselves,” former agent Richard Repasky says of presidents.

Trivial though it may seem, even the use of the honorific “Mr. President” leads some who have held that office to think they are divine.

“Few people, with the possible exception of his wife, will ever tell a president that he is a fool,” President Ford lamented in his book, A Time to Heal . “There’s a majesty to the office that inhibits even your closest friends from saying what is really on their minds. They won’t tell you that you just made a lousy speech or bungled a chance to get your point across. Instead, they’ll say they liked the speech you gave last week a little better or that an even finer opportunity to get your point across will come very soon. You can tell them you want the blunt truth; you can leave instructions on every bulletin board, but the guarded response you get never varies.”

Disillusioned by President Johnson’s arrogance, his press secretary George Reedy brilliantly analyzed how presidents become consumed by the office in his book The Twilight of the Presidency . “The atmosphere of the White House is a heady one,” Reedy warned. “By the twentieth century, the presidency had taken on all the regalia of monarchy except robes, a scepter, and a crown.”

“The White House is a character crucible,” says Bertram S. Brown, M.D., a psychiatrist who formerly headed the National Institute of Mental Health and was an aide to President Kennedy. “It either creates or distorts character. Few decent people want to subject themselves to the kind of grueling abuse candidates take when they run in the first place,” says Dr. Brown, who has seen in his practice many top Washington politicians and White House aides. “Many of those who run crave superficial celebrity. They are hollow people who have no principles and simply want to be elected. Even if an individual is balanced, once someone becomes president, how does one solve the conundrum of staying real and somewhat humble when one is surrounded by the most powerful office in the land, and from becoming overwhelmed by an at times pathological environment that treats you every day as an emperor? Here is where the true strength of the character of the person, not his past accomplishments, will determine whether his presidency ends in accomplishment or failure.”

Thus, unless a president comes to the office with strong character, the crushing force of the office and the adulation the chief executive receives will inevitably lead at best to poor judgment and at worst to catastrophe. As one example, the contrast between Hillary Clinton’s nastiness in private and her Cheshire cat smile in public demonstrate both hypocrisy and an unbalanced personality.

The fact that Hillary fired a White House usher who was the father of four children for trying to help a former first lady with her computer and denounced and humiliated her friend Vince Foster in front of White House colleagues demonstrates Nixonian ruthlessness, hypocrisy, and paranoia that could be expected to balloon if she were ever president. Likewise, her calculated determination to overlook her husband’s philandering to enhance her political fortunes suggests overweening ambition that could spiral out of control in the White House. Nor is Hillary’s nastiness with Secret Service agents—earning her a reputation as the most detested protectee—a sign of a stable individual who cares about the little people she claims to champion. Instead, agents say the real Hillary Clinton hungers for power and bears little resemblance to the image she seeks to project.

By the same token, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich betrayed his true character when he showed up at the hospital bed of his first wife, Jackie, after her cancer surgeries and tried to discuss details of the divorce he wanted. Gingrich later dismissed what happened by saying the couple “got into an argument, which I think people who have gone through divorces can probably identify with.”

In contrast to their professed distaste for government waste, possible Republican presidential candidates Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Rand Paul show up for five-minute interviews at Fox News with five or six fawning aides in tow. Normally, one or two aides accompany members of Congress for such appearances.

Much as Nixon’s Checkers episode was an early clue to his character, Joe Biden’s irresponsibility and colossal lack of judgment in refusing to let the nuclear football near him in Delaware, and his hypocrisy and arrogance in claiming to be the sheriff who cuts government waste while incurring costs of a million dollars for personal trips on Air Force Two, are early signs of potential disaster were he to become president.

“If the general public knew what was really going on inside the White House, they would scream,” a former agent says. “Americans have such an idealized notion of the presidency and the virtues that go with it, honesty and so forth. That’s the furthest thing from the truth.” He adds, “You just shake your head when you think of all the things you’ve heard and seen and the faith that people have in these celebrity-type people. They are probably worse than most average individuals.… If we would pay attention to their track records, it’s all there. We seem to put blinders on ourselves and overlook these frailties.”