Ronald Kessler: The First Family Detail

In listening to their talk in the presidential limousine, “Michelle’s agenda goes back to when she said about her husband running for president, ‘For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,’” a former agent says.

But if Secret Service agents respect Obama, they say the agency’s corner cutting, laxness, and undercutting of basic security protocols threaten the life of the president. The corner cutting ranges from letting people into events without magnetometer screening to not keeping up-to-date with the latest firearms, cutting the size of counterassault teams, letting agents fill out their own physical fitness test scores, and ignoring firearms requalification requirements.

While most of the corner cutting goes on behind the scenes, symptoms of the lowering of standards emerged when Secret Service uniformed officers let party crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi and Carlos Allen into a state dinner at the White House, even though they were not on the guest list, in November 2009. It emerged again when I broke the story in the Washington Post on April 14, 2012, that the Secret Service sent home agents believed to have engaged prostitutes while assigned to protect President Obama during his trip to Cartagena, Colombia, after one of the agents refused to pay a prostitute her agreed-upon fee.

Secret Service agents have learned that if they blow the whistle on such high-handed breaches of security as letting Bradley Cooper’s vehicle into a secure off-limits area without screening, they will suffer retribution from management. The pressure not to rock the boat takes precedence over protecting the president from the jackal, the term agents use to refer to a potential assassin.

While Cooper arrived at the Hilton before Obama, given the orders handed down from the Secret Service official in New York, agents would have allowed the actor’s vehicle to remain on the driveway at the hotel indefinitely until Obama arrived. If loaded with explosives, it could have taken out the president.

“Agents were told just let Bradley Cooper through,” an agent says. “The agents did as they were told and let Cooper’s vehicle through, out of fear of repercussions. That’s just one example of the arrogance of senior managers in the Secret Service. They think they’re accountable to no one.”

During his presidency, Richard Nixon maintained what was known as the Florida White House on Key Biscayne. Fronting Biscayne Bay on the Atlantic coast, the compound on Bay Lane consisted of Nixon’s home, a second house used as his office, and homes for his close friends Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp. At a checkpoint on Bay Lane, the Secret Service blocked vehicles from entering the compound unless they had been cleared.

One weekend during Nixon’s first term in office, Rebozo, a banker, and Abplanalp, a manufacturer of aerosol valves, drove up to the guard post in Rebozo’s convertible at two in the morning.

“Both were loaded,” a former agent on the Nixon detail recalls. “They had been partying. Bebe was a hell-raiser and would go on all night. They laughed and said they had to wake up the president. They had a present for him.”

Just then, the agent at the post heard a noise from the trunk.

“Excuse me, I think there is something in the trunk,” the agent said.

“No, no. There is nothing in the trunk,” Rebozo said.

“Who is in the trunk?” the agent demanded. He told them to open it.

“There was a naked young lady in the trunk, totally naked,” the former agent says. “She had a good body and was holding a bottle of champagne.”

“We are going to give her to the president,” Rebozo explained.

“No,” the agent said firmly. The young woman had no identification. Therefore, he could not do a background check on her.

But the agent allowed Rebozo and Abplanalp to deliver the stripper to Rebozo’s home. She could not go near Nixon’s home, at 500 Bay Lane. And given his habits, Nixon—code-named Searchlight—likely had been asleep since 9:30 P.M.

“If he had seen the naked young lady, he probably would have had a heart attack,” says another former agent who learned about the incident.

“Nixon never got a piece of tail in his life,” a former agent on his detail says jokingly. “He’d go out and have a couple drinks with Bebe and Abplanalp and start slurring his speech. Nobody would see it, but that’s the only time he ever let his hair down.”

In contrast to Nixon, his vice president Spiro Agnew had a number of extramarital affairs going at once. All the while, the Republican publicly proselytized about the importance of family values.

One morning in late 1969, Agnew asked his Secret Service detail of five agents to take him to a Washington hotel, now the 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 for the vice president, then returned to the hotel to pick him up.

Agnew “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.” After that, the agent says, they couldn’t look Agnew’s wife in the eye.

In addition to his relationship with the woman he saw at the hotel, Agnew was having an affair with a dark-haired, well-endowed female member of his staff. When traveling out of town, Agnew insisted that the Secret Service arrange for her to stay in a hotel room adjoining his, a former agent says. The woman was the age of one of Agnew’s daughters. And an agent says Agnew also had an affair going with a blond woman in New Orleans. The agent found out because, at one point, he expressed interest in her himself. Another agent warned him that she was part of Agnew’s “private stock.”

Ultimately, near the end of Nixon’s second term, Agnew was charged with accepting $100,000 in cash bribes. Agnew had taken the payoffs when he was Baltimore County executive in Maryland and later when he was vice president. Agnew pleaded nolo contendere and agreed to resign. He left office on October 10, 1973.

Agents considered Nixon one of the country’s strangest presidents. He was notorious for walking on the beach at Key Biscayne and at his home in San Clemente, California, in a suit or sport jacket.

“He’d go out on the beach in the morning and walk by himself,” a former agent says. “You almost had to feel sorry for the guy. He wouldn’t know to put a bathing suit on. He’d wear slacks, a jacket, and dress shoes walking along the ocean.”

“Nixon could not make conversation unless it was to discuss an issue,” a former agent on his detail says. “Nixon was always calculating, seeing what effect his words would have. The one exception was baseball. You dropped a baseball name or a baseball figure—bingo! But if you couldn’t recite back batting averages and heights and who’s on what and who got traded and who’s up and down, that conversation would end just as fast as it started.”

In contrast to the swagger that comes across in his taped conversations revealed during the Watergate scandal, Nixon in private seemed passive and often out of it. After spending a weekend at Camp David, the president stepped out of his cabin with his wife, Pat, to get into a Secret Service limousine that would take them to Marine One, the president’s helicopter.