“If I had gotten a clear shot at the man, I would have shot him,” Smith says.
As with all presidents, some people totally lost it when meeting Reagan. One woman in a crowd threw her baby into the air. Agent Glenn Smith had to catch the little girl. An eighty-year-old woman held on to Reagan’s hand so tightly that Smith had to pry it loose. Hoping to get an autograph, a sheriff approached Air Force One at high speed in his cruiser with lights flashing. The sheriff brought his car to a halt just in time.
“In a few more seconds, we would have opened fire on the car,” Smith says.
While in office, Reagan never showed the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, which ultimately led to his death. “We had a hundred twenty agents on his detail, and he seemed to remember everyone’s name,” Smith says.
But in March 1993, a year before he announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s, former president Reagan honored Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney at his library and invited him to his ranch. As Mulroney was leaving, the prime minister asked Agent Chomicki, “Do you notice something with the president?”
Chomicki said he did but did not know what the problem was.
“He would just stop midsentence and forget what he was saying,” Chomicki recalls. “Then he would just start a whole new story.”
After Reagan had been out of office for three years, he was to speak at an event in Akron, Ohio. In contrast to the retinue he’d had as president, Reagan traveled with just one staffer and his Secret Service contingent. The agent in charge of the former president’s protective detail came into the command post and said to agent Dowling, “You know, the president’s been sitting in his room alone all morning. And he’d really like for some folks to talk to. Would you guys mind if he came over and sat in the command post and just chatted with you guys for a while?”
“That’d be terrific. Bring him over,” Dowling said.
For two hours, Reagan chatted with the agents, telling stories and jokes.
“He told us he and Mikhail Gorbachev had private conversations,” Dowling says. “They agreed that their talks were not about today and are not about us. They’re about our grandchildren and the life that they’re going to live.”
16
The Big Show
TO SIGN UP to take a bullet for the president requires extraordinary commitment. Besides the glamour and the travel, “I see being in the Secret Service as a calling for me to serve my country and do good at a higher level,” one agent says.
“Agents do not protect any individual but rather the integrity of the office, so the bullet we may take is for the office—not the person,” another agent says.
The job requires not only protecting the president but safeguarding the lives of other agents.
“When I walked into an event with the president as part of the protective detail, I knew and trusted that everybody would do their job,” former agent Norm Jarvis says. “The formation has shift agents, and each has responsibilities unique to each position. So if everybody takes care of their position, then you don’t have to worry about your back, or who’s looking out over your shoulder. Somebody is. You just have to focus on what your job is at the time. Agents build up an awful lot of trust and appreciation for each other.”
The reverse is true as well.
“If you detect that somebody’s lazy or not thorough or not doing the job, it means more than just ‘Hey, this guy’s a bum and I’ve got to spend my time with him,’” Jarvis says. “You feel like your life could possibly be in danger. Certainly the president’s life would be in danger. So there’s a lot of us within the detail policing ourselves and using positive and negative sanctions to get people to do the right thing all the time.”
Agents recognize that the job entails long hours and extensive travel. In describing job opportunities, the Secret Service’s website makes a point of that.
“Agents have a certain drive,” a Secret Service agent says. “They’re all kind of wired the same; they all want to see the job get done, and they want to get it done the right way.”
But many say that the agency’s management needlessly makes the job tougher. In particular, the Secret Service’s senseless transfer policies drive agents to quit before retirement, adding to the government’s costs. This comes at a time when, because of threats from terrorists, the need for the Secret Service has never been greater.
Agents cite numerous situations where fellow agents are denied transfers to cities where their spouses work, while others are forced to transfer to those same cities. Often, the agents who want to transfer have offered to pay their own moving costs. Instead, the Secret Service pays fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars each to move agents who do not want to be transferred to those cities.
“We sign up to take a bullet, but that’s not the hardest part of the job,” Jessica Johnson, a former Secret Service agent, says. “It’s not anything that we normally face. The risk is there. But what makes the job very difficult is the mismanagement. If the Secret Service were better managed, you’d have a lot better workforce, a lot more people who don’t quit.”
Since 9/11, the private sector has been offering hefty salaries to anyone with a federal law enforcement background. Typically, former Secret Service agents sign up as vice president for security of a major corporation or start their own security firms. For those who want to remain vested to earn full government pensions, opportunities have expanded as well at other federal law enforcement agencies.
Until 1984, under a previous retirement system, Secret Service agents could not keep their pensions if they transferred to another government agency. Now they can. Agents can retire at any age after twenty-five years with the agency. They can retire at age fifty if they have served twenty years. For both government agencies and private companies, a Secret Service or FBI agent is a prize catch.
The FBI has taken steps to retain agents, while the Secret Service has not. In contrast to the Secret Service, after three years with the bureau, unless he or she chooses to go into management, an FBI agent can stay in the same city for the rest of his or her career. An agent going into management can remain in the same city for five years.
The Secret Service, on the other hand, typically transfers agents three to four times during a twenty-five-year career. An agent who enters management may move five to six times. The rationale is that agents need to acquire experience in different offices. But experience in one office does not translate into another. Decades ago, the FBI had the same policy. The bureau scrapped it because the constant moves were not necessary and resulted in many agents leaving the bureau. In turn, that led to high costs both for moving families and for training new agents to replace those who left.
Not having to transfer as often, FBI agents can better work out living arrangements with spouses. The FBI at least tries to take into account situations where a spouse must work in a particular city, sometimes addressing these as hardship cases.
Essentially, according to agents, the Secret Service moves agents around like checkers on a board without regard to their wishes. Rather than explaining the reasoning behind transfers or other policies that impinge on the agents’ personal lives, the Secret Service will typically give the high-handed response that the change is necessary because of the “needs of the service.” The exception is when an agent has “juice,” meaning connections to higher-ups, a situation that contributes to poor morale.