“No. Looks like they cleaned it out,” Albracht said.
“I turned around to see George Bush off my right shoulder,” Albracht says. “After I get over the shock of who it was, Bush says, ‘Hey I was really hoping there would be something to eat.’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, every day the stewards bake cookies, but every night they hide them from us.’ With a wink of his eye he says, ‘Let’s find ’em.’ So we tore the kitchen apart, and sure enough we did find them. He took a stack of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk and went back up to bed, and I took a stack and a glass of milk and went back to the basement post.”
When Albracht returned to the post, Dowling asked, “Who the hell were you in there talking to?”
“Oh, yeah, sure, right,” Dowling said when Albracht told him.
Bush’s regular vice presidential detail played a prank on an agent who was on temporary assignment, telling him that it was okay to wash his clothes in the vice president’s laundry room.
“He went down and used the vice president’s washing machine and dryer,” former agent Patrick Sullivan recalls. “Mrs. Bush came down and said to the other agents, ‘He’s doing his laundry!’”
A supervisor heard about the incident. Mortified, he told Barbara Bush that it had all been a practical joke.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said.
In fact, at the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara Bush once strode to the Secret Service post and asked if agents had any laundry they would like her to do, since she was about to do a load anyway. She was so close to the agents that when Pete Dowling’s wife, Lindy was expecting a baby, the first lady instructed him to call her when the baby arrived, day or night.
As vice president, Bush flew to a fund-raiser in Boise, Idaho, during the 1982 election campaign. He was to have dinner at the Chart House seafood restaurant on North Garden Street on the banks of the Colorado River.
“The way we protected him, we had some agents inside, but typically what we’d do was situate ourselves at dining tables near him,” says former agent Dowling.
Dowling had been seated a few minutes when he heard a radio transmission that two white males in camouflage outfits with long weapons were low-crawling around the back toward their location. They had their weapons in their hands and were crawling on their bellies, moving themselves along with their elbows.
Just then, Dowling looked up and saw the two bad guys. He recalled intelligence reports that Libya had sent a hit squad to the United States to kill American officials. The agent instinctively jumped out of his chair and tackled Bush to protect him. As food flew everywhere, Dowling threw the vice president onto the ground and flopped on top of him.
“What’s going on here?” Bush asked.
“I don’t know, but just keep your head down,” Dowling replied.
Dowling looked up. He saw about a hundred law enforcement officers with their guns drawn—Secret Service agents, sheriff’s department deputies, and state troopers. They were on the scene as part of routine protection for a visit by the vice president. The two bad guys were kneeling with their hands clasped behind their heads.
“We evacuated the VP out of the restaurant to get him away from whatever danger may have still been there,” Dowling says. “You would think I had just thwarted an assassination attempt.”
As it turned out, the restaurant was near an apartment complex where the girlfriend of one of the two men lived.
“The guy had gone to see his girlfriend, and she was there with another guy,” Dowling says. “So the boyfriend got very angry. The other guy who was there with his girlfriend pulled out a knife, kind of slashed him, didn’t hurt him badly. So this fellow who had been cut decided that he and another guy were going to go back and kill the guy that night.”
Not knowing that the vice president was coming, they parked in the lot at the Chart House and decided to sneak through the woods to get to the apartment complex. They were tried and convicted on illegal weapons and attempted assault charges.
In contrast to many other presidents, Bush—code-named Timberwolf—treated Secret Service agents and everyone else around him with respect and consideration, as did his wife, Barbara. After Bush 41 became president, his twelve-year-old grandson, George Prescott Bush, was hitting tennis balls off the back of the White House tennis court. J. Bonnie Newman, assistant to the president for management and administration, and Joseph W. Hagin, deputy assistant to the president for scheduling, approached the court to play. The two White House aides had earlier reserved the court, but when they saw the president’s grandson playing, they turned away and began walking back toward the White House.
Just then, Barbara Bush—code named Tranquility—came along and told George, son of Jeb Bush, to get off the court.
“When we went down and saw the president’s grandson, there was no question he should be the one playing on the court,” Newman says. “But Mrs. Bush saw it and just plucked him off. She really sent the message not only to staff but to family as well that you remember your manners.”
“Bush 41 is a great man, just an all-around nice person,” an agent says. “Both he and Mrs. Bush are very thoughtful, and they think outside their own little world. They think of other people.”
Bush “made it clear to all his staff that none of them was a security expert, and if the Secret Service made a decision, he was the one to sign off on it, and they were never to question our decisions or make life difficult,” Dowling says. “So consequently it was kind of a moment in time, because all the entities really worked well together to make his protection and the activities that he participated in successful.”
Bush was so considerate of the agents who protected him that he would stay in town on Christmas Eve so agents could spend it with their families. Then he would fly to Texas the day after Christmas. The Secret Service’s only complaint about Bush is that, to this day, he is hyperactive.
“He can’t sit still,” an agent says. “He is in perpetual motion.”
In every hotel, the Secret Service had to make sure Bush had an exercise bike in his suite. If the hotel did not have one, the agency rented one.
“He can’t read a book,” the agent says. “He has to be on a treadmill or StairMaster. It’s go, go, go. For the Secret Service, that meant more work. The tennis court, horseshoes, the golf course, the boat. Always something.”
Early on, Bush chafed at protection.
“Most people have difficulty adjusting to having protection,” says former Secret Service deputy director Danny Spriggs. “These folks do it because it goes with the job. However, it’s nothing they embrace initially. You infringe on their private lives. Even though I did it for twenty-eight years, I can’t imagine what it would be like to be told I can’t go to a movie or amusement park whenever I want, or to be told that friends I have known for years must submit their name, Social Security number, and date of birth before they can visit me.”
One week, with motorcycle sirens screaming, the motorcade twice took him to events just a few blocks from the White House. Bush fussed about the precautions and wanted to know why he couldn’t simply walk to the events. His protective detail decided to play a joke on him. While the president’s limousine and backup are driven by agents, other Secret Service vehicles in the motorcade are driven by what are called physical support technicians. Billy Ingram, one of these drivers, was a grizzled Korean War veteran.
“He always had a cigarette dangling from his lips with ashes dropping all over,” says Joe Funk, an agent who was on Bush’s detail. “His personal car was twenty years old and dented. It reeked of cigarette smoke.”
Agents affixed the presidential seal and American flag to Ingram’s car. When the president came out for the next motorcade ride, his limousine was nowhere in sight. Instead, Ingram’s car was at the head of the procession.