“He looked at it,” Funk says. “He turned to Barbara and said, ‘What’s going on?’”
“Well, you’re always complaining about the limos. Let’s go,” the first lady said.
Bush got into Ingram’s beat-up car and said to the agents, “You win.”
“They drove him to the gate, and that’s where the presidential limo was,” Funk says.
Despite warnings from his detail, Bush had a habit of leaving the Oval Office through the door to the Rose Garden and greeting tourists lined up along the fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. The detail assigned agents to rush to the fence as soon as an alarm notified them that Bush had opened the door to the outside. Soon, The Washington Post ran a story reporting that onlookers were delighted at their unexpected greetings from the president. Right after that, when Bush again greeted fans at the fence, agents spotted what agent Glenn Smith calls a “textbook” possible assassin.
“The man had on a coat in the summer, he looked disheveled, and his eyes were darting in all directions,” Smith says. “We patted him down, and it turned out he had a nine-millimeter pistol on him and probably intended to use it on the president.”
The head of the detail pointed out to Bush that by greeting people spontaneously, he was not only endangering himself but his agents. After that, “Bush would give us time to set up a secure zone at the fence.”
As a courtesy, Secret Service agents try to preset the radio in the limousine to the stations the president or vice president likes. Bush is a country-western fan, so agents preset the radio to country-western stations in whatever town they happened to be in.
“One time, Bush 41 got into the limo and turned on the radio, and, of course, a country-western station came on immediately, and one of his favorite songs was playing,” Albracht says. “He started singing along with it. The agent who was driving looked up in the rearview mirror and saw Bush.”
“Larry, what do you think?” Bush asked the driver.
Without hesitation, Larry answered, “Don’t give up the day job, boss.”
Secret Service agents are instructed to ignore any conversations that take place in their presence, but of course they hear everything. At one point, the Secret Service was driving President Bush and Barbara Bush, along with two of their children, who were in the backseat of the limo.
“They were engaged in a deep conversation about something, and suddenly they were distracted,” Albracht says. “When they asked each other what they had been talking about, they couldn’t remember, and the agent who was driving said ‘Y’all talkin’ about Social Security’”
That was a violation of Secret Service protocol, and the supervisor in the right-front seat later reprimanded the agent. The agent’s tenure in the transportation section was about to end, but Bush liked him. When he hadn’t seen him for a while, Bush asked the Secret Service to assign him as his driver. That did not sit well with supervisors.
When Bush was president, the Secret Service obtained intelligence that a Colombian drug cartel had put out a contract on his family. As a result, Secret Service agents began protecting future president George W. Bush, his children, and his sister and brothers.
“He [George W. Bush] had just bought a new Lincoln, and we were following him closely,” former agent John Golden says. “He stopped quickly when a traffic light turned yellow. We plowed into his car, but it turned out there was no damage.”
Because Bush’s entire family would converge on his summer home in Kennebunkport, agents referred to it as Camp Timberwolf Because the home is on the water, the Secret Service enlisted the military to search for underwater explosives and patrolled the ocean in boats.
“Our cigarette boat at Kennebunkport was faster than his boat, but if we told him that, he would go out and buy a faster boat,” says Andrew Gruler, who was on the president’s detail.
At one point, Bush and Barbara flew to their Kennebunkport home in the winter. It was freezing cold, and the president and his wife came out for a walk.
“I had a hat on, and two of the other agents had hats on, but the one agent assigned to the first lady didn’t bring a hat with him,” says former agent Sullivan, who was on the president’s detail. “So the president came out with Mrs. Bush, and we started to walk.”
“Where’s your hat?” Mrs. Bush asked the hatless agent.
“Oh, Mrs. Bush, I didn’t bring one. I didn’t realize it was going to be so cold here,” he said.
“George, we need to get this agent a hat,” Barbara said.
“Okay, Bar,” he replied.
She walked back into the house, got one of President Bush’s furry hats, and gave it to the agent.
“No, Mrs. Bush, that’s fine,” the agent said.
“Hey, don’t argue with Mrs. Bush,” Bush said.
The agent put on the president’s hat.
“That was Mrs. Bush,” Sullivan says. “She was everyone’s mother, and she didn’t want this forty-year-old man walking around at Kennebunkport without a hat on. She was a sweetheart.”
“Barbara and George Bush were genuinely in love,” former agent Albracht says. “They share a special bond of being married and being each other’s best friends that you don’t really see a lot of. I know there was a woman on the staff that Bush was always rumored to be having an affair with, but I’m telling you, I never saw it, and I was with the guy for four years.”
While Barbara “can be sweet and nice, you do anything to cross anybody in the family, and you are written off,” says a former agent on Bush’s detail. “I remember the Bushes had some friends that would come to visit them, and one of them had decided to vote for Ross Perot, and she wrote that person off. And President Bush would say, ‘Aw, Barb, that’s just politics.’ And she’d say, ‘No, that’s just not right.’ And if somebody divorced his wife and married a younger woman, she didn’t like that at all.”
18
A Psychic’s Vision
RUNNING FOR REELECTION against Bill Clinton, Bush 41 was to give a speech on September 17, 1992, at the civic auditorium in Enid, Oklahoma. Agent Norm Jarvis was assigned to run intelligence investigations for the visit, and a detective from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation called him.
“He said that a woman who was a psychic had told her police contact, whom she worked with on a homicide case in Texas, that she had had a vision that President Bush was going to be assassinated by a sniper,” Jarvis says.
People call the Secret Service all the time reporting a vision they have just had about the president being shot. They are usually self-promoters. But in this case, the detective told Jarvis that this psychic’s visions had actually helped police find buried bodies and had provided useful leads in criminal investigations. Another seasoned law enforcement homicide investigator from Texas also told Jarvis that he needed to pay attention to her.
“She’s the real deal,” the Oklahoma detective said.
Jarvis remembered seeing the psychic on television. Sporting a beehive hairdo, she would don what she called a special pair of cowboy boots and then tell police not only where bodies were buried but how the victims had been murdered. The evening before Bush’s visit, Jarvis and his partner drove to the woman’s home in Enid. She invited them in, and Jarvis told her why they were there. The psychic confirmed that she had had a vision that Bush 41 was about to be assassinated.
“About that time, her husband comes walking into the house, and he looks at me and he says, ‘Has she had another one of them visions?’” Jarvis says.