The Secret Service discussed its concerns with Clinton, but he continued to run. That changed after he fell walking down the stairs at golf pro Greg Norman’s house in Florida in the early morning hours of March 14, 1997. The Secret Service Joint Ops Center then woke agent Norm Jarvis at home to ask him to secure the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where surgery would be done on the president to reattach a tendon torn from his right kneecap.
Later that morning, Clinton arrived by motorcade from Andrews Air Force Base. Jarvis arranged for an agent to stand in the operating room throughout the surgery.
“I’m not sure if they knew we had guns on under our scrubs, but sharp cutting instruments so close to the president—even in the hands of a trusted military physician—needed a countermeasure in the hands of a trusted agent,” Jarvis says.
Clinton’s doctor, Admiral E. “Connie” Mariano, who traveled with the president, oversaw the operation. But Jarvis was startled to see an orderly line of dozens of surgeons in the operating room waiting to step up and do part of the knee reconstruction.
“Each one had a tool, probe, scalpel, or whatever, waiting to take their turn to poke, cut, or saw so they could claim they operated on the president of the United States,” Jarvis says. “After the anesthesia was administered, the first surgeon did the initial incision. The next exposed the tendon. Then another cut the tendon to even out the jagged remains. Another surgeon cleaned and exposed the kneecap. On and on it went for hours.”
In one form or another, Jarvis had seen this phenomenon played out dozens of times: For most people, any contact with a president is a highlight of their lives.
Clinton did not want to return to the White House in an ambulance, and Secret Service vans were not equipped to transport him in a wheelchair. Because Jarvis knew Sarah Brady, wife of the former Reagan press secretary James Brady, he asked if the Secret Service could borrow her husband’s wheelchair-accessible van for the trip.
Clinton faced about eight weeks on crutches and months of physical therapy. He had to wear an adjustable leg brace to restrict knee movement. After that incident, Clinton gave up running and started using exercise machines.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service tried to adapt to Clinton’s style.
“President Clinton would see a small crowd of spectators that may have gathered behind a rope outside our secure perimeter just to get a glimpse of the president, and he would head off to shake their hands,” says Jarvis. “Of course, this drove us to distraction because we didn’t want him to approach an un-magged crowd. We didn’t know if we had a Hinckley or Bremer in the crowd with a handgun. A person like that might be loitering in the area because he couldn’t get into the event.”
In fact, at one point, Jarvis was faced with just such a situation: Clinton had plunged into a crowd that had not been screened.
“I was in the lead on the rope line,” Jarvis says. “When you’re working a rope line, there are agents leading in the president’s direction, then there’s the president, and then others who trail behind, with others nearby.”
Jarvis noticed a woman whose hands were under her coat.
During an event, “You’ll be in the formation and walking along with the president, you spot something, and you say something over the air to the shift leader,” Jarvis says. “You’re generally very quiet. There’s not a lot of chatter, but if you say something and you’re with the president, it means something. You size up the person that causes you to bring your attention to them, and you have to make a quick judgment as to what you’re going to do or what the detail needs to do.”
In this case, “What was strange was everyone was looking at the president—clapping, yelling, smiling,” Jarvis says. “She was staring down and had a real puzzled look on her face. Mind you, the president was two arms’ lengths from us. I let the shift leader know I had a problem, and I just wrapped my arms around this woman because I didn’t have time to frisk her.”
Jarvis held her in a bear hug as the shift and the president worked their way around him.
“She was startled, but I wouldn’t let her arms out from under the coat,” Jarvis says. “I held her until I could get some assistance, which arrived from a protective intelligence team that was nearby.”
The team interviewed the woman and quickly determined that she was mentally ill.
“She didn’t have a weapon under her coat, but you can tell mentally disturbed people by the way they react,” Jarvis notes. “And when they react the opposite of everybody else, it brings your attention to them, and you know you’ve got an issue out of the ordinary.”
To be sure, Jarvis says, “Not a lot of people would appreciate an agent grabbing them in a bear hug and pinning them against a crowd. But you’ve got maybe seconds to correctly respond to a situation that has potentially catastrophic consequences.”
“We had a young, gregarious guy who absolutely thrived on and was energized by being in crowds,” Dowling says. “We weren’t going to have a conversation saying, ‘Sir, you’re really going to have to change. This isn’t presidential.’ We really had to redefine the way we did business on the road.”
Dowling thought the fact that Clinton would plunge unpredictably into crowds could work to the advantage of the Secret Service because there was no advance notice. “The odds of somebody being there that would willingly want to do him harm were at least decreased,” notes Dowling, who later headed the Washington field office. At the same time, Dowling says, the Secret Service worked with the staff to identify places where Clinton could go and allow agents to scout out the areas in advance.
On Sunday morning, February 26, 1995, Dowling read an item in Parade magazine’s Personality Parade and knew he was in for trouble. The item asked how much truth there was to “those stories coming out of Washington that Bill Clinton is still an incurable womanizer.”
Parade answered, “If there were any hard evidence that the president of the U.S. was womanizing, you can be certain it would have appeared by now in the media. The days when the White House press corps respected a president’s privacy and ignored his extracurricular activities—as with JFK—are long gone.”
More ominously for the Secret Service, the item continued: “Insiders say the salacious rumors about Bill Clinton often can be traced to Secret Service agents, who may be feuding with the first lady. She reportedly suspects that some of the agents are snoops and tries to keep them at a distance. One agent recently spread a story that Mrs. Clinton had become so tired of her husband’s wandering ways that she threatened to seek a divorce and run against him in 1996. No one believes that outlandish tale, but unfortunately it has made its way through the Washington gossip mill.”
Dowling, the assistant special agent in charge of the Clinton detail, was working that Sunday. The Clintons were attending church, and the president said nothing to him about the Parade item. However, two hours later, Dowling was at his office in Room 62 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building when the phone rang.
“Mr. Dowling, stand by please for the president,” a White House operator said.
“Did you see Parade magazine this morning?” Clinton asked Dowling.
“Yes, sir, I did,” Dowling replied. “I was very disturbed at what I saw.”