“He could call her up on the phone and be like, ‘Jenna, what the hell are you doing?’ They were buddies. They were pals. He was strictly professional, but he knew how to deal with her. He could tell her, ‘Listen, Jenna, you’re killing me. You gotta tell me what’s going on.’ And she respected him, which was great.”
Still, says another agent, “Every day we’d run the risk of losing her. She never told us where she was going. It was rare. Sometimes she’d tell Neil [the detail leader], and Neil would get the scoop of what was going on, and Neil would try hard to get that information.”
Another agent says Barbara was almost as difficult as Jenna.
“She’d pick up the phone and call Dad and say that we’re getting too close,” the agent says.
When Barbara was attending Yale, she would sometimes jump into her car with friends and drive to New York, where she would stay overnight, never giving her agents advance warning.
“Agents learned to pack a bag with clothing, because it became a habit for both Barbara and Jenna to say ‘I want to go to the airport. I want to fly to New York,’” an agent says. “These guys were prepared to work an evening shift, and all of a sudden they’re going with just the clothes on their backs.”
“Instead of calling somebody to complain about us, just tell us what you’re going to do and we’ll make it work, but just work with us, instead of trying to play games with us, making our lives miserable,” says an agent who was on Jenna’s detail.
When Barbara spent time in Africa, the White House said she was helping children with AIDS. A member of the counterassault team who accompanied her says that while she did some volunteer work in places like Cape Town, South Africa, “Most of the time she was out on her own, doing her thing, partying. She went to a couple schools, but we ended up doing an African safari, and of course the American taxpayer paid for her protection. You never knew where she was going, and she was always calling and complaining.”
Meanwhile, at a 2005 Halloween party in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, Henry Hager, who was Jenna’s boyfriend and soon-to-be husband, became so inebriated that the Secret Service wound up taking him to Georgetown University Hospital.
“It was after a Halloween party, and they were all dressed up in their costumes,” an agent on her detail recalls. “She’s like, ‘Listen, Henry, we’ve got to get you out of this costume. We got to look dignified before we go to the hospital.’ At this point, I’m thinking to myself, yeah, she’s growing up a little bit when she’s thinking about having to look dignified before going to the hospital, as opposed to looking like a sloppy drunken mess in a Halloween costume.”
Another time, Hager became drunk with Jenna in a Georgetown bar and picked a fight with several other patrons. Agents had to intervene to avoid a brawl.
“He was getting out of control and starting to pick a fight,” an agent says. “Agents pulled him aside and they said, ‘You realize that you are with the president’s daughter? You know the situation you are putting her and us in because of the way you’re acting?’”
“When she got around her friends, she was out of control,” an agent who was on her detail says of Jenna. “She was a party girl, smoking cigarettes, drinking a lot, burping, loud, and sort of obnoxious. I couldn’t believe that she was a schoolteacher during the day.”
Jenna taught inner-city children in Washington and later in Baltimore. Barbara maintained her interest in helping people afflicted with AIDS. Over time, the twins became more mature and demonstrated that they appreciated their detail.
“Around the Fourth of July, Jenna had a whole bunch of steaks delivered to our command post,” an agent says. “Around Christmas, she gave us all another order of steaks and hot dogs and stuff like that. It’s got to be tough being the kid of a president. I can’t imagine it.”
Asked if Barbara, Jenna, or Henry Hager had any comment, Sally McDonough, Laura Bush’s press secretary in the White House, said, “I am making a formal request that you do not include any of this nonsense in your book.”
Like Jenna and Barbara, Susan Ford Bales, the daughter of President Ford, tried to evade her Secret Service detail. Eighteen when her father became president, Susan—code-named Panda—had a reputation for romantically chasing Secret Service agents. After her father left the White House, she married Charles Vance, a Secret Service agent who was guarding the former president in California. They later divorced, and she remarried.
“In my career, Chelsea Clinton did it the best,” says an agent familiar with both her detail and the Bush twins’ details. “Treated the detail right, told them what was going on, never gave problems that I knew of.”
In recent memory, the brattiest offspring of a president was Amy Carter, who was nine when her father became president.
“Amy Carter was a mess,” says Brad Wells, an Air Force One steward. “She would look at me and pick up a package of [open] soda crackers and crush them and throw them on the floor. She did it purposely. We had to clean it up. That was our job.”
Secret Service agents guarding Amy—code-named Dynamo—at school often found themselves in the middle when Amy wanted to play with friends after school instead of going home to the White House to do her homework, as she was supposed to do. When agents told her she had to go home, “Amy would call her father and hand the phone to the agents,” Dennis Chomicki, who was on her detail, remembers. “The president would say to take Amy anywhere she wants to go. Amy just had her father wrapped up.”
Since Amy would often stay at a friend’s house through the evening, agents wound up working longer hours than if they had taken her directly to the White House. As a result, says Chomicki, “The detail would always try to get Mrs. Carter, the first lady, on the phone, because she would say, ‘Nothing doing. She’s coming home; she’s got her homework to do.’”
Of all the presidential children guarded by the Secret Service, Carter’s second oldest son, James Earl “Chip” Carter III, was one of the least liked. Twenty-six when his father won the presidency, Chip had helped campaign for him in 1976 and again gave speeches on his behalf when Carter ran for reelection in 1980.
“He was outrageous,” a Secret Service agent says. “Chip was out of control. Marijuana, liquor, chasing women.” Separated from his wife, Chip would “pick up women in Georgetown and ask if they wanted to have sex in the White House. Most of them did. He did it as often as he could,” the agent says.
At one point, Rosalynn Carter told the press that all three of her sons had “experimented” with marijuana. Their oldest son, John William “Jack” Carter, had been discharged by the navy for smoking weed.
Carter told the Secret Service that Rosalynn objected to agents and uniformed officers being armed inside the White House. According to Carter, Rosalynn cited the fact that guns made Amy “uncomfortable.” The Secret Service explained that in the event of an attack, agents would be useless if unarmed. President Carter relented.
26
Angler
WHEN ASSIGNING CODE names to protectees, the Secret Service starts with a random list of words, all beginning with the same letter for each family. The code names were once necessary because Secret Service radio transmissions were not encrypted. Now that they are, the Secret Service continues to use code names to avoid confusion when pronouncing the names of protectees. In addition, by using code names, agents prevent people from overhearing the subject of their conversations.
Produced by the White House Communications Agency, the list of code names excludes words that are offensive or may be easily mistaken for other words. However, those under protection may object to a code name and propose another. Thus, Lynne Cheney, a prolific author, asked for and was given the Secret Service code name Author. Dick Cheney, an avid fisherman, got the code name Angler.