Zero fail, p.21
Zero Fail, page 21
“Are you prepared tonight to say that you’ve never had an extramarital affair?” Steve Kroft asked.
“I’m not prepared tonight to say that any married couple should ever discuss that with anyone but themselves,” the governor replied. “I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage.”
Flowers, who was telling the truth about her affair with Clinton, told reporters she was “disgusted.” “I saw a side of Bill that I have never seen before,” she said. “He is absolutely lying.”
But though Clinton was indeed lying, he nevertheless came across as likable and genuine without being defensive. He also had a powerful counter against Flowers, which gave pause to reporters, many of whom were already squeamish about pursuing a story about a past affair. The state clerk and sometime nightclub singer had been paid handsomely for her story, which Bill Clinton dubbed “cash for trash.”
The couple’s 60 Minutes interview set records for viewership. With its airing, the Arkansas governor became the leading Democratic candidate in the race overnight. Over the next two months, Clinton won several more states in primary after primary. Secret Service leadership agreed now it was time for them to “pick up” Clinton. In protection agency parlance, that meant the Service had concluded that the Arkansas governor was no longer a long shot, but a front-runner who by law was entitled to full-time protection on the campaign trail. Providing Secret Service protection for leading candidates had become the law after Democratic nominee Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down while campaigning in Los Angeles in June 1968.
Within several weeks, his new shift agents quickly learned what the public didn’t know: That grocery store tabloid had been on to something about Bill Clinton and his extracurricular activities. A small handful of agents on the new Clinton detail were uncomfortable when they slowly discovered that part of their job was to discreetly look the other way while the governor traveled to romantic assignations.
Starting in February, headquarters began notifying more than two dozen agents spread across the country that they had been chosen to create the fledgling Clinton detail, which would launch in March. Presidential candidate protection was a temporary gig that drained the Service of field office agents every four years, but it was a routine that the drafted agents expected and understood. They would be required to serve on rotating shifts—working three weeks alongside Clinton wherever he traveled on the campaign, then returning for three weeks at home at their normal field office or headquarters jobs.
The three shift leaders for the detail, temporarily based out of Little Rock, briefed their new team on Clinton’s routine when he was at home and not campaigning on the road. One key feature: He liked to jog many mornings from the governor’s mansion to the downtown YMCA, a historic tan brick building with a gym, pool, and offices on South Broadway.
Depending on his route, Clinton and two agents in tow usually ran a little less than two miles north, at something between a nine- and ten-minute-mile pace. They took the quieter side streets off the downtown’s main boulevard to get to the Y, where Clinton said he planned to have a short workout or swim. Inside, he would dress and shower in a private room. When he emerged, the team would shadow him one more block on foot—to the nearby McDonald’s at Seventh and Broadway. There the governor would grab a decaffeinated coffee and maybe an Egg McMuffin, and they would drive him back to the mansion.
But several agents noticed a security deviation in Clinton’s YMCA visits. In the Service’s peerless security standards, protocol required someone to be steps away from the principal at all times. But no agents went inside the YMCA to stand within reach or eyesight of Clinton during his workout. During some of the governor’s visits, detail agents were standing post just outside the Y and just inside the entry door. None shadowed him inside to intervene in case a problem developed inside a public facility full of unscreened strangers. A handful of newly arrived agents, flummoxed by this gym routine, discussed it among themselves, figuring this must be a mistake. A few of them felt compelled to ask: What the hell?
“Why don’t we have anybody inside with him?” one shift agent asked a higher-ranking agent.
“It’s not a problem,” replied the supervisory agent.
“But…” the new shift agent began.
“Let it go,” the elder agent replied.
The shift was mostly made up of junior field agents tossed together randomly, but they had been trained in the same mold. No agent told another to “let it go” when they raised a security concern. One critical strength of the detail culture was that agents looked out for one another’s flank, and they were expected to flag any vulnerability they spotted. The Secret Service lived the motto “See something, say something” long before it was a post-9/11 catchphrase.
The younger agent approached the supervisor.
“They’re working out in there,” the younger agent said. “He could get hurt. There could be a wacko. We need to go inside. Something could happen in there.”
The elder sighed, shook his head.
“There’s a woman in there waiting for him,” the senior agent said. “They’re having sex.”
The junior agent let that information sink in. The detail was now in the business of aiding and abetting a ruse, helping the candidate pretend he was exercising a few times a week when in fact he was just meeting women for trysts. After a pause, Governor Clinton’s new protector asked what Kennedy’s detail agents had asked decades earlier: “How do you know she isn’t going to hurt him?”
To better protect Clinton, a Secret Service agent responsible for securing the site had already helped check out the private room where Clinton and one of his presumed girlfriends would rendezvous. They had concluded that this precaution resulted in an acceptable level of risk, agents said. A Clinton spokesman said it was completely implausible and “flies in the face” of basic security protocol that a presidential nominee would be allowed to enter a large, highly trafficked building unaccompanied by anyone from his elite security team. “There’s simply no truth behind this,” spokesman Angel Urena said.
Some agents considered Clinton’s morning routine in 1992—heading to the YMCA and sometimes meeting women for trysts there—a crafty accommodation to his new high profile as a presidential candidate. When he was just the governor of Arkansas, Clinton had used his early morning jogs as an excuse to dash out of the mansion and secretly meet his regular girlfriends. The women would pick him up in their cars somewhere along his route and drive off for some privacy. Clinton’s state troopers would later pick him up in his Lincoln Town Car at the downtown McDonald’s. They would sometimes teasingly ask Clinton about his unruffled appearance after his jog. He didn’t have any sweat on his face or clothes, even in the height of summer.
“He’d say he just ran five miles,” former state trooper Roger Perry said. “And I’d say, ‘Governor, you better see a doctor. There’s something wrong with your sweat glands.’ ”
They said Clinton once replied, “I can’t fool you guys, can I?”
After such morning outings, Clinton would stop in the troopers’ guardhouse bathroom to splash water on his face and shirt, which gave the appearance that he had been sweating.
Interestingly, some women remembered Clinton inviting them to work out at the Y when he was campaigning in 1992. A notorious flirt, Clinton was described as striking up saucy conversations with the pretty young stewardesses who were part of the Dallas-based crew on the private Express One plane his campaign rented.
Christy Zercher, then twenty-seven, was one of six women—all young, all blondes—who were hired to hostess on Clinton’s plane, dubbed Longhorn One. She had grown up a farm girl in rural east Texas and worked briefly as a topless dancer in a high-priced Dallas strip club before getting the hostess job with Express One. The very first time she flew on the plane with Clinton, just weeks after the Flowers affair story broke, Clinton tried to hit on her, she told former Washington Post reporter Michael Isikoff. The candidate, she said, walked back to the galley, looked at Zercher appreciatively, and said, “Oh, those blue eyes. Let’s just blow the campaign and go to Bermuda.”
Clinton kept up his suggestive banter with the women on Longhorn One throughout the campaign. On future flights, he asked Zercher about the quality of the sex in her previous marriages, complimented her figure, and rested his head on her shoulder. He made come-hither comments to the stewardesses, once remarking, “You don’t know what that outfit is doing to me.”
Zercher said she generally laughed off the candidate’s doggish advances. But one thing stood out as odd. He repeatedly asked her and some of her fellow stewardesses to join him for a workout at the YMCA when they landed in Little Rock. The women often had layovers in town because of the frequent campaign flights.
Bruce Lindsey, Clinton’s campaign aide, just as frequently stepped in to rescind his boss’s invitation. “It would not be a good idea,” a nervous Lindsey told the women.
Lindsey also repeatedly reminded the stewardesses to do him a favor when they landed. Could they please wait and not exit the plane with Clinton? Lindsey didn’t want the press photographing the candidate with a bevy of pretty young blondes in tow.
Clinton had loyal staffers who worked overtime to help him create a public image of a loving dad and husband, a hardworking public servant focused on his voters’ needs. And he truly possessed most of those noble traits. Though he and his wife appeared to be mostly political partners, he did dote on his daughter and work into the wee hours of the night negotiating legislation he believed would help the people of Arkansas. But also, as governor, he had commandeered a few trusted state troopers to help him feed his sexual appetite, duck out to various getaways with women, and hide his dalliances from his wife and the public. From his very first days under the protection of the Secret Service, Clinton had asked his new federal security guards to do the same.
Clinton zoomed to the front of the very large pack of Democratic candidates in what pollsters described as an opportune moment in history. Candidates historically faced stiff odds when they challenged an incumbent president. But not so in 1992. Half of American voters disapproved of President George H. W. Bush’s handling of the country’s economic slowdown, a poll in early February 1992 found. They believed a Democrat could do a better job. At the same time, the governor of Arkansas was surprising the pundit class and sewing up more than twice as many Democratic Party delegates as any of the five other candidates. He soon became the party’s nominee for November.
Clinton would triumph over Bush and become America’s forty-second president. He had enjoyed the luck of great timing, campaigning as a fresh-faced outsider during an economic downturn that soured the public on its current leadership. The charming governor had doused a sizzling scandal, overcoming it with political mastery and a generous helping of luck.
* * *
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THE CLINTONS’ RELATIONSHIP with the Secret Service didn’t start off on the best footing. In fact, it began with palpable distrust.
The new president and First Lady were wary of the agency at the start of their tenure and particularly suspicious of those ensconced in senior positions on the presidential detail and at headquarters. The Clintons, after living day to day for nine months with a small group of agents, had picked up their own intelligence about the culture of the Service. They quickly detected the strong loyalty many on the presidential detail and Secret Service leadership felt for the former president. They saw the RE-ELECT BUSH bumper stickers on the cars parked behind the White House. As tradition dictated, Clinton would inherit the most seasoned detail agents when he became president—Bush’s detail.
An early sign of the Clintons’ suspicion flared just days before his election—in the final sprint of the presidential campaign. With a group of agents listening intently, Clinton and his aides let their guard down outside a high school near Detroit where the candidate was scheduled to kick off a campaign rally.
On that Sunday—October 25, 1992—the dueling campaign planes carrying President Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton both flew in to the Detroit airport for separate events. Bush’s team flew in that morning, and the president received a standing ovation at the Detroit convention center when introduced for a speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Bush’s plane then departed Detroit’s airport, carrying the president and his campaign team onward to stops in South Dakota and Montana. Clinton’s plane touched down within a few minutes at the same airport so the Democratic challenger could speak at a rally at a high school in nearby Utica, Michigan.
John Magaw, the director of the Secret Service, had flown to Detroit with Bush on Air Force One, but he did something unusual. He stayed behind to catch up with Clinton’s team. The silver-haired director, a stiff man of few words who had helped lead Bush’s protective detail since Bush first campaigned for the White House back in the late 1970s, wasn’t welcome in the Clintons’ circle.
“What is he doing here?” one of Clinton’s senior aides snorted to Clinton as their sedan reached the high school. Clinton looked over to see Magaw, the former Ohio state trooper and Secret Service lifer, dressed in his trademark trench coat and standing with a smaller cluster of agents near the entrance to the school football field. Clinton and his campaign aides didn’t see a future senior adviser and chief protector; they saw a spy for the other team. They knew of Magaw’s long history and close bond with President Bush. The president had named Magaw to the director’s job that February, just a few months earlier. Clinton’s closest aides fumed. This was the first time they had seen Magaw’s face at a Clinton event. And without really knowing, Clinton aides presumed they knew why. The winds had shifted, and the latest polls showed that Magaw’s rabbi was likely on his way out of the White House. Pollsters announced that week that Clinton had a strong lead going into the final two weeks of the race, and the Bush campaign acknowledged it would be hard for them to overcome. Was Magaw playing the modern version of the Secret Service director who famously rushed to challenger Thomas Dewey’s campaign headquarters on election night, seeing reports that Dewey would beat President Truman?
“Now he decides to come?” another Clinton aide sniffed.
Agents working the site and shadowing Clinton could hear the disdain in their voices as George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, and Bruce Lindsey bemoaned Magaw’s arrival. The agents overhearing this saw the writing on the wall: Magaw was going to be out of a job if the polls were right. If Clinton won the election, Magaw would end up in the Secret Service annals as its briefest-serving director. “The body language was clear,” said one agent who witnessed the discussion. “He was a dead man walking.”
Once Clinton won the election and prepared to move into the White House, both he and his wife immediately felt tension with the Secret Service. Clinton, now carrying the Secret Service code name Eagle, feared he was losing control over his favorite activity: hanging out with people. He chafed at his detail supervisors’ increasing the constraints on his movements now that he was president-elect, trying to discourage him from running on city streets. He insisted they allow him to continue, and to stop and say hello to people. Clinton was the king of the drop-in, still wanting to stop by the local diner and surprise the locals.
“It’s no secret that the governor loves to have that one-on-one contact with the people” and the Secret Service must adjust to that, Max Parker, a spokesman for Clinton’s transition team, told reporters. “Each time there is a new president, there is a little bit of a ‘getting-used-to-each-other’ period.”
Retired agent Dennis McCarthy, who had helped tackle President Reagan’s shooter in 1981, told a reporter, “He’s got to be driving the agents crazy.”
After the inauguration, the couple also feared the loss of their privacy. In his first week on the job, Bill Clinton was flabbergasted that he couldn’t pick up the phone and make a call by himself. He insisted that the White House change the phone system. He wanted to be sure no one was listening in on his private calls.
The president bristled at the agents stationed on the staircase landing near his bedroom hallway when he woke up. He liked to go jogging in the morning but hated having to plan it the night before. The detail relented, and each morning they had one group of agents dressed in running shorts and another wearing business suits, so he could decide on the spot whether he wanted to go for a run. He cursed one evening when his shift leader explained that he couldn’t go to a friend’s book party on the spur of the moment: There wasn’t time to secure the location of the party.
Since Reagan’s presidency, agents had traditionally been stationed on the second floor—the heart of the president’s private residence—for quick reaction in case of an emergency. One stood at a staircase landing, next to the president’s elevator. Another agent was positioned at the top of the Grand Staircase across from the Treaty Room. Mrs. Clinton ordered that agents would no longer stand on the second floor, so the family could have privacy.
“It saves a few seconds if there is trouble,” said one former Clinton detail agent. Agents positioned on the second floor can more quickly evacuate the president or First Lady. “But during the Clinton years, they didn’t want to see us.” Hillary Clinton had her staff spread the word: She also didn’t want to see agents or officers when she came through the White House. They should stand back and not say a word.
The First Lady’s actions may have seemed cold. But a warning from a trusted friend had caused her to be on guard with her guards. After the inauguration, friends Harry and Linda Thomason had been living at the White House part time. Harry Thomason returned one night from a party with a group of reporters and relayed some bad news to the First Lady: He’d heard that agents on Clinton’s detail were leaking information to reporters about the First Couple’s private moments in the White House.
