And they call themselves the secret service!
The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal The Hidden Lives Of Presidents
Promising to reveal scandalous details about the lives of America’s presidents and their families, this opens enticingly. According to a former Secret Service agent, Bill Clinton is regularly visited by a mysterious blonde at his home in upstate New York when his wife is out of town.
‘Her figure looks great, but her bust doesn’t fit the rest of her figure; it is rather endowed,’ says the agent. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that her breasts are enhanced.’ The code name the Secret Service has given this woman is ‘Energiser’. Beyond this, though, there is a frustrating lack of detail. We aren’t told whether this was during Clinton’s presidency or afterwards. No corroborating evidence is offered apart from the testimony of various anonymous agents who, the author points out, are made to sign confidentiality agreements.
The entire book is full of similarly salacious tales. We learn that two intoxicated friends of Richard Nixon appeared at his house one night with a naked woman in the boot of their car, telling the agents at the guard post that they wanted to make a ‘present’ of her to the President.
We discover that Lyndon Johnson was known to agents as ‘bull nuts’ on account of his fondness for walking around naked. During flights on Air Force One, he would routinely disappear into the bedroom with one of his secretaries and lock the door.
Is any of this credible? How do we know that the unnamed agents whom the author quotes are real? To a great extent, we’re reliant on the author’s integrity and, thankfully, Ronald Kessler is an investigative journalist with impeccable credentials who, over the course of his career, has won 18 awards. He’s also covered a lot of this ground before, having written another book relayed to him by anonymous agents called In The
President’s Secret Service.
So it’s all 100% true, right? If it is, it’s likely to have a serious impact on Vice President Joe Biden’s attempt to become the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. According to Kessler, Biden regularly jeopardises national security by insisting that the agent carrying the nuclear launch codes travels in a car at least a mile behind his limousine whenever he visits his home in Delaware. His reason, apparently, is that he doesn’t want to ruin his man of the people image.
Not only that, but Biden treats Air Force Two, the military passenger jet assigned to the Vice President, as his personal taxi service. Kessler estimates his flights have cost the American taxpayer in excess of a million dollars, yet Biden is supposed to be President Obama’s ‘tsar’ for cutting government waste.
No less scandalous are Kessler’s stories about Hillary Clinton. Apparently, she is so unpleasant towards agents that being assigned to her protection detail is regarded as a form of punishment.
By the end of the book, you can’t help noticing that the politicians who emerge in the worst light are nearly all Democrats. Is that another reason to doubt the veracity of these stories, or just evidence that, behind closed doors, conservatives are nicer than liberals? Hard to say, but this is a thoroughly entertaining worm’s eye view of presidential behaviour.