Bush Shown How Secret Service Prepares Agents to Protect Him

President Bush, the nation’s most protected citizen, on Friday learned how Secret Service agents make sure he stays safe.

During Bush’s visit to the Secret Service training center in rural Maryland, agents demonstrated how they would save the President in the water, speed him away from a motorcade explosion and prevent weapons from entering a hotel where he was speaking.

Bush rode in a souped-up sedan with an agent demonstrating speed driving and 180-degree spins. And the President fired a Secret Service rifle, aides said.

“He seemed like he was having a pretty good time and he was interested in everything,” spokesman John Herrick told reporters.

Reporters and photographers watched Bush’s helicopter land at the James J. Rowley Training Center but were not allowed to accompany the President on his tour of the training facility.

Secret Service spokesman Robert Snow, citing security reasons, instead escorted reporters to the firing range, where they were briefed on the Secret Service weapons and were taught to shoot one of them, an Uzi submachine gun.

The Secret Service prefers the Uzi because of its triple safety system and because it is simple and accurate, reporters were told.

Although the President was surrounded by officers of the federal agency on the training center’s grounds of several hundred acres, his own White House security detail remained with him.

The Secret Service was created in 1865 as a division of the Treasury Department, assigned to combat counterfeiting of money.

The presidential protective mission was added to the Secret Service mandate after the assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1901.

In addition to protecting the President, vice president and their immediate families, the Secret Service guards former presidents and their wives, visiting foreign dignitaries and major presidential and vice presidential candidates and their spouses.