Agents Walk a Fine Line Between Access, Privacy

When the sorrows of Watergate drove President Nixon to tears, Secret Service agents were there.

When usually mild-mannered Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey lost control and punched a heckler in the chest, his agents looked on.

Agents were close, too, when the Clintons moved into the White House--so close, in fact, that an unhappy first family ordered that, henceforth, the detail no longer should stand guard on the residential floors of the White house but on the landing of the floor below.

The Secret Service’s access to White House secrets has always been an element--and something of a problem--in agents’ work. While agents are keenly aware of the need to preserve the privacy of the president and his family, they are trained to be even more aware of preserving their safety.

The detail is taught to stay as close to the president as possible when the chief executive is in a crowd, in the open or in any uncertain situation. Often, if they were any closer, “they’d be the shirt on his back,” said one former agent, who asked to remain unidentified.

When the president works a crowd, agents stand just behind him, ready to seize him by the belt and pull him away if someone tries to pull him toward the hordes. If real danger appears, the agents are trained to throw their bodies over him, as if in a rugby match, to shield his body with their own.

They are not required to be along with him when he’s with small groups in the White House. But Secret Service doctrine says that they must be present when such groups expand. And when the president is on the road, they have been known to go into bathrooms with him to make sure there is no danger.

Some people who see the president refrain from saying certain things because they are aware that Secret Service agents are present, former agents said. Yet the job of keeping close for protection “is always first,” one said.

Clinton, for his part, chafed at the agents’ proximity from the beginning of his presidency and complained that the White House was the “crown jewel of the federal penal system.” At one point, the Clintons discussed getting rid of agents they thought might be more loyal to their predecessors, George and Barbara Bush.

Some members of the White House detail, for their part, were nervous about Clinton’s habits from the start, fearing that his jogging and love of plunging into crowds would be dangerous.

Clinton is not the only president who has chafed at the agents’ presence.

Motoring at his ranch in the Texas Hill Country, President Johnson was known to tell his driver to gun the engine and leave the Secret Service car in the dust. President Kennedy was known to order agents off the running boards of his automobiles.

Over the years, Clinton and his detail have worked out a respectful relationship, aides said, in which both sides know and follow the rules. And Clinton has cultivated the friendship of agents, throwing parties for them when they leave the detail and giving gifts to their families.

Should Clinton fear what they might say about him in the media if not in the nation’s courtrooms, after they leave?

So far, none have sought to market their White House knowledge, as former FBI agent Gary Aldrich did in his highly critical account of the first Clinton term.

Still, no written contract, or anything like Britain’s Official Secrets Act, bars agents from spilling what they know.

“There’s no explicit rules, only an unwritten code of ethics,” said Hamilton Brown, who guarded seven presidents as an agent and is now executive secretary of the Assn. of Former Agents of the U.S. Secret Service.

Secret Service officials have tried to make it clear that they believe the code of ethics is a code of silence.

After writer Seymour Hersh interviewed former agents for a recent book on Kennedy, Secret Service Director Lewis Merletti sent a letter to 3,000 Secret Service employees reminding them that their oath requires them to be worthy of their subjects’ “trust and confidence.”

Agents chosen for the White House detail generally have worked for a number of years in regional offices, where they have typically handled federal criminal investigations and done stints protecting political candidates. White House duty is considered one of the most desirable jobs and only agents who have distinguished themselves are chosen.

Yet despite the seeming glamour of their jobs, agents are usually happy to rotate out of the detail after two years. One reason is the irregular schedule and long hours that are part of being with the president when he travels.

But the bigger reason, former agents said, is simply the grinding tedium of a job that requires them to stay alert but largely motionless for hours on end.

A Secret Service agent on the White House detail once told an acquaintance that, to get the best sense of what his work was like, he should imagine what it would be like to get into his best suit, walk out into his back yard and stand there nearly motionless for the rest of the day.

For all its seeming glamour, “the truth is, this can be a very boring job,” said former agent Brown.