Candidates and Their Protectors Play an Endless Tug of War

By MASSIE RITSCH

April 23, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Were the Secret Service to run political campaigns, there would be no balloons that pop like bullets, no impromptu handshaking through crushing crowds, no rallies in city parks.

If agents had their druthers, candidates would campaign by satellite from a bombproof bunker.

“They want maximum exposure,” said Special Agent in Charge Frank O’Donnell, “and we want minimum exposure. Everything’s a compromise.”

Such is the tension that occurs every four years when the Secret Service, best known for protecting the president, begins protecting those who would take his job.

The Secret Service wants 20 feet between the candidate and the crowd; his advance staff wants four. The agents want him to enter the hotel through the loading dock; the aides want him to stride past the cameras out front. It is almost a daily negotiation.

“There’s definitely a conflict,” said a former White House advance staff member who planned events for President Clinton’s 1992 campaign. “A campaign is, by definition, about meeting people, and each person the candidate meets, the Secret Service sees as a potential risk.”

Threats Routinely Made

And for good reason, the Secret Service says. Like several milestones in the agency’s 135-year history, the Service began protecting presidential candidates because of an assassination.

It was Robert F. Kennedy’s murder in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after he claimed victory in California’s 1968 primary, that prompted the Secret Service to add major presidential candidates to its list of protectees. One campaign later, in the parking lot of a Maryland shopping center, Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was paralyzed below the waist by five bullets from would-be assassin Arthur Bremer. Against his security detail’s cautions, O’Donnell said, Wallace had strayed away from a bulletproof lectern.

“You still turn on the TV every night and see the candidates wade into the crowd,” said O’Donnell, who supervises the Secret Service’s Los Angeles field office. After former Republican candidate John McCain turned down federal protection in February, O’Donnell said he saw the Arizona senator speaking at huge rallies and “was just holding my breath, hoping there wasn’t another Arthur Bremer out there.”

There always could be. Although threats against the men who want to run the country are generally fewer and less serious than those against the man who actually does, such threats are made. The Secret Service investigates all of them.

“In every campaign,” said former Secret Service Director Eljay Bowron, “they have determined that there have been people--for lack of a better word--stalking candidates with ill intent.”

While the president and the vice president (who, this year, is also a candidate) have permanent Secret Service details, a prominent presidential candidate--with the approval of the secretary of the Treasury and Congress--is typically assigned about a half-dozen agents. They set aside their field-office jobs investigating counterfeiting and fraud, the Service’s other charge, for three-week shifts on protective detail.

At public events and in motorcades, additional plainclothes agents from the nearest field office and uniformed local police beef up security and help the candidate’s entourage move smoothly through the streets.

The nominees’ running mates and spouses generally begin receiving protection at their party’s summer nominating convention.

“Every four years we have more work than we can handle,” said O’Donnell. In campaign years, agents from other Treasury bureaus--the U.S. Customs Service, for example--are often drafted to help out.

This fiscal year, the Secret Service has budgeted $25 million for candidate protection.

In the busiest primary seasons, the Secret Service has protected as many as eight candidates, O’Donnell said. Currently, with both parties’ presidential nominees all but certain, agents travel with just the Big Two: Al Gore (code name: Sundance), who has been protected throughout his vice presidency, and Texas Gov. George W. Bush (code name: Tumbler), whose detail includes officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety.

At a rally last month in Orlando, Fla., Bush’s detail had a minor scare when a high school band let out a thunderous whomp of drums just as the governor entered a rally. Two of Bush’s agents lunged to shield the governor from what truly sounded like gunfire, but pulled back when they realized he was not in danger.

Bill Bradley, whom agents referred to in their radio traffic as “Panther,” had Secret Service protection for about a month before he quit the race.

“Sen. Bradley was a big guy, and [on trips to Los Angeles] we put him in an SUV because it was just too hard to get him in and out of a Cadillac,” O’Donnell recalled. Bradley, a former New York Knick, had a good seven inches on the supervisor of his security detail.

The supervisor--the senior agent who sits in the right front seat of the candidate’s car and is among those closest to him in a crowd--is, in theory, the only member of the detail who speaks to the candidate.

The other agents guarding a presidential candidate tend to be among the Secret Service’s most junior. Still, a candidate’s guards are typically more experienced than the advance staffers they work with.

The aides who stage political events are often the greenest of a campaign’s staff and can make up in arrogance what they lack in experience. Agents, the former Clinton advance man said, “have got to deal with a lot of boneheads on the campaign trail.” And though the Secret Service will not compromise security for a good photo op, agents are mindful of politics.

“The Secret Service realizes that isolation is not reality when you talk about a public official, and particularly during a campaign,” said Bowron, who left the agency for the private sector in 1997. “If security prevents them from campaigning and accomplishing their mission, there’s no point to them going out on the campaign trail.”

Lending an Official Air

As restrictive as around-the-clock protection can be, having a security detail can be a political boon to a candidate. With their dark suits, wrist radios, identifying lapel pins and--only occasionally--sunglasses, Secret Service agents lend an imposing, presidential air to a campaign. They also, as the Bush campaign has noticed, can make a campaign run on schedule. Or not, judging from President Clinton--who even as a candidate ran chronically late.

The agency began in 1865 as the Treasury Department’s defense against rampant monetary counterfeiting. But protecting the nation’s leaders, their families and visiting dignitaries has become its primary mission--and a higher-profile function that often attracts new agents.

The days that agents spend intensely scanning crowds can be long, and the lonely night shifts posted outside a hotel room feel no shorter.

“The younger guys love it. The older guys would rather be back at the field office,” said O’Donnell, who in 24 years with the agency has guarded candidates Edward M. Kennedy, Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis as well as Vice President George Bush and President Reagan.

Even so, he said, “Everybody needs to do it at least once, because you’ll be telling those stories for the rest of your career.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Secret Service Fact Sheet

The Secret Service was founded in 1865 and began protecting the president in 1901 after William McKinley’s assassination.

WHO’S PROTECTED

* President and vice president and their immediate families

* President-elect and vice president-elect and their immediate families

* Former presidents and their wives

* The widows of former presidents until death or remarriage; children of former presidents until they reach age 16

* Visiting foreign leaders and their spouses

* Representatives of the United States performing special missions abroad

* Major presidential and vice presidential candidates and, within 120 days of the general election, the spouses of those candidates