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WHEN IT CAME to protecting Jenna and Barbara Bush, the Secret Service had its hands full. Back when Bush was reelected governor of Texas, “The next morning after the inauguration, they had a breakfast for friends and family,” Laura’s friend Anne Stewart says. “George was sitting on a chair at a podium. He looked like he was about to fall off of it. I mean, his eyes kept closing.”
Bush gave a short speech.
“Thank God for the person who invented caffeine, because I really needed the coffee this morning,” he said. “I also have something to say about the person who coined the word ‘curfew’ Unfortunately, my girls do not know the meaning of the word ‘curfew’”
Later, Anne Stewart asked Laura what he meant.
“The girls did not show up after the inauguration party,” Laura said. “At two-thirty in the morning, I heard him frantically punching buttons calling all of their friends, finding out where they were. Finally, he tracked down one of the girls. He said, ‘I don’t care if it’s my inauguration. Get your booties home.’”
“They were partying and having a great time,” Stewart said. “They thought, ‘Dad won’t mind. It’s his inauguration as governor.’”
Recognizing how a presidential race would infringe on their family life, Laura later said she was “somewhat reluctant initially” about a presidential campaign. “I knew it would be hard to see someone I loved criticized,” she said. Laura knew that a run for the presidency and a possible win would mean giving up even more of their family’s privacy than when Bush was governor of Texas. Simply taking a walk or dropping in at a drugstore would require heavy security precautions.
The twins, especially Jenna, were opposed. They wanted to be normal teenagers. The thought of being different, singled out because they were in the White House, made them cringe.
When Bush became president, Barbara—code-named Turquoise—went off to Yale, and Jenna—code-named Twinkle—went to the University of Texas, and they both made good grades. But on May 29, 2001, Austin police officer Clay Crabb was dispatched to Chuy’s restaurant after manager Mia Lawrence called 911 at ten thirty-four P.M. Crabb later wrote in his report that when he arrived at the restaurant on Barton Springs Road, Lawrence told him the subject of her call was a blonde wearing a pink halter top who was seated in the bar area with her back to the wall.
Crabb and another officer “were about to go in and talk to the girl Mia pointed out when I was tapped on the shoulder by a subject identifying himself as a member of the Secret Service,” Crabb wrote. By then, the officers knew that the alleged offender was Jenna Bush, and they explained to the agents that they were checking into an allegation that she had used fake identification to buy a drink.
The Secret Service agents did not interfere. Instead, Michael Bolton, a Secret Service supervisor, told Jenna and Barbara, who was also at the bar, what was happening. He then told the police the girls were going to leave. Two days later, the Austin police issued tickets to both girls for Class C misdemeanor violations. Jenna was cited for misrepresentation of age by a minor, Barbara for possession of alcohol by a minor.
It had all started when a waitress became suspicious of the license Jenna handed her. The waitress showed it to Lawrence, who noted that the license had someone else’s name on it. In addition, the photo looked “slightly off.” Lawrence told Jenna she would not be served.
“Whatever,” Jenna said, according to the police report.
Apparently thinking she was older than Jenna, the waitress brought Barbara and two friends three margaritas and three tequila shots. The bartender kept watch to make sure Jenna drank none of them. After other patrons pointed out that Barbara was the same age as Jenna, Lawrence called 911. By the time officers arrived, the tequila shots were gone. Each of the margaritas had been at least “partially consumed,” the police report said. When officer Clifford Rogers asked Jenna for the identification she had used, she handed it over and started to cry.
“She then stated that I do not have any idea what it is like to be a college student and not be able to do anything that other students get to do,” Rogers wrote.
Another officer asked restaurant manager Lawrence what she wanted the police to do with the girls.
“I want them to get into big trouble,” Lawrence said.
Police Chief Stan Knee told the Austin American-Statesman that the unusual thing about the incident was not the way the police handled it, but that they were involved at all.
“Most business establishments usually handle those things themselves,” the chief said. “Once we were notified of the crime, or the potential crime, we felt obligated to make as thorough a report as possible.”
For Barbara, it was a first offense. But two weeks before, on May 16, Jenna had pleaded no contest to possession of alcohol at Cheers Shot Bar on Sixth Street in Austin. In response to the new charge, Jenna on July 6 pleaded no contest to misrepresenting her age. Her driver’s license was suspended for a month. She paid a six-hundred-dollar fine for the infraction at Chuy’s and for the previous charge. She also got three months of deferred adjudication, a form of probation, plus thirty-six hours of community service. She was required to attend an alcohol awareness class. Barbara also pleaded no contest and was sentenced to deferred adjudication. She had to attend alcohol awareness class as well.
After the incident at Chuy’s, Mike Young and John Zapp, the owners of the restaurant, apologized. “Usually, we wouldn’t have handled it the way it was handled,” Young admitted.
While the girls matured in college, they still resented having Secret Service agents around, even though the agents dressed in casual clothes and most people were unaware of their role. Jenna was particularly difficult. She would sometimes purposely try to lose her protection by going through red lights or by jumping into her car without telling agents where she was going. As a result, the Secret Service kept her car under surveillance so agents could follow her—a waste of manpower.
“One night I was working on her detail, and about three-thirty P.M. on a Friday, she steps out of the house all dressed to the nines and hops into her car,” an agent says. “We follow her in our vehicle. She drove to a bar and got there around four-fifteen.”
The bar was across the street from the Verizon Center at 601 F Street NW in D.C., and it turned out the Rolling Stones were playing there that night. Jenna was meeting friends for a party at a private box at the center. Such a public event requires special security arrangements and close to a hundred agents. But, the agent says, Jenna never told her agents.
“So we scrambled,” an agent says. “We’re trying to get guys from the Washington field office, and we’re trying to get guys into the Verizon Center. Whoever invited her to this box had sent emails to all his friends saying, ‘Hey Jenna Bush [now Jenna Bush Hager] is going to be there.’ We had no idea about this. We pulled people in from the Washington field office and said, ‘Dress for the Rolling Stones concert.’”
The agents asked the Verizon Center management for help.
“That’s the beauty of being a Secret Service agent,” the agent says. “Basically, we can go anywhere, show our badge, and say, ‘Listen, here’s what we’ve got going on. Please help us.’ So we said, ‘Listen, Secret Service, got a problem. Can’t tell you who’s going to be here, but somebody important’s going to be here tonight, and we need your help because we didn’t know about it.’ And management at the Verizon Center bent over backward that night and gave us whatever we needed.”
Since the center is private property with its own security force, the agents had to get permission to enter while armed. The center provided a room as an operations center.
Jenna “doesn’t like the protection whatsoever,” says another agent. “The supervisor of her detail was scared of her, because they were afraid that she was going to pick up the phone and call Dad.”
In fact, says the agent, Jenna called her father many times when she wanted the agents to back off. “The president would call the special agent in charge,” the agent says. “The SAIC would call the detail leader, the detail leader would call the guys and say, ‘Hey you’ve got to back off.’”
“How about us doing our jobs?” an agent says. “I mean, what if something happens to her? I think she has a hard time grasping how easy it would be to pick her up, throw her into a van, and next thing you know she’s on Al Jazeera. And we’re out there, we’re trying to do the right thing. And I don’t think she understands it. She definitely didn’t respect what we’re out there trying to do for her.”
At times, Bush chewed out the detail for not following his daughter. One afternoon at the White House, Jenna snuck out a back exit that leads to the Rose Garden, eluding her detail. Bush saw her leave and called the detail leader to complain that she was not being followed.
“She stepped up to the plate and said, ‘Daddy, I didn’t tell them where I was going,’” an agent says.
An agent on the counterassault team accompanied Jenna on a trip to Central and South America.
“She was really getting a hard time in Argentina because the paparazzi were following her around, and she really couldn’t go out and do the things that she wanted to do because of all these cameras following her around,” the agent recalls. “Typically, she would just start complaining [about the Secret Service following her]. She would actually sit in the car and start looking back, trying to pick out the counterassault guys. She would say, ‘Hey those guys are too close.’ Next thing you know, the cell phone rings and it’s the DL, the detail leader, saying, ‘Hey can you guys back off a little bit? She sees you.’”
One detail leader found he could give Jenna instructions, and she would listen.
“He could call her up on the phone and be like, ‘Jenna, what the hell are you doing?’ They were buddies. They were pals. He was strictly professional, but he knew how to deal with her. He could tell her, ‘Listen, Jenna, you’re killing me. You gotta tell me what’s going on.’ And she respected him, which was great.”
Still, says another agent, “Every day we’d run the risk of losing her. She never told us where she was going. It was rare. Sometimes she’d tell Neil [the detail leader], and Neil would get the scoop of what was going on, and Neil would try hard to get that information.”
Another agent says Barbara was almost as difficult as Jenna.
“She’d pick up the phone and call Dad and say that we’re getting too close,” the agent says.
When Barbara was attending Yale, she would sometimes jump into her car with friends and drive to New York, where she would stay overnight, never giving her agents advance warning.
“Agents learned to pack a bag with clothing, because it became a habit for both Barbara and Jenna to say ‘I want to go to the airport. I want to fly to New York,’” an agent says. “These guys were prepared to work an evening shift, and all of a sudden they’re going with just the clothes on their backs.”
“Instead of calling somebody to complain about us, just tell us what you’re going to do and we’ll make it work, but just work with us, instead of trying to play games with us, making our lives miserable,” says an agent who was on Jenna’s detail.
When Barbara spent time in Africa, the White House said she was helping children with AIDS. A member of the counterassault team who accompanied her says that while she did some volunteer work in places like Cape Town, South Africa, “Most of the time she was out on her own, doing her thing, partying. She went to a couple schools, but we ended up doing an African safari, and of course the American taxpayer paid for her protection. You never knew where she was going, and she was always calling and complaining.”
Meanwhile, at a 2005 Halloween party in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, Henry Hager, who was Jenna’s boyfriend and soon-to-be husband, became so inebriated that the Secret Service wound up taking him to Georgetown University Hospital.
“It was after a Halloween party, and they were all dressed up in their costumes,” an agent on her detail recalls. “She’s like, ‘Listen, Henry, we’ve got to get you out of this costume. We got to look dignified before we go to the hospital.’ At this point, I’m thinking to myself, yeah, she’s growing up a little bit when she’s thinking about having to look dignified before going to the hospital, as opposed to looking like a sloppy drunken mess in a Halloween costume.”
Another time, Hager became drunk with Jenna in a Georgetown bar and picked a fight with several other patrons. Agents had to intervene to avoid a brawl.
“He was getting out of control and starting to pick a fight,” an agent says. “Agents pulled him aside and they said, ‘You realize that you are with the president’s daughter? You know the situation you are putting her and us in because of the way you’re acting?’”
“When she got around her friends, she was out of control,” an agent who was on her detail says of Jenna. “She was a party girl, smoking cigarettes, drinking a lot, burping, loud, and sort of obnoxious. I couldn’t believe that she was a schoolteacher during the day.”
Jenna taught inner-city children in Washington and later in Baltimore. Barbara maintained her interest in helping people afflicted with AIDS. Over time, the twins became more mature and demonstrated that they appreciated their detail.
“Around the Fourth of July, Jenna had a whole bunch of steaks delivered to our command post,” an agent says. “Around Christmas, she gave us all another order of steaks and hot dogs and stuff like that. It’s got to be tough being the kid of a president. I can’t imagine it.”
Asked if Barbara, Jenna, or Henry Hager had any comment, Sally McDonough, Laura Bush’s press secretary in the White House, said, “I am making a formal request that you do not include any of this nonsense in your book.”
Like Jenna and Barbara, Susan Ford Bales, the daughter of President Ford, tried to evade her Secret Service detail. Eighteen when her father became president, Susan—code-named Panda—had a reputation for romantically chasing Secret Service agents. After her father left the White House, she married Charles Vance, a Secret Service agent who was guarding the former president in California. They later divorced, and she remarried.
“In my career, Chelsea Clinton did it the best,” says an agent familiar with both her detail and the Bush twins’ details. “Treated the detail right, told them what was going on, never gave problems that I knew of.”
In recent memory, the brattiest offspring of a president was Amy Carter, who was nine when her father became president.
“Amy Carter was a mess,” says Brad Wells, an Air Force One steward. “She would look at me and pick up a package of [open] soda crackers and crush them and throw them on the floor. She did it purposely. We had to clean it up. That was our job.”
Secret Service agents guarding Amy—code-named Dynamo—at school often found themselves in the middle when Amy wanted to play with friends after school instead of going home to the White House to do her homework, as she was supposed to do. When agents told her she had to go home, “Amy would call her father and hand the phone to the agents,” Dennis Chomicki, who was on her detail, remembers. “The president would say to take Amy anywhere she wants to go. Amy just had her father wrapped up.”
Since Amy would often stay at a friend’s house through the evening, agents wound up working longer hours than if they had taken her directly to the White House. As a result, says Chomicki, “The detail would always try to get Mrs. Carter, the first lady, on the phone, because she would say, ‘Nothing doing. She’s coming home; she’s got her homework to do.’”
Of all the presidential children guarded by the Secret Service, Carter’s second oldest son, James Earl “Chip” Carter III, was one of the least liked. Twenty-six when his father won the presidency, Chip had helped campaign for him in 1976 and again gave speeches on his behalf when Carter ran for reelection in 1980.
“He was outrageous,” a Secret Service agent says. “Chip was out of control. Marijuana, liquor, chasing women.” Separated from his wife, Chip would “pick up women in Georgetown and ask if they wanted to have sex in the White House. Most of them did. He did it as often as he could,” the agent says.
At one point, Rosalynn Carter told the press that all three of her sons had “experimented” with marijuana. Their oldest son, John William “Jack” Carter, had been discharged by the navy for smoking weed.
Carter told the Secret Service that Rosalynn objected to agents and uniformed officers being armed inside the White House. According to Carter, Rosalynn cited the fact that guns made Amy “uncomfortable.” The Secret Service explained that in the event of an attack, agents would be useless if unarmed. President Carter relented.