Saucing That Secret Service Goss
“So a bunch of guys away from home take off their wedding rings, mix testosterone with alcohol and hookers—an appalling combination— and argue over the price of a lady’s company."
It’s been a minute! My head was turned by the January 6 commission, which I wanted to experience (after four years of offering Trump commentary) as a private citizen—until the latest burst of news. Perhaps you caught me having too much fun on CBS, MSNBC, or read my short history of presidential run-ins with the law.
But most of all, I’ve been hard at work on the next book. I can’t say anything to satisfy you until 2023ish, so I’ll exacerbate the anticipation with this post!
On a recent bike ride, I realized something so profound about my current subject that I ended up in a bush. I emerged unscathed, thanks to the patron saint of historians, though I can’t say as much for the people I’m writing about. When I told friends about it, I sent along a photo of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, then First Lady, falling off her horse, Bit of Irish. It wasn’t Jackie’s fault, either; the horse had been startled by a camera. Once Clint Hill, her Secret Service agent, confirmed that Jackie, an accomplished equestrienne, was unharmed, his concern turned to anger. In his book, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, Hill describes a confrontation with the journalist.
In 2016, I asked Hill, who often appeared on my Audible podcast, Presidents Are People, Too!, how much he left out of his books. According to my notes, he said, “Most of it.” Most?! Most. I fell into despair. Hill is 90 years old. His coauthor, Lisa McCubbins, 58, had been my great hope for a more open source—until I realized that they were dating. In 2021, they married. They have at least one new book coming out.
I’ve accepted that McCubbins is totally unlikely to sauce the goss. She may know more than us, but I doubt she knows most. The same can likely be said of Hill’s first wife, Gwen. She rarely appears in Hill’s books because he’s rarely with her. For much of their marriage, he was serving a president or Jackie Kennedy. If Gwen is mentioned in the narrative, it’s likely because he’s trying to make it to the hospital before she has a baby, or he’s left her with young children for most of the year.
“For the privilege of wearing that special five-starred badge, [agents] abandon any thoughts of their time being their own,” the author Jeffrey Robinson wrote in 2012. “They miss birthdays and Christmas, Little League games, graduations, school plays, first teeth, first steps, first words.” And then there’s the financial cost. No matter how many hours they work, agents can, at most, make around $160,000. In Hill’s books, agents often put some of those funds toward their own housing and food on the job—and they work nights and weekends for free.
In 2016, data from the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association showed little has changed since Hill’s days. Most of the Secret Service travels eight months of the year, during which there is little if no time off, and they’re expected to work far more than a 40-hour workweek the rest of the year, too. In terms of hours worked, they surpass Homeland Security’s pay cap by significant numbers. Partners are essentially single parents whose children hardly know their fathers or mothers. “My wife keeps asking me what the benefit is and I don’t have a good answer,” an agent in Utah said. A worse answer: “So a bunch of guys away from home, who should know better, take off their wedding rings, mix testosterone with alcohol and hookers—an appalling combination,” Robinson explained, and “argue over the price of a lady’s company.”
The divorce rate among agents is high, which may have something to do with the Secret Service’s consistently low rank on the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government: 377 out of 432. Clint was doing his best, or at least as he and his second wife have portrayed him, but in the end, the relationship he had with Gwen was secondary. An oath eclipses a vow when the leader of the free world is in danger.
That danger isn’t necessarily direct or mortal. It can be as benign as Jackie’s humiliating fall, which we only know about for a few reasons: There were witnesses, and the event is documented. There were no domestic or national security threats; it was of no concern to a grand jury or a House Oversight Committee. And in the end, Hill controlled himself. He put the law above the power of his position and his very real friendship with Jackie.
Hill could not have predicted any part of that scenario. After the election, he was devastated by his new assignment. He had expected to transition from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s detail to Kennedy’s, only to learn he was assigned to a first lady. His boss’s logic: Hill was three years Jackie’s junior and both had young children. Hill, who was raised by his adoptive parents in Washburn, North Dakota, disagreed. What did he have in common with Jackie, a debutante who grew up in the many homes of her Standard Oil heir stepfather, spoke multiple languages and traveled the world for pleasure? Hill feared it was a demotion that meant he’d spend the Kennedy administration shopping in Palm Beach, doing “kiddie detail,” and attending luncheons. He wasn’t totally wrong; Jackie was no Mamie Eisenhower, but she was no five-star general, either. And yet, they became close enough that Hill often joined her in the backseat of the car for an illicit cigarette.
That’s a far cry from the Secret Service’s drive with Donald Trump on January 6, 2021. When they refused to take him to the Capitol, where supporters were heeding his call for insurrection, he allegedly lunged for the wheel of the presidential limo. Earlier that day, they refused another request: Trump, afraid that agents were turning away too many people with AR-15-style rifles, asked that they get rid of the metal-detecting magnetometers. He wanted the crowds to look large and formidable.
We didn’t learn that from Trump or the agents guarding him that day. It came from Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Trump’s then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in her testimony before the January 6 commission. She had heard about the incident from Tony Ornato, a senior Secret Service officer, the day it happened. Ornato, as well as Robert Engel, the head of Trump’s security detail, the driver, and others, have denied the story. “Her Fake story that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House Limousine in order to steer it to the Capitol Building,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media app, “is ‘sick’ and fraudulent.”
Like Hill, modern Secret Service agents don’t share much. And they’ve covered their tracks—or perhaps Joseph Cuffari, the Trump-appointed inspector general from the Department of Homeland Security who they report to has covered their tracks—by erasing text messages from January 5 and 6. Even Cuffair couldn’t stand by claims of an ill-timed “device replacement program.” The texts were erased after his office requested them. How? We don’t know, but Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, insists “the insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false.” Indeed, the department has turned over hundreds of thousands of internal messages related to the insurrection, including a direct request for emergency assistance from the Capitol Police.
Hill liked Jackie. Loved her, even. If the news is to be believed, how could Trump’s Secret Service feel the same affection for him? Nine hundred agents got COVID while serving him, which makes sense; Stanford University economists believe Trump’s rallies “ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed COVID-19 cases” and “likely led to more than 700 deaths.” It’s hard to forget, of the many horrifying Trump photo ops of 2020, the images of Trump riding in a car with agents while he was still being hospitalized for COVID. And things weren’t good before that. Trump Tower was too expensive for the Secret Service, who were relegated to a nearby trailer. Ivanka and Jared wouldn’t let their agents use one of their many bathrooms, costing taxpayers thousands of dollars per month.
The list of indignities is long, but since Trump left office, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest there are no hard feelings. “Geez, the fact that we’re thinking about him going to jail kind of scares me,” a former Secret Service official told Business Insider. “It’s just awful to even think about.” Perhaps the “him” here is more of a “royal we.” To agents, it’s “awful” to think about Trump going to jail because it would be “awful” to think of any president facing ignoble hardship. From Clint Hill to Secret Service officials who say “Geez” when a president may be held accountable for, among other things, inciting an insurrection, it’s clear that agents feel bound to the American president—perhaps more than to American democracy.
It may also be a matter of self-interest. Hill’s post-presidential days with Jackie were spent on Aristotle Onassis’s $40 million yacht or on Skorpios, his private island—to agents, duty is duty. If Trump goes to prison, he’ll need them more than ever; he’ll be a target among inmates, but no matter where he sleeps, the maximum (or minimum, if he’s as lucky as his old lawyer Michael Cohen) security prison will be a target among his followers. (Can you imagine that heist? Oceans 11 it will not be.) There’s no precedent for this, of course, but former presidents are entitled to Secret Service protection. Not all take it. Richard Nixon, who would have likely gone to prison if he hadn’t been pardoned by Gerald Ford, opted out after he left office.
One thing is for sure: If Trump is incarcerated, the grift is over. There’s a decent chance Congress will strip him, or all former presidents, of lifelong Secret Service protection. When Bill Clinton was president, coverage was reduced to ten years. And if that happens, Trump will be in financial straits (as he may have been for some time). “It’s a classic Producers situation,” the Late Show host Stephen Colbert explained in 2020. “Trump tried to earn more money with a flop than with a hit. Also, there are Nazis.”
We don’t know much more—yet. The deadline for Cuffari to turn over the requested documents is August 23.
See you next week! Until then, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram, and the books we’ve mentioned on Bookshop and Amazon. If you’d like a personalized copy of my books, please order them from Oblong.