This 44-part series began running in WCT Nov. 8. Readers can read all the installments to date at www.windycitymediagroup.com .
From the journal of John 'Jack' Quincy Adams, Chief Secret Service Special Agent in Charge, The White House. Code Name: One.
Part 4. Moving to Washington
Jack Adams, the Secret Service agent known as One, and now charged with assassinating President George W. Bush and being held for psychiatric evaluation, is telling about the first time he saved George H. W. Bush's life when he was running for vice president with Ronald Reagan. At the time, Jack was an agent in the Houston office.
I took a long cut to my right shoulder and a lesser gash on my chin before I grabbed the man's wrist and twisted his arm behind him, taking him to the ground in the process. By that time two other agents were on top of him and a third was ordering everyone to back away.
The man on the ground was shouting, 'Leave us alone. Why can't you just leave us alone?' and three private security men hired by the RNC as added bodyguards materialized from the front of the house to usher Sheepskin immediately through a gate in the back yard fence and into the limousine out front. It all seemed to happen within a few seconds and by the time I was standing up and noticing the blood on my clothes, Sheepskin was half a mile away.
I took some personal gratification in what I had done, but I certainly didn't expect anything to come of it. So a week later when my supervisor called me into his office and told me I was being summoned for a 'command performance' I didn't know what he was talking about.
'He wants you, Adams. Fancies you, I suppose, now that you've pulled his ass out of the meat grinder. You have to be in D.C. by the end of next week,' he said, handing me the formal transfer that had been faxed to him.
'D.C.?' I said, looking at the re-assignment sheet but not comprehending.
'You're going to be on his detail full-time. You'll have to work on the road a lot. I don't think it means you have to uproot your life or anything, since he lives here most of the time. When he's not up in Kennebunkport, that is. But you'll be living out of a suitcase until November. It's all there on the sheet: where to report, when to report, who you'll be answering to.'
I took the paper and headed back to my desk. As I went through the supervisor's door, he said, 'That's what you get for saving someone's life around here. Not like China where they belong to you; here it means you belong to them.' And he gave a laugh that I didn't think was 'with' me so much as 'at' me. 'It'll be all right come November. Carter just gave a million civil servants a nine percent pay raise. That ought to put him over the top.'
'Did it surprise you?' Dr. Haber asked. 'I mean that they wanted you to stay on with them?'
'Absolutely. I didn't think they noticed any of us agents. What surprised me the most was that the Ice Queen liked me, Barbara Bush that is. The move was her doing as much as Sheepskin's. I guess it was the knife incident. She figured there really was one Pinscher who would put his life on the line for her husband. She's fiercely protective of him. And her kids. I'll give her that.'
'She paid me one of the best compliments I've ever had. In 1993, while her husband was visiting Kuwait to receive an award for having liberated them in Desert Storm, somebody tried to kill him. Almost succeeded too. The CIA thought it was Saddam, which is why Trailblazer ( Bush II ) made that well-publicized comment, 'That man tried to kill my Daddy.' But Mrs. Bush only said, 'If One had been there the guy wouldn't even have gotten into the building.' And then there was the time she spoke to me in Rome, at the Pope's funeral. She sought me out and talked to me. I thought that was kind of weird.'
'What did she say?'
'She wanted to thank me for all I've done for her family. My boys is how she phrased it. I guess she thinks of her husband as one of her boys. That made me feel rather peculiar.'
'Why would it? That was 2005. Were you planning your move that long ago?'
'No, no, nothing like that. But remember, I had been bugging her husband during his entire term of office and by then I was also bugging her son.'
'You were spying on the president?'
Follow this 44-part serialized book in Windy City Times for the next several months. See www.WindyCityMediaGroup.com for past columns.
