Read Online In the President's Secret Service by Ronald Kessler - Free Book Online

portrayed Ford as a dullard and a klutz, but agents say he was neither. A University of Michigan football player who was voted most valuable player, Ford was an expert skier who taunted agents who could not keep up with him. Finally, the Secret Service assigned a world-class skier to his detail. The agent would ski backward and wave as the president tried to catch up with him.
    “Ford was a very athletic guy” says Dennis Chomicki, who was on his detail. “He used to swim every day, he was a good golfer, and he was an outstanding skier.”
    But one day after he left office, Ford was driving an electric golf cart in Palm Springs, California, when he accidentally crashed into an electric panel hanging on the wall of a shack for golf carts.
    “The whole panel came off its fasteners and fell down on top of the carts,” Chomicki says. “He was mad as hell, and he looked at me and said, ‘You know, after all those years, they were all right. All the reporters used to say I was awkward. Well, they’re right. I’m just one big clumsy sonofabitch.’ And he walked away.”
    Unlike many other presidents, Ford never engaged in any dalliances. Until
The Miami Herald
revealed Gary Hart’s fling with Donna Rice in May 1987, the media had not exposed extramarital affairs of presidentsand presidential candidates. Indeed, throughout American history, the press had been aware of presidential affairs and covered up for occupants of the White House. Yet the hypocrisy and lack of judgment exhibited by a politician engaging in extramarital relations is a clue to character that the electorate needs to consider.
    Ironically, the press’s record was broken only because
The Miami Herald’s
political editor Tom Fiedler wrote a column defending Hart, the Democratic Party’s leading contender, against unsubstantiated rumors of being a womanizer. A woman who refused to identify herself called Fiedler to say she disagreed with his column. In fact, she said a friend of hers who was a part-time model in Miami was flying to Washington that Friday evening to spend the weekend with Hart. The caller described the woman as quite attractive and blond.
    Fiedler, reporter Jim McGee, and investigations editor Jim Savage looked at airline schedules and picked out the most likely nonstop flight to Washington that Friday evening, May 1. McGee took the flight and spotted several women who matched the description. One was carrying a distinctive shiny purse. When they touched down in Washington, she disappeared into the crowd.
    After taking a cab to Hart’s townhouse, McGee saw the same young woman with the shiny purse walking arm in arm with Hart out the front door of his Washington home. Joined by Savage and Fiedler on Saturday, McGee watched their comings and goings at the town-house for the next twenty-four hours. When Hart came outside and seemed to have spotted them, they confronted him and asked about the beautiful young woman sitting inside his home.
    Hart denied that anyone was staying with him.
    “I have no personal relationship with the individual you are following,” Hart said. He described the woman as “a friend of a friend of mine” who had come to Washington to visit her friends.
    That night, after the story had been filed with Rice still unidentified,Savage, Fiedler, and McGee met with a Washington friend of Hart’s who had introduced the candidate to Rice. Savage pointed out that the effort to identify the woman would create a media feeding frenzy, and it would be in Hart’s interest to name her. The story ran in
The Miami Herald
on Sunday, May
3
. That morning, a spokesman for Hart told the Associated Press that the unidentified woman was Donna Rice.
    On the same Sunday,
The New York Times
ran a story quoting Hart as denying the allegations of affairs. He challenged the reporters to “follow me around … it will be boring.” Hart continued to deny he had been having an affair with Rice, but CBS ran an amateur video of them together