- Byrne, Gary J. and Grant M. Schmidt.
Crisis of Character.
New York: Center Street, 2016.
ISBN 978-1-4555-6887-1.
-
After a four year enlistment in the U.S. Air Force during which he served
in the Air Force Security Police in assignments domestic and
abroad, then subsequent employment on the production line at a Boeing
plant in Pennsylvania, Gary Byrne applied to join the U.S. Secret
Service Uniformed Division (SSUD). Unlike the plainclothes agents
who protect senior minions of the state and the gumshoes who pursue
those who print worthless paper money while not employed by the government,
the uniformed division provides police-like security
services at the White House, the Naval Observatory (residence of the
Vice President), Treasury headquarters, and diplomatic missions in
the imperial citadel on the Potomac. After pre-employment screening
and a boot camp-like training program, he graduated in June 1991 and
received his badge, emblazoned with the words “Worthy of Trust
and Confidence”. This is presumably so that people who cross the
path of these
pistol
packing feds can take a close look at the badge to see whether
it says “Worthy” or “Unworthy” and respond
accordingly.
Immediately after graduation, he was assigned to the White House,
where he learned the wisdom in the description of the job by
his seniors, “You know what it's like to be in the Service?
Go stand in a corner for four hours with a five-minute pee break
and then go stand for four more hours.” (p. 22). He
was initially assigned to the fence line, where he became acquainted
with the rich panoply of humanity who hang out nearby, and occasionally
try to jump, the barrier which divides the
hoi polloi from their anointed
rulers. Eventually he was assigned to positions within the White
House and, during the 1992 presidential election campaign, began
training for an assignment outside the Oval Office. As the campaign
progressed, he was assigned to provide security at various events
involving candidates Bush and Clinton.
When the Clinton administration took office in 1992, the duties of the
SSUD remained the same: “You elect 'em; we protect 'em”,
but it quickly became apparent that the style of the new president and
his entourage was nothing like that of their predecessors. Some were
thoroughly professional and other were…not. Before long, it
was evident one of the greatest “challenges” officers
would face was “Evergreen”: the code name for first lady
Hillary Clinton. One of the most feared phrases an SSUD officer on
duty outside the Oval Office could hear squawked into his ear was
“Evergreen moving toward West Wing”. Mrs Clinton would, at
the slightest provocation, fly into rages, hurling vitriol at all
within earshot, which, with her shrill and penetrating voice, was
sniper rifle range. Sometimes it wasn't just invective that took
flight. Byrne recounts the story when, in 1995, the first lady beaned
the Leader of the Free World with a vase. Byrne wasn't on duty at the
time, but the next day he saw the pieces of the vase in a box in the
White House curator's office—and the president's impressive
black eye. Welcome to Clinton World.
On the job in the West Wing, Officer Byrne saw staffers and interns
come and go. One intern who showed up again and again, without
good reason and seemingly probing every path of access to the president,
was a certain Monica Lewinsky. He perceived her as “serious
trouble”. Before long, it was apparent what was going on, and
Secret Service personnel approached a Clinton staffer, dancing
around the details. Monica was transferred to a position outside
the White House. Problem solved—but not for long: Lewinsky
reappeared in the West Wing, this time as a paid presidential
staffer with the requisite security clearance. Problem solved,
from the perspective of the president and his mistress.
Many people on the White House staff, not just the Secret Service,
knew what was transpiring, and morale and respect for the office
plummeted accordingly. Byrne took a post in the section responsible
for tours of the executive mansion, and then transferred to the fresh
air and untainted workplace environment of the Secret Service's training
centre, where his goal was to become a firearms instructor. After
his White House experience, a career of straight shooting had great
appeal.
On January 17, 1998, the Drudge Report broke the story
of Clinton's dalliances with Lewinsky, and Byrne knew this placid
phase of his life was at an end. He describes what followed as the
“mud drag”, in which Byrne found himself in a Kafkaesque
ordeal which pitted investigators charged with getting to the bottom
of the scandal and Clinton's lies regarding it against Byrne's duty
to maintain the privacy of those he was charged to protect: they
don't call it the Secret Service for nothing. This
experience, and the inexorable workings of
Pournelle's
Iron Law,
made employment in the SSUD increasingly intolerable, and in 2003
the author, like hundreds of other disillusioned Secret Service
officers, quit and accepted a job as an Air Marshal.
The rest of the book describes Byrne's experiences in that service
which, predictably, also manifests the blundering incompetence which
is the defining characteristic of the U.S. federal government. He
never reveals the central secret of that provider of feel-good
security theatre (at an estimated cost of US$ 200 million per arrest):
the vanishingly small probability a flight has an air marshal on
board.
What to make of all this? Byrne certainly saw things, and heard about
many more incidents (indeed, much of the book is second-hand accounts)
which reveal the character, or lack thereof, of the Clintons and the
toxic environment which was the Clinton White House. While recalling
that era may be painful, perhaps it may avoid living through a
replay. The author comes across as rather excitable and inclined to
repeat stories he's heard without verifying them. For example, while
in the Air Force, stationed in Turkey, “Arriving at Murtad, I
learned that AFSP [Air Force Security Police] there had caught rogue
Turkish officers trying to push an American F-104 Starfighter with a
loaded [sic] nuke onto the flight line so they could steal a
nuke and bomb Greece.” Is this even remotely plausible? U.S.
nuclear weapons stationed on bases abroad
have permissive
action links which prevent them from being detonated without
authorisation from the U.S. command authority. And just what would
those “rogue Turkish officers” expect to happen after
they nuked the Parthenon? Later he writes “I knew from my Air Force
days that no one would even see an AC-130 gunship in the sky—it'd
be too high.” An
AC-130 is
big, and in combat missions it usually operates at 7000 feet
or below; you can easily see and hear it. He states that “I knew
that a B-17 dual-engine prop plane had once crashed into the Empire
State Building on a foggy night.” Well, the B-17 was a four
engine bomber, but that doesn't matter because it was actually
a two engine
B-25
that
flew
into the Manhattan landmark in 1945.
This is an occasionally interesting but flawed memoir whose take-away
message for this reader was the not terribly surprising insight that
what U.S. taxpayers get for the trillions they send to the crooked
kakistocracy in Washington is mostly blundering, bungling,
corruption, and incompetence. The only way to make it worse is to put
a Clinton in charge.
November 2016 