The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents

by Ronald Kessler

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER  • “Ron Kessler appears to get everything first.”—Slate

As in a play, presidents, vice presidents, and presidential candidates perform onstage for the public and the media. What the nation’s leaders are really like and what goes on behind the scenes remain hidden. Secret Service agents have a front-row seat on their private lives and those of their wives and children. Crammed with new headline-making revelations, The First Family Detail by New York Times bestselling author Ronald Kessler tells that eye-opening, uncensored story.

The First Family Detail reveals:

• Vice President Joe Biden regularly orders the Secret Service to keep his military aide with the nuclear football a mile behind his motorcade, potentially leaving the country unable to retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack.
• Secret Service agents discovered that former president Bill Clinton has a blond mistress—code-named Energizer by agents—who lives near the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York.
• The Secret Service covered up the fact that President Ronald Reagan’s White House staff overruled the agency to let unscreened spectators get close to Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton, allowing John W. Hinckley Jr. to shoot the president.
• Because Hillary Clinton is so nasty to agents, being assigned to her protective detail is considered a form of punishment and the worst assignment in the Secret Service.

“Kessler’s such a skilled storyteller, you almost forget this is dead-serious nonfiction.”—Newsweek 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804139229
Publisher:	The Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/05/2014
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	112,420
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Ronald Kessler is the New York Times bestselling author of The Secrets of the FBI, In the President's Secret Service, and The CIA at War. A former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post investigative reporter, Kessler has won eighteen journalism awards, including two George Polk awards, one for national reporting and one for community service. He was named a Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian magazine. Kessler lives in Potomac, Maryland with his wife, Pamela Kessler.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 "Regular Joe" Biden 7

2 Hillary 16

3 Clandestine Movements 27

4 Potus 35

5 The Stripper 43

6 Sifting Threats 55

7 Penny-Pincher 63

8 Wilmington Shuttle 66

9 Advance 74

10 Peanut Farmer 87

11 White House Collar 93

12 Boys Will Be Boys 104

13 A Bullet for the President 113

14 Nancy 124

15 Corner Cutting 131

16 "Keep Your Head Down" 139

17 Hawkeye 148

18 Energizer 156

19 Dallas 166

20 Operation Moonlight 176

21 Missing Sunglasses 186

22 Watch the Hands 196

23 Throwing a Fit 202

24 Exposing Romney to Danger 212

25 Intrusion 220

26 Risking Assassination 228

Secret Service Chronology 247

Acknowledgments 253

Index 254