Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [283]
For much of the term of President George H. W. Bush, Lew Merletti and his fellow PPD agents walked close by the president’s side. They were dressed as hospital technicians, as major league baseball coaches, as priests, as students in caps and gowns, as Arab sheiks, and in an array of other disguises that allowed them to stick next to President Bush like alter egos. On his wall—beside a photo of himself exiting a burning building with a submachine gun as part of an antiterrorism maneuver—Merletti kept a framed copy of the cover of the Washington Post dated January 17, 1991. On that day, President Bush, wearing a trench coat and walking somberly through the rain with the Washington Monument in the background, was flanked by a single, slight man in a dark suit. The caption read: “U.S., Allies Launch Massive Attack Against Targets in Iraq and Kuwait.” On that walk, President Bush had leaned over and confided to Agent Merletti, “Thousands of our pilots are in the air right now. God bring them back safely.”
Every day of this job, Merletti would later say softly, he knew that he was engaged in the most “serious business imaginable.”
When President William Jefferson Clinton moved into the White House in January 1993, Merletti told his director, Eljay Bowron, that he would prefer not to return to the PPD. Besides the job’s being an unusually stressful assignment—he had already done his time under two presidents—Merletti feared that Clinton’s people would view him as a “Reagan-Bush” loyalist, which would prevent him from carrying out his job effectively. “Although in the Secret Service, we are apolitical,” Merletti explained, “the politicians don’t necessarily see it that way. And if they have seen you with a prior president from a different party, they think that your loyalties may lie with that president or with that party.” His greatest fear was that the new president would lack trust in him, pushing him away when sensitive matters were discussed, creating unacceptable risks for the new commander in chief.
Yet Director Bowron promoted Merletti to head the protective detail for President Clinton. In 1997, when Bowron retired unexpectedly, Merletti was elevated to the agency’s top position, becoming the nineteenth director of the Secret Service. Now, barely a half-year into his tenure, Merletti was confronted with one of the greatest challenges ever to face that agency in its 132-year history. If Secret Service agents were forced to testify by Independent Counsel Ken Starr, Director Merletti believed strongly, the agency would be irreparably harmed.
Truth be told, when the Lewinsky story made headlines worldwide, Merletti was stunned “because the events, if they had happened, had happened when I was agent in charge of the president’s detail, and I did not know who Monica Lewinsky was.” A review of the archives would later reveal that “Monica Samille Lewinsky” had sent Merletti at least one letter in October 1996, thanking him for doing such a great job “of protecting the ‘Big Guy.’” Yet Merletti had no recollection of this note. It was common to receive pieces of mail as head of PPD from unknown “fans” of all kinds, sane or otherwise. The Lewinsky name rang no bells. But this problem was arising under Merletti’s watch, and he had to deal with it. As head of an agency whose motto was “Worthy of Trust and Confidence,” he could not allow federal prosecutors—from Starr’s office or anywhere else—to interrogate his agents about things they had seen and heard while protecting the chief executive.
Merletti immediately convened a briefing session at the Old Executive Office Building with the Secret Service’s chief counsel, John Kelleher. A veteran of the Justice Department, Kelleher assured Merletti there was nothing to worry about. The attorney had dealt with Starr when Starr was solicitor general, and again on Whitewater-related matters; he had always found Starr to be agreeable and accommodating. As Merletti recalled, Kelleher “felt that from past experience with Starr, that once we