Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [44]
Are they put there to spy? To see the direction that state government is going, what’s happening, and report back—to whom? And for what purpose? Do they think there are traitors in certain states?
I don’t know. That part, I wasn’t told. I’m left to wonder why our Constitution is being violated. It wasn’t the last time that I’d run into the CIA, either.
TERRY: I didn’t find out about it until after he was out of office. Jesse did try to protect me about a lot of things.
Was I afraid that something could happen to him? Are you kidding? Every day. When he was running for office, we didn’t have a gate on the property at the time. I came out at six o’clock one morning, going to feed the horses and the chickens in the barn, and there was a guy sitting in his car in our driveway. I said, “Who are you?” He said, “Well, I want to talk to Jesse.” I said, “Well, everybody knows that he’s on the radio right now.” There I was telling him, I’m here all alone, in the middle of nowhere. How stupid is that? Thankfully, the man simply drove off.
Another time Jade had come home from junior high school and was out in the barn doing chores. I had to go to the store, and I saw a car in front of the barn. I walked in, and there was some guy following Jade around. When I demanded to know who he was and what he was doing there, he said, “Oh, I’m just somebody who’s gonna vote for Jesse, and I wanted to come see if he was home and talk to him.” He turned out to be a perfectly nice man, but . . .
Then, after he became governor, there were always death threats and constant security. At first I would go off alone to the grocery store and one of the security people would end up telling me, “First Lady, please don’t go anywhere unless you tell us.” In the beginning it was kind of annoying, but, when you have security around you all the time, you end up figuring you must need it. I was terribly afraid when Tyrel refused to accept security. At the end, when they’d come and say, “Everybody get in the car, you have to go back to the mansion, there’s been a threat,” you think, Oh my God, somebody must be trying to kill us all the time.
The state patrol had me go and take self-defense lessons, along with my assistant and my executive protection person. They made me do gun training. I bought a purse that executive protection women carry, with the little zipper on the side. I learned how to quick-draw out of my purse. I was very accurate.
If I have to fight for myself, I can. It’s not like I’m above violence. One time I was on a pay phone at a restaurant, when a drunk came up and started talking to me. Finally I said, “Hold on just a minute ”—I was checking on the kids—and told him, “If you say one more filthy thing to me, I’m going to hit you with this telephone.” I went back to talking, and he kept on. So I took that phone and I hit him as hard as I could, right in the forehead.
After Jesse left office and there was no protection around us anymore, it took a really long time for me to be comfortable going anywhere.
Toward the end of my term, on one of my days off, I was playing golf and having a bad round. It’s competitive, me against the course, and I don’t like the course to win that easily. (Which it usually does.) Anyway, I was already in a bad mood—when, all of a sudden, squad cars started pulling onto the golf course.
It turned out that some guy in a pickup truck had been in a restaurant that morning, said he’d seen me the night before and should have killed me then—but he was for sure going to get me tonight. As he left, a waitress wrote down his license plate, picked up the phone, called the local police, and said: “We just had a guy here threatening to kill the governor.”
I had a public appearance that night. Right away my security had to cancel it. They will not put you out in public until the person making the