for hours watching everything around them. For some protectees it was hard to get used to having someone always there. One kept insisting, wrongly, that the Secret Service had set up cameras in his bedroom. Others balked, got irritable under the constant watch, even yelled at the agents. Shoot, I was going to spend just as much time with them as with Hargrave and Ryan and Karen—although the Secret Service agents did rotate, so maybe not quite as much time—and I figured that the better we got along, the better the experience. The rotation allowed the agents, who had been pulled from all over the country, to go back to their home bases, get home for a while and have dinner with the roommate, for during their two- or three-week shifts they only went where I went. Sometimes we would skirt their hometowns. It’s how I met Bob Rolin’s family and Bill Cousin’s son. Bob was as easy a smile as Kevin was difficult. He was a cheerful, happy man, and it honestly made me feel good just to be around him. Bill was a sweetheart, and he had a sweetheart. We teased him about Mary, the pretty woman who would show up at Michigan events now and again, and then, after he asked her to marry him when his shift was off right before the election, we got him a card and teased him some more. Don Cox, the fourth lead agent, was a student of history and culture. His being in the Secret Service made him a witness to the history he loved, a part of events that mattered. And the man knew everything. Lani Breda, though blonde, was more like me than the others—a sensible-shoes sort of woman. The other women could all play Secret Service agents in the movies: gorgeous Sonyia Rouel with her Ralph Lauren ponytail; Joanne Moses, who would have played the intellectual but surprisingly athletic agent; Lindsey Taylor—whom we eventually lost to Jack and Emma Claire’s detail—was the homecoming queen turned Secret Service agent; and Laura Hughes, well—Laura actually was in a television documentary about the Secret Service that was shown while we were on the road. I can only imagine the ribbing she took. Each of them, Michael, Bart, Patrick, and the list goes on, three dozen, I’d guess, names and faces and stories. It’s hard to leave any of them out.
We didn’t leave them out of any of the fun. I didn’t get them to play Boggle on the plane, but when it was time to sing, I would hand out the songbooks I had refurbished for the general election and ask them to pick a song. I would do it only when we were in the private plane we eventually squeezed out of the campaign, because that was a controlled environment where they could have something in their hands and on their mind other than watching out for me. Kevin would never sing, of course, but nearly everyone else did, and even I caught Kevin flipping through the songbook once or twice.
As the end of the campaign approached, the shifts were having their last days as part of our little team. A few days before each shift left for the last time, we had a goodbye party. The first was in Reno. Hargrave and Karen’s room was on one side of a common room, and mine was on the other, and in between we laid out a feast. Cake, piles of fruit, nachos, and things to drink. Actually, when I write it, it sounds terrible, but it wasn’t. And even if it had been, it would have been terrific, because the agents there—and later for the next crew at the party in Kenosha—were so unbelievably appreciative. One said that in twenty years with the Secret Service, covering all kinds of people, never had anybody done this, ever. He turned to the younger agents. “So don’t expect this again. People,” he said, “don’t even say thank you.” Honestly, that broke my heart. They were supposed to act like furniture, but that didn’t mean we should treat them like furniture.
In mid-October we piled into the Secret Service SUV as we always did, heading out from the airport to a town hall in Grand Junction, Colorado. On a bench outside the airport gates sat a man, perhaps in his sixties, his hair thinning, the color of his faded jacket and the color of his