The next time you find yourself watching a television news clip on the presidential campaign, consider the grim fellows in the earplugs and sunglasses who keep scanning the crowds, radiating a sense of coiled readiness and latent aggression. That stern, stony face that Secret Service agents present to the public is called The Look. They wear it like a mask. In a new book Marty Venker gives us a glimpse behind the mask.
In 1980 Venker was transferred from Jimmy Carter`s White House to New York City to guard Richard Nixon after the former president had moved from San Clemente, Calif., to a townhouse in Manhattan.
In his nine years with the Secret Service, Venker, then 34, had always been one of the freer spirits among his colleagues, but his off-duty behavior in his new assignment soon began crossing the line of mere eccentricity. It was obvious that something was wrong, at the very least a case of severe burn- out.
On the job, his white shirt, dark tie, conservative suit and wing-tipped oxfords were more like a disguise to him than his customary working clothes.
”It made me wonder about other guys I`d see on the street in super-straight nerd suits. What were they hiding?”
Venker was concealing a private life that would have gotten him fired if his superiors had found out. He had chopped his hair in a punk-style cut and was covering it at work with a wig.
He was ingesting drugs and making nightly forays into the new wave music scene and sampling any underground, borderline action he could find, the raunchier the better, hitting some very kinky joints, mixing with some very questionable people, everybody from gay bikers to zonked yuppies to movie stars, dancing until dawn, wearing outfits that one does not associate with a Secret Service agent.
On some evenings, he would choose an all-leather ensemble-pants, jacket, boots, studded wrist bands; for other occasions, perhaps he`d select something more casual-a simple T-shirt with pink harem pants or a pair of short-shorts and roller skates.
Sometimes he`d press the skates into service as transportation to his detail at Nixon`s, where his fellow agents would roll their eyes and go about their business. Typical Marty, a very zany guy.
A guy on the edge was what he was. Once riding the subway at night on his way to a late shift, a grinning kid in sunglasses sitting opposite him took out a knife, and Venker, without saying anything, pulled out his .357 Magnum, the standard Secret Service handgun. The kid`s smile faded, and he put away the knife and got off at the next stop.
Venker describes his emotional plunge and his attempt to pull out in
”Confessions of a Secret Service Agent” (Donald I. Fine, $17.95), whose author is George Rush, a graduate of Highland Park High School who writes a gossip column for the New York Post. Venker`s refusal to be interviewed for this article suggests that some problems may yet exist.
By 1981 Venker was feeling more disconnected, alienated, erratic. The killing of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan had intensified the stress that for a long time he had tried to ignore.
It arose not only from the strain of travel, long hours and the constant specter of death and violence that followed him but also because there was another, almost anarchic personality struggling to be heard. ”All those years working demonstrations, part of me wanted to join the protestors. Inside, I was rooting for the dissidents.”
The punk music he discovered during his off-duty hours on a junket to London aroused and conflicted the suppressed Marty.
He was now continually beset with colds and sore throats; one day when he paid a visit to his doctor, he was wearing his short-shorts and skates. The doctor privately diagnosed the get-up as ”an abnormal coping response-that`s a nice way of saying he needed psychiatric help, that he was pushed too far by his responsibilities.”
Venker also was having nightmares, the same one each time: ”Someone was pointing a gun at me. I`d pull my gun out-in plenty of time-but I couldn`t pull the trigger back. It wouldn`t fire. Then the other guy would shoot me in the chest. . . .
”The dream was a reflection of reality. Taking another person`s life is really serious. You have to feel totally justified. Subconsciously, I doubted I had the will to kill someone. I always wondered if I`d let them kill me first.”
He never mentioned his dream or his sense of coming apart to his doctor or to other agents, which was in keeping with the machismo of the agency.
”Gallows humor was still as close as we came to talking about our anxiety.”
Later his doctor would conclude that Venker was suffering from something similar to the post-traumatic stress disorder that afflicts some Vietnam veterans.
Venker would call it a nervous breakdown. But he didn`t seek counseling, at least not until after he had resigned from the service following a final trip to Europe with Nixon in August, 1981.
The moment he knew he had to quit was in a cavernous hotel dining room in Vienna, as he sat in a chair a few feet from Nixon, who was dining alone. ”As he ate, we just kept staring at each other. That`s when things started spinning. I could hear Nixon`s knife screeching against his plate. It got to be deafening. . . I suddenly felt if I didn`t get up from that chair, I never would.”
Venker asked for relief, went to his Secret Service chief and said he couldn`t take it anymore. ”The Secret Service reports that less than 3 percent of those who become agents leave before retirement; and most of those people drop out after the first year or two,” Rush writes.
A 1979 study of stress among agents found that the Secret Service was doing ”a mature job of self-scrutiny,” but Rush notes that since then steps have been taken to improve conditions. The number of days that agents can spend traveling on campaigns has been reduced, and agents and any members of their family are now pointed ”toward psychotherapists and experts in substance abuse, marital counseling and personal finance.”
Rush met Venker after he`d left the Secret Service and become a disc jockey at several New York dance clubs, those huge halls that throb and shudder with galaxies of strobe lights, sound systems capable of making ears bleed and an aura of exhilarant, evanescent escape.
He started at a swingers club for $50 a night and progressed to a former sheet metal factory that had been transformed into a sprawling spot called the Kamikaze; one of the bartenders was a cocky aspiring actor who went by Bruno but who would be more widely known as Bruce Willis.
It was more satisfying than following Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter on moonlit walks at Camp David, accompanying Imelda Marcos on a shopping spree or watching a drunken Anastasio Somoza, the former Nicaraguan dictator, crawl on his hands and knees across the lobby of the Waldorf Towers after a night on the town with prostitutes.
After Rush made Venker the subject of an article in Rolling Stone magazine, a book contract and movie deal followed. The hook, of course, was the bizarre juxtaposition of night-crawling punk deejay and Secret Service agent.
Not surprisingly, the Marty Venker story is notably different from the handful of other books and films by and about Secret Service agents, which have been far more upbeat and attentive to the proud history of the organization and the courage, dedication and discipline of its personnel.
In this tradition, Warner Brothers produced ”Code of the Secret Service” and several other B-movies in the `30s about agent Brass Bancroft, played by an actor named Ronald Reagan. (Warner has Rush`s screenplay ”in development.” Maybe with Willis as Venker?)
The last entry in the literary genre before Venker`s book was ”Guarding the President: The Inside Story of the Secret Service,” coauthored in 1985 by Dennis McCarthy, the agent who threw himself on John Hinckley as Hinckley fired at Reagan in 1981. (Agent Tim McCarthy, no relation, was seriously wounded in the attack.)
The before-and-after photographs on the dust jacket of Venker`s book, which appear with this article, are testimony to the metamorphosis he has made.
Although he`s still wearing The Look, the picture of ”Marty Venker now” in shades, satin army cap and black T-shirt probably won`t be snapped up by the Secret Service as a recruiting poster.
”The last time I saw Marty he had a Mohawk haircut,” author Rush said during a visit to Chicago. ”He looked a lot like Travis Bickle (the protagonist of the movie `Taxi Driver`). If his former colleagues saw him, they`d probably wrestle him to the ground if he got too close to whoever they`re guarding.”
Rush thinks the book`s central message is how a person can change his life and become more creative; others are going to read it as the
disintegration of a troubled guy. Venker himself seems to lean toward the latter interpretation; he has refused to be interviewed about the book, disconnecting his phone and refusing even to talk to Rush.
”He knows the media will want to hear the anecdotes about Carter in the bathroom and Nixon on the roof of his townhouse,” Rush said. ”Marty feels those are kiss-and-tell stories, and I don`t think he`s completely accepted the fact that he has kissed and told. Marty and I both believe in the kiss-and-tell book as a way of policing public officials, but I think he also feels some ambivalence because of the unwritten code against talking out of school.”
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