You could set your watch by President Ronald Reagan. His reputation for punctuality gave Secret Service dog handler Tony Ferrara some comfort as he stood at the end of a row of fifteen handlers and dogs in front of the hay barn at the president’s California ranch.
At first the dogs—German shepherds and Belgian Malinois—sat patiently at their handlers’ sides. But after several minutes, composure turned to restlessness. Some whined and fidgeted. Ferrara’s 110-pound Dutch shepherd, Bart, pulled and barked toward his four-legged colleagues as if he wanted to eat them. Ferrara took a few steps in the other direction to move Bart away from temptation.
Horses snuffling the ground for hay behind the dog teams glanced up to look at the creatures who were disrupting their peaceful morning routine. They flicked their ears and snorted, and went back to their breakfast.
It was October 29, 1988, less than three months before Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency would end, and just ten days before the nation would elect its next president. Someone had decided this would be a good time for photo ops with the Secret Service dog teams that had protected the president and Nancy Reagan on their 688-acre ranch atop the Santa Ynez Mountains northwest of Santa Barbara. Although Reagan would receive Secret Service protection for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t be getting this kind of massive canine protection after he left office. It needed to be documented for posterity.
Right on the dot, the president strode up a dirt path, flanked by a couple of Secret Service agents. He wore khaki riding clothes with rich brown leather boots and a matching belt, and he was smiling.
As he approached, a strange thing happened. The dogs all settled down. They stopped barking and sat quietly, looking toward the chief executive. Ferrara wondered if the sudden attentiveness of the handlers had dumped down the leash to affect their dogs, or if Reagan’s presidential presence had a calming effect.
Reagan said a few words of thanks to the group, then walked to the first handler and shook her hand. The photographer took a photo. Down the row of handlers Reagan proceeded, shaking hands as the photographer captured the image.
Then came a gap of about six feet. The president looked past the gap and saw Bart giving the evil eye to the other dogs. Ferrara kept a firm grip on Bart’s coiled leather leash. Bart had never snapped at anyone unless he was supposed to, but Ferrara wasn’t taking any chances.
Reagan walked toward them and shook Ferrara’s hand. “He doesn’t like those dogs, does he?” Reagan asked with a grin.
“There’s a few things he doesn’t like, Mr. President,” Ferrara said. “German shepherds, bad guys, and Democrats.”
Reagan burst out laughing, his eyebrows drawn together in an expression of easy joviality. Still shaking his right hand with Ferrara’s, the president grasped Ferrara’s elbow with his left. Ferrara relaxed and felt an undeniable warm connection. But he didn’t for a second loosen his hold on Bart’s leash.
—
Secret Service director H. Stuart Knight had no idea of Wilson (Bill) Livingood’s love of dogs when he called the special agent in charge of protective operations into his office in 1975 and asked him to form a canine unit.
With incidents of domestic and international terrorism on the rise, the agency had done some research to find out how to best detect explosives. Dogs came out on top of the list.
The Service had been piecing together canine protection for presidents by calling in military and local law-enforcement canine teams wherever the president went. There was no standard of training, and dogs weren’t always available. This patchwork quilt was no way to protect the president. It was time for the Secret Service to develop its own canine program.
Livingood was thrilled that the job of starting a canine unit fell to him. Early in his Secret Service career he had watched the nation plunge into “a deep, deep sadness” after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He would support anything that would diminish the chances of such a national disaster again.
If it involved dogs, all the better for the lifelong dog lover.
When Livingood was a radioman on a Navy minesweeper after high school, he managed to convince the captain to allow him to keep a puppy he had adopted while onshore. She looked like Dagwood Bumstead’s dog, so he named her Daisy. She became the darling of the crew. Everyone loved her. Everyone except one gruff boatswain who always grumbled about her.
One day in rough seas, Livingood heard an alarm go off while he was at work in the radio shack.
“Man overboard, man overboard!” a voice announced.
Then a pause.
“Correction. Dog overboard!”
Horrified, Livingood bolted out and ran to the edge of the vessel. He looked down and saw that someone had jumped into the swells and already had a hold of Daisy. He was shocked to see that of all people, the hero was the boatswain. The crew deployed a motorboat and picked them up.
After thanking him profusely, Livingood asked why he rescued her.
“I thought you didn’t like her,” Livingood said.
“Bill, I love this dog,” the boatswain told him. “I just couldn’t admit it because that’s not how I am.”
After the Navy, Livingood went to Michigan State and majored in criminal justice. During summers he had a job on a small police force. The animal warden in the area had a reputation of being cruel to dogs, so Livingood and some of his cop friends would scoop up whatever strays they came across and find their owners, or find homes for them if they didn’t have owners. He found it rewarding to pair up dogs who needed a home and people who needed a companion.
And now here he was, being asked to pair up the Secret Service with a whole new breed of program. How hard could it be?
—
The Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD) seemed like the logical agency to approach to help launch the Secret Service’s canine program. It was widely regarded as an outstanding department and was accepted as a leader in K-9 training. Bomb dogs were fairly new to the department, but MPD’s patrol and narcotics dogs had a stellar reputation.
MPD offered to provide dogs for the Secret Service, and to train the dogs and their handlers. For the Secret Service, it seemed like the perfect answer, with one-stop shopping in its own backyard.
In the summer of 1975 the Service announced six open positions for handlers. Job applicants had to meet an unusual requirement right off the bat. They had to be married. The logic behind this was that if an officer was sick, someone else in the house could care for the dog.
More than one hundred applied. After a taxing interview process that involved wives of the finalists, six Uniformed Division officers were selected. Four had been dog handlers in the military.
William (Bill) Shegogue (pronounced shay-go) had trained as a combat tracker dog handler when he was drafted in 1968 during the Vietnam War. He loved the job and longed to work with dogs again. He was instructing a firearms class at RTC when he heard the news over the loudspeaker.
“Congratulations, Billy Shegogue, you are now the proud owner of a dog!”
His students cheered.
In early December, Shegogue and the other five handlers reported to the MPD training facility at Blue Plains in southwest D.C. to get their dogs. Training wouldn’t start until after the holidays, but the trainers wanted the dogs and handlers to acclimate to each other.
For some it would be a happy holiday.
For others, it would be memorable.
The dogs, all German shepherds, had been plucked from shelters or donated. Their temperaments ranged from assertive to ballistic.
Shegogue’s dog, Diamond, tried to bite him a few times over the holidays. Despite his previous work with dogs, he couldn’t get a handle on how to stop it. He looked forward to starting class in January and smoothing Diamond’s rough edges.
But even in the hands of the professionals, Diamond’s biting continued. Through basic obedience, detection work, and patrol training, nothing anyone did helped the dog. He was likely to bite any time he was anxious. When searching buildings, if the dog couldn’t find the bad guy hiding behind a closed door, he’d turn around and bite Shegogue for good measure. He never broke the skin, but it hurt like hell.
Shegogue described the pain to his wife. “It feels like you put your hand down on the table and took a hammer and hit yourself with it really hard.”
After five weeks of this, MPD took Diamond back and gave Shegogue his next dog, Keeper. He hoped the dog would live up to his name. Keeper had been donated by a married couple. Word was that Keeper hated the husband and wouldn’t let him get near the wife.
Shegogue quickly discovered that the dog didn’t like most people. Only Shegogue and one other handler could touch him. And they had to be careful.
One afternoon Shegogue tried taking a candy wrapper out of Keeper’s mouth. He ended up with his thumb split wide open and his thumbnail hanging off in a grotesque fashion.
He had a description of a new sensation for his wife. “You start with a number two pencil and smash it down on the ground, break the tip off, round it out, and stab yourself with it multiple times.”
Keeper did well on the patrol work, where he could use his innate talents of running and fighting and biting. But explosives detection work was of no interest. No matter how much Shegogue and the trainers encouraged him with praise and rewards, Keeper put in minimal effort.
The only part of explosives detection he seemed to enjoy was what happened the moment he detected the scent. MPD trained what’s called an “aggressive alert.” Anything with the word aggressive suited Keeper.
In an aggressive alert, the dog signals the handler to a find by vigorously pawing and scratching at it. In effect the dog is trying to dig up his reward, which in training would magically bounce up from the area. It’s a technique traditionally used in narcotics detection.
Shegogue’s classmate Cliff Cusick had trepidation about the aggressive alert for explosives. It seemed obvious to the former Air Force sentry dog handler that a dog digging at a volatile substance could easily trigger an explosion, even if a handler pulled away his dog immediately.
“It defeats the entire purpose, doesn’t it?” he asked a classmate.
But Cusick had too much going on to find time to challenge the status quo. He was on his third dog in four months of training and needed this last dog to work out if he was going to graduate.
Cusick had loved his first dog, Rajah, a stunning German shepherd who’d been donated by a wealthy woman from Virginia. Everything was going beautifully until gunfire acclimation training. The noise of the firearms frightened Rajah so badly that he once bit Cusick in the leg as he panicked to escape. A dog who had that kind of fear wouldn’t do well in a life-or-death situation without a great deal of work, if ever. It wasn’t a problem MPD trainers had time to fix.
Cusick’s next dog had an ear that had been half chewed off or had met some other unfortunate fate. He felt bad for the dog, whose jagged ear hadn’t yet healed and attracted flies. The dog had some other issues, and MPD took the dog back and gave Cusick a new dog by the name of Devil. Or more accurately, Devil #6, as they’d had five other Devil dogs before this one.
Devil was donated by an MPD officer whose career had become too busy to give her dog the attention and training he needed. The dog was highly aggressive, but in the end, he made it through the program.
On April 30, 1976, the first canine class of the United States Secret Service graduated. The six uniformed handlers posed with their dogs on an outdoor staircase. In the front row, lined up close together alongside their handlers, were canines Bullet, Tony, Danny, and Duke.
On the step above them stood MPD trainer Dave Haskins. The men held him in high esteem and knew they were going to miss seeing him daily. He and the other trainers had done their best with the dogs they’d been given. Three of the six dogs looked like they were going to do great things in the Service. Not bad, considering.
Two dog teams in the photo had physically separated themselves from the other dogs and from each other by several stairs: Cusick and Devil way at the top of the staircase, as far as possible from the others. And Shegogue and Keeper, with a wide cushion between Devil in the back and the rest of the dogs in front.
Anyone watching may have thought the handlers arranged themselves this way to make the photo look more interesting or symmetrical, unaware of the melee that would probably ensue if they’d been closer.
Like new graduates anywhere, Shegogue wondered about his future. Where would he be in a few months or years? Would this dog get better at detecting explosives? What if Keeper missed something and the worst happened?
He stashed these thoughts away and tried to enjoy their big day.
—
Shegogue and the MPD trainers had to face reality after Keeper had been on the job for three weeks. Keeper was not, after all, a keeper. No one could get him to show interest in explosives detection. Shegogue gave back his dog and reluctantly stepped out of the world of dog handling, since no other dogs were available.
The dog found another home, and Shegogue found himself back at the Foreign Missions Branch, standing post in front of embassies without a canine, often on the midnight shift. He went from having little supervision as a dog handler to having layers of it.
Soon after, another dog from the class washed out.
And then there were four.
A third dog wasn’t doing so well either, but the handler didn’t call attention to him. He didn’t want to end up pulling night duty standing post by himself.
Livingood and Senior Special Agent Thomas Quinn were already painfully aware that the canine program was in need of extensive changes if it were to survive. As the dogs were washing out and others were pawing at explosives during training, the agents made phone calls and spoke with law-enforcement leaders and with military canine training facilities around the country to get information about what others were doing.
Their research led them to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. It seemed to have just the kind of program they were looking for. Livingood and Quinn visited Lackland, headquarters for training most of the nation’s military dogs and handlers.
They liked how the dogs alerted with a passive response rather than one that could cause an explosion. Instead of digging at explosives, the dogs simply sat and stared. And the quality of the dogs impressed them. These weren’t dogs scraped together from whatever free resources were available. They were high-quality dogs, primarily German shepherds, procured from breeders in Europe and the United States.
Back in D.C. the men worked out a deal. The Air Force would supply the dogs to the Secret Service and train the handlers and the dogs in an intensive course at Lackland, followed by more training in the Washington, D.C., area.
Shegogue and the other dogless handler got sprung from post duty. They flew with four new handlers to be part of the first Secret Service canine class at Lackland. He figured he was in for a smooth ride this time, at last.
And then he met Coley. The dog had already bitten several handlers before Shegogue got him. “He’s a good dog, really,” he was assured.
The problem seemed to be that Coley didn’t like to be told what to do. As Shegogue worked with the dog on obedience the first few days, Coley conveyed his message as best as he could.
Every so often, the dog spun around and put his teeth on Shegogue’s groin area. He didn’t clamp down. It was just a warning:
No one tells me what to do.
Shegogue knew he needed to nip it in the bud before the dog decided to take it to the next level. He didn’t want to have to call his wife with a description of a new and particularly awful kind of bite pain. He had a feeling it would involve more than pencils and hammers.
Within a week, with the help of the trainers at Lackland, he and Coley had come to an understanding. From then on, Shegogue had no doubt his canine partner was exactly what the dogs of the other Secret Service handlers were to them: the best.
Coley was proving excellent at obedience and looked like he was going to be a fine patrol and explosives dog as well. He didn’t like coming off the bite once he got hold of a bite sleeve, but that would give Shegogue something to work on when they headed back home for more training.
The next class of six handlers that flew down to Lackland included Cusick with Devil, and two other handlers from the original MPD class. Their dogs needed to unlearn the aggressive alert and replace it with the passive alert, among other new skills.
The canine unit grew by increments of six teams every several months, and soon there were enough dogs to work around the clock, rotating to different areas each shift. Every day brought something new. No one stood post for eight- or twelve-hour shifts. Boredom was rarely an issue as they pulled four-hour blocks at the White House and on the streets or wherever they were needed.
The Secret Service hired their favorite trainers from Lackland to work at Rowley Training Center. The program grew and became more self-sufficient. It was becoming robust enough that the Secret Service would soon be able to end its training relationship with Lackland. But there was still one more class to go . . .
—
Shepherd, shepherd, shepherd, shepherd . . .
Malinois.
Five dogs, five handlers. They had spent six weeks together at Lackland getting to know each other, for better and worse. And now back at RTC, the handlers were about to learn which dogs the trainers had picked for them.
The program had never selected a Malinois before. The breed wasn’t that well known yet in the United States. A Malinois named Marko had caught the eyes of the Air Force trainers, who could see he was strong, tough, energetic, and driven.
“Who’s going to get Marko?” the Lackland trainers had asked before the dog handlers had gone back to RTC.
“Not sure yet,” a Secret Service instructor responded.
“Watch out, or Marko will kill him!”
Handler Freddie McMillon knew this was no joke. He had developed an ongoing internal dialogue with Marko during their encounters.
Dog, don’t chew me up. You don’t need to eat me alive. Let’s work together on this.
McMillon wanted to say the words but only thought them as he willed himself to open the kennel door whenever he was assigned to take out Marko. He didn’t want any whiff of doubt to trail in with him.
The barking and whirling of the other dogs didn’t bother him so much. But Marko’s icy glare gave him cold feet. McMillon could almost hear what Marko was trying to tell him with his look: I dare you to bring your ass in here!
The handler was always relieved when it was someone else’s turn to take out Marko. The dog was a biter, out of control, and tireless.
And now was the moment of truth. The instructor began the matchmaking announcements.
“Denny, you’ve got Mutz.”
“Billy, you’ve got Bear.”
Oh no, just three of us left. Please don’t let me get Marko.
“George, you’ve got Abus.”
Uh-oh. Give Marko to Marty, give Marko to Marty . . .
“Marty, you’ve got Fritz.”
Noooooo!
“And Freddie, you’ve obviously got Marko. Don’t worry, you can handle it. That’s why we chose you for him.”
He wanted to believe him, so he decided to get this relationship off to a strong start. After the announcement, he walked over to have a chat with Marko at the kennel.
Marko glared, as always. McMillon knew what he was trying to tell him.
Look, I don’t know what your intentions are, but I’d advise you not to come any closer.
“OK, OK, you can look at me like that but your ass has to eat, and guess who has the food?” McMillon said to him, out loud, standing tall and trying to make himself look sturdier and more in control than he felt. He made sure his body language conveyed that he was trying to tell Marko something important, something he needed to know.
The first day, when everyone fed their dogs, McMillon showed up but brought no chow. The same happened the next morning. Later in the day McMillon approached the kennel. He had kibble in his pockets.
“OK, Marko, are we going to be friends or what? This is going to be a good partnership. They said to me you’ll be a great detection dog. We already know about your patrol side.”
The dog stared, but it wasn’t the usual defiant pose. McMillon entered the kennel without incident but stayed near the door just in case.
He took some kibble from his pocket and cupped his hand toward Marko. The dog ate it hungrily. After several fistfuls, McMillon still had some food in his pockets when something unprecedented happened. Marko wagged his tail. McMillon kept feeding him, and his dog’s tail kept wagging.
“I got you, boy,” he said to Marko, and smiled.
He and Marko became closer every day. He saw in the dog the kind of hard-core dedication and energy and determination he valued in himself.
By the end of the months of training, Marko was calling him Dad.
—
Several years into the canine program, the Secret Service hired Ray Reinhart to be an instructor. He had put in nearly twenty years as a K-9 handler with Prince George’s County, Maryland, and was ready to bring his brand of instruction and training, and his passion for K-9s’ capabilities, to the Secret Service.
He knew firsthand what great dogs could do. His German shepherd, Rommel, had saved his life on three occasions.
“There was a bank robbery,” he’d tell his classes. “And two of the assailants took off. K-9 was the first one called. We were searching in some high sage grass. Suddenly Rommel stopped and bristled. I couldn’t see anything but I let him go and he bolted and got the guy in the arm—the arm that had been holding the gun he was about to shoot.”
Rommel got steak that night.
“Did you know Rommel was a water dog?” he’d ask his students.
“A water dog? I thought he was a German shepherd,” someone would inevitably say.
“No, he was a water dog. You could turn him on and you could turn him off just as easily. I’m hoping all your dogs will be water dogs.”
Reinhart handled every facet of training: criminal apprehension, explosives detection, obedience, agility, and article searches. When problems needed to be solved, students knew the solution would likely bear Reinhart’s unique, creative stamp.
“You gotta experiment,” was his philosophy. “It’s not all in a book.”
—
Members of the media had set up for their nightly newscast on the north grounds of the White House when they noticed a Secret Service dog staring, utterly riveted, at something in the distance. The Malinois, Rudy, lowered his body as if ready to bolt after an intruder.
“Wow, is he intense!” one of the reporters yelled over to the dog’s handler, Henry Sergent.
“What’s he fixated on?” another asked. “Is he getting ready to go after someone?”
“I hope not!” Sergent said, half joking.
Rudy charged forward, pulling his handler with him. Sergent wasn’t worried about a fence jumper. Dozens of other Secret Service officers would have seen someone jump the moment it happened. But he couldn’t fathom what his dog was doing. It was certainly nothing he’d ever done before.
They approached a tree and Rudy locked onto something in the branches. Sergent finally saw the intruder. It was a squirrel. Rudy stared, not barking, not even breathing. Sergent gave the leash a tug and Rudy left reluctantly, but kept looking back.
After that, Rudy was a dog obsessed. Whenever he worked on the White House grounds, hunting down squirrels was his sole mission. He was in luck. Squirrels have been calling the area surrounding the White House home for a long time, enjoying whatever bounties the gardens and trees provided and the safe haven from cars and people. They were everywhere.
Sergent didn’t know what to do. He turned to Reinhart.
“I’ve got an idea. It’s crazy, but it just might work,” Reinhart said with a chuckle.
The next day Reinhart met Sergent on the south grounds. He was carrying a bag with a toy stuffed squirrel he had bought. He’d named it Rocky. That morning he had made a small incision in Rocky, pulled wads of stuffing out of him, and infused the squirrel with hot peppers and Tabasco sauce. He tied a string to Rocky and stood behind a tree.
Sergent walked toward Rocky with Rudy. Reinhart pulled the string. The squirrel skittered across the grass with Rudy hot on its trail. Sergent let Rudy have a go at him. The dog grabbed the squirrel in his mouth and shook it. Hot sauce oozed out like blood. Moments later, he spit it out and was shaking his own head.
After a bowl of water and some TLC, Rudy and Sergent went about their rounds as usual. Squirrels would dash across the White House lawn and dart up trees for the rest of Rudy’s career. But they were far too spicy for his tastes.
—
Sergent had a hard time finding a dress that fit his sturdy six-foot-five frame. The one he ended up with didn’t match his purse, but he wasn’t going to fret about it.
The mustachioed dog handler slipped the dress on out of sight of the congressional representatives and other VIPs who’d gathered at the RTC dog training yard for a demonstration of the canine program.
He tapped on the edge of a large baby carriage, and Rudy jumped in. The dog sat dutifully while Sergent tied a white baby bonnet to his head. They’d practiced enough times that Rudy didn’t bother trying to push it off with his paws. He knew the drill. Rudy lay down and Sergent covered him with a blanket.
“Break a leg,” said Reinhart, who had coached them through the scenario on numerous occasions.
On cue, Sergent strolled out in front of the audience, pushing the pram. Everyone broke out in laughter at the sight of this unusual-looking mother out for a peaceful stroll with her baby.
Suddenly a man sprinted out from the audience toward the mother and child. In an instant, the bad guy had grabbed her purse and was running away.
But the mugger had picked the wrong mother. She uttered a couple of words the audience couldn’t quite hear, and out of the baby carriage sprang her enormous, furry baby. The baby/dog charged the purse snatcher. Rudy’s bonnet flew off as he leapt at the mugger’s arm (which was covered with a bite sleeve) and apprehended the bad guy.
The audience exploded in cheers. The purse was returned to the happy mother, who pushed the carriage back to where they’d started. Rudy wagged and trotted beside Sergent.
After the demo, a few audience members walked over to talk with Sergent and meet Rudy. Someone asked how the dog could go from attack mode to happy pup so quickly.
“He has an unbelievable on-off switch,” Sergent answered. “He can do attack work like he’s the Tasmanian Devil, then he goes right back and can be next to a group of little kids who hug him, and he doesn’t blink an eye.”
Reinhart smiled. Water dogs were definitely in abundance these days.
—
After eight years on the job, it was time for Shegogue’s dog, Coley, to hang up his badge. He was getting tired too easily—more than a dog his age should. The vet had diagnosed him with cardiomyopathy. It could be treated with pricey medications, which would make him feel much better, but he’d need to take it easy.
Coley became the first dog to retire from the canine unit. There was no precedent for how to handle it, but Livingood, Quinn, and the others who helped start the program had long ago determined that dogs at the end of their careers would be retired to their handlers, as most other law-enforcement dogs are.
(Dogs in the military didn’t have the same happy ending. At that time, they were usually euthanized. A fine thank-you for their devotion to the job. And devastating for their handlers.)
Coley had done great work. In addition to his normal duties, he had even apprehended a suspected rapist near the White House. The Secret Service decided the dog would retire with full medical benefits. It would pay for all his medications and any treatments he might need. (That’s not how it works today. Medical bills are the adoptive handler’s responsibility.)
The old guard was stepping down. Cusick’s dog Devil had passed away three years earlier, in 1981. Cusick disappeared from canine because of the “one and done” policy. Shegogue knew this would be his fate, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.
But Shegogue and Cusick were lucky, rare exceptions. Each got to be a handler again, although not until after they put in some years without a dog. Cusick got a sweet dog named Buddy. And Shegogue’s new partner was Barry.
They were both great dogs. The best dogs yet.
—
Forty years after he helped start the Secret Service’s canine program, Bill Livingood is sitting in an Alexandria, Virginia, restaurant with his assistant and a guest and extolling the virtues of Dunkin’ Donuts.
“It has to be the law enforcement in me,” says Livingood. “I could just about live in Dunkin’ Donuts. Their coffee is the best. I’m a cake donut fan. I usually get the glazed cake donut. It’s dense and sweet—like me!”
His assistant shakes her head but can’t help laughing.
Livingood retired in 1994, after thirty-three years in the Service. The next year, he became the sergeant at arms of the House of Representatives. As the House’s chief law-enforcement and protocol official, he was responsible for maintaining security on the House side of the Capitol complex, as well as on the floor of the House.
He held the office for seventeen years, many fraught with deep challenges. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and the anthrax mailings all happened on his watch.
“An example of class and humility, Bill has led us through the unthinkable,” Speaker John Boehner said at an event for Livingood’s 2012 retirement.
As important as his role in Capitol safety and security was, most Americans might only know him as the man who introduced the president before a State of the Union address and escorted him to the podium.
“Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States!”
These eight words gave Livingood butterflies every time he had to say them, although it got easier with time.
At the Alexandria restaurant, he leans in toward his lunchmates and lowers his voice, not wanting to disturb a couple having a romantic meal at the next table.
“As a police officer I don’t mind going through a doorway when there are bad guys on the other side. That’s easier than standing up in front of all these cameras and introducing the president, even though it was an honor. I was just nervous. If I messed up, millions would see.
“I practiced and practiced. I practiced while I was driving. I tried to practice when no one was around. And my press secretary—I had a press secretary in my office because I had ten or fifteen press calls a day—she said, ‘Don’t tell them how many times you practice!’”
His assistant remarks that he really is more comfortable behind the scenes.
“It’s true,” he says. “Like when they asked me to form the canine program. I’ve done a lot of things in my career, and that was extremely special and gratifying.
“There’s no telling the difference that these brave men, women, and dogs have made. They love what they do so much, and they work so hard.”
In fact, as he spoke those words in late August 2015, the dogs and handlers of the United States Secret Service were gearing up for one of the busiest months in their careers, and in the history of the Secret Service. It would put all their training and dedication to the test.