Five Presidents 1 The Secret Dead Body All I could think of as I stared at the dead woman lying on the bed was How the hell are we going to get her body out of here without anyone knowing? There were only a few hours of darkness left, so some quick decisions had to be made. It was my first month as a Special Agent in the United States Secret Service, and I knew if I screwed this up, my career would be over before it really began. Fortunately, I had the home telephone number of my supervisor, Earl Schoel, the Special Agent in Charge (SAIC) of the Denver Field Office, in my wallet. I walked quietly downstairs and dialed his number from the phone in the kitchen. "Hello?" Schoel answered groggily. "Mr. Schoel," I said, "it''s Clint Hill. I''m sorry to call you in the middle of the night, but we have a situation here at the Doud residence.

" Few people knew it, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered part-time Secret Service protection for his eighty-year-old mother-in-law, Mrs. Elvira Doud. There were no outright threats to the president''s mother-in-law, but because she was ill and lived alone, except for a maid and a nurse, there was concern that she could be kidnapped and held for bargaining purposes. Likewise, if there was a major health problem during the night, the agents would have the means to quickly get her the help she needed and also be able to immediately notify the president and Mrs. Eisenhower. On September 22, 1958, I was given a badge, handcuffs, holster, gun, and ammunition, and officially sworn in as a Special Agent in the United States Secret Service. I was taken out to the shooting range at the U.

S. Mint in Denver to make sure I could qualify, and that was it. There was no other immediate training, except for reading the Special Agent Manual. One of my first assignments was on the midnight shift, protecting Mrs. Doud. Mrs. Doud lived in a three-story brick home at 750 Lafayette Street in Denver, Colorado, and the protection was from seven o''clock in the evening until seven o''clock in the morning, with one agent on duty from 7:00 p.m.

until 11:00 p.m., and another agent taking over from 11:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. First Lady Mamie Eisenhower and her sister Mabel--whom everyone called "Mike"--had been visiting their mother over the past week and were so grateful for the agents to stay the night with her that they prepared sandwiches for us each evening and left them in the fridge. It was a very nice gesture, and they weren''t so bad when Mamie made them, but when Mike got involved, let me tell you, those were the worst sandwiches I ever tasted.

I never could figure out exactly what she put between the slices of white bread that tasted so bad, but it was almost inedible. The Mike and Mamie sandwiches were a running joke among the agents in the Denver office. That particular night, I had come to work just before eleven, and the departing agent told me there had been no unusual activity. The house was quiet, with Mrs. Doud and her nurse asleep upstairs on the second floor, and the maid, Mary, in her room on the third floor. I had been at the house for a couple of hours when I heard Mrs. Doud calling for her nurse. The nurse stayed in the bedroom adjacent to Mrs.

Doud, and I assumed she would attend to her needs. A few minutes later, however, Mrs. Doud called out again, this time a bit louder. I waited a few more minutes, listening closely for any conversation upstairs, but there was just silence. When Mrs. Doud called out a third time, I realized that the nurse must be asleep. I walked up the stairs and into Mrs. Doud''s room.

"Mrs. Doud, I''m Agent Hill. Is there a problem?" She coughed, and then said, "I''ve been calling for the nurse." "She''s probably asleep, ma''am," I said. "I''ll go tell her you need her." I walked into the nurse''s room, and in the darkness I saw the outline of her body on the bed. I called out to her in a firm voice, but she didn''t budge. An uneasy feeling started to come over me as I walked toward the bed.

I placed my hand on her shoulder and started to shake her, but her body was stiff as a board. Oh God, I thought. The nurse is dead. From the other room, Mrs. Doud called out, "Agent? Where''s my nurse?" I did not want to tell her that her nurse was dead. "Just a minute," I said as I ran up the stairs to the maid''s room on the third floor. "Mary, wake up," I whispered as I shook her. "It''s Agent Hill, Mary.

You need to wake up. The nurse is dead, and Mrs. Doud needs some help. You need to get up and help Mrs. Doud." Mary sat straight up in bed, her eyes like big white marbles against the dark black of her skin opened so wide that I thought they were going to pop right out of her head. "Oh my Lordy!" she exclaimed. "Shh, Mary," I said.

"I don''t want to alarm Mrs. Doud. Please go down and see what she needs, and don''t tell her the nurse is dead." As soon as Mary went into Mrs. Doud''s room, I went back into the nurse''s room to try to figure out what to do. The problem was that Mrs. Eisenhower had just left Denver that morning, headed back to Washington by train. She was afraid of flying, so she always took the train.

I was concerned that if the press got word that a woman had died at 750 Lafayette Street, they would assume it was Mrs. Doud. I sure as hell didn''t want rumors flying and poor Mrs. Eisenhower to think her mother had died before we could clarify what actually happened. Fortunately, when I called my supervisor, Mr. Schoel, he had a solution. He was a friend of the coroner, and he knew the coroner had a special car--not a traditional hearse, but a sedan in which the backseat had been removed and the two doors on the passenger side opened opposite each other to form an opening wide enough to get a body inside. Schoel said he would call the coroner and send him right over.

Mrs. Doud had fallen back asleep, but poor Mary was still in a state of shock as I explained what we were going to do and why we had to do it. The coroner arrived and slowly backed the car into the driveway so that the passenger side was opposite the side door of the house leading into the kitchen. We went upstairs, wrapped the nurse in a blanket, and the two of us proceeded to haul her body downstairs. She was a hefty woman and presumably had had a heart attack, but it was clear she had been dead long before I arrived on duty. Her body was deadweight, extremely difficult to maneuver down the narrow staircase, and with every step I was privately cursing the agent who came on duty before me for not realizing there was a dead woman upstairs--or worse, for knowing the woman had died and leaving the situation to me to deal with and then do all the damn paperwork. The coroner and I managed to get the nurse out of the house and into the car without making too much noise, and no one in the press ever knew. Of course, when Mrs.

Doud awoke that morning, she was informed that her nurse had died overnight, Mr. Schoel notified the president''s staff, and I got to keep my job. As it turned out, surreptitiously removing a dead body from the president''s mother-in-law''s house in the wee hours of an autumn morning in 1958 was minor-league compared to the situations I would face over the next seventeen years. I NEVER HAD any intention of becoming a Secret Service agent. Growing up in Washburn, North Dakota, my goal was to coach athletics and teach history. I have come to realize, however, that sometimes your life takes a turn in a direction over which you have no control--and in my case, it started from the moment I was born. When I was seventeen days old, my mother had me baptized and then, on a snowy January morning, left me on the doorstep of the North Dakota Children''s Home for Adoption in Fargo. Three months later, Chris and Jennie Hill drove to Fargo with their four-year-old adopted daughter, Janice, and out of all the children at the orphanage, chose me to make their family complete.

I had a wonderful childhood. Washburn, North Dakota, is perched on the north bank of the Missouri River, about halfway between Bismarck and Minot, and back then the population hovered around nine hundred. Largely settled by German, Swedish, and Norwegian immigrant farmers, Washburn had numerous churches and a couple of gas stations, but not even one stoplight. It was the kind of close-knit community where you didn''t dare get into trouble because word would get back to your parents before you could race home and sneak in the back door. There wasn''t much for a boy to do but play sports, and that was fine with me. In high school I participated in every competitive sport that was offered--track, football, baseball, and basketball--and throughout the long winters, my friends and I would play ice hockey until it was too dark to see the puck. Our family life revolved around the Evangelical Lutheran Church where my sister Janice played the piano and I was an altar boy. My father was the county auditor and also served as treasurer of the church, so on Sundays he would bring home the collection money and we would sit at the kitchen table, counting and registering what had been offered that week while my mother prepared dinner.

My mother was the glue that held the family together, and I rarely saw her sitting down--she was doing laundry, tending to the vegetable garden, canni.