Haitian President Préval largely absent in quake's aftermath

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By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 18, 2010; A01

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- As foreign aid and troops flow into this ruined capital, a Haitian government led by a diffident president has been overwhelmed, making it largely invisible since the earthquake throttled the country six days ago.

An aloof politician who was educated abroad, President René Préval has spoken far more to foreign audiences through satellite television than to his own people. Over consecutive days this weekend, Préval, 67, met with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. But he has yet to visit the vast refugee camp that has risen in the city center alongside the crumbled National Palace, where he once lived.

The U.S. government views Préval, an agronomist by training, as a technocrat largely free of the sharp political ideologies that have divided Haiti for decades. But at a time when tragedy is forcing the country essentially to begin again, Préval's aversion to the public stage has left millions of Haitians wondering whether there is a government at all.

"Clearly, we have not spent enough time with the people," Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, Préval's right-hand man, said in an interview. "But we are overwhelmed. We just can't step back and have a vision for this country. Soon, we hope, the operations will be matched with a strategy for the future."

Bellerive, who has been in office less than two months, acknowledged that "we are not only ourselves victims of the disaster, but also do not have the capacity to do this on our own."

Since the ouster of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, Haiti's elected government has been weak. Largely mistrusted by its people, the government has been unable to lift the country from severe poverty despite billions of dollars in annual international aid.

Préval and his ministers are sitting now at the volatile intersection of a sputtering aid effort and the rising demands of millions of Haitians traumatized by the quake and desperate for basic assistance. The emergency-triage stage will soon give way to long-term planning for how to rebuild a country virtually from scratch.

With most government buildings in precarious condition, Préval and his ministers have decamped to the one-story Judicial Police headquarters on the outskirts of the city. On Sunday morning, a throng of Canadian generals, Spanish aid workers and other foreigners waited there for a turn to see government officials.

Beyond the guards and gates, though, anger among Haitians displaced by the 7.0-magnitude quake is rising quickly. It is directed primarily at Préval's administration.

"We're living here with God alone," said student Dalromy Guerrier, 19, who has moved with his family into a shelter on the sideline at the national soccer stadium, where substitutes usually wait to enter a game. "Is there anyone coming to help?"

Although he has served at the highest ranks of government for nearly two decades, Préval has been known more as a surrogate than as a powerful politician in his own right.

The son of a former Haitian agriculture minister forced to flee the Duvalier regime, Préval grew up outside his country. He studied business and biology in Belgium and Italy and even worked as a waiter in Brooklyn before returning to Haiti in the early 1980s to work in the government.

He also opened a bakery here in the capital. Through his charitable bread donations, Préval came to know Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a spellbinding liberation priest who preached against the Duvalier dictatorship.

In 1990, Aristide became Haiti's first elected leader, and he named Préval prime minister. Over the next 14 years, Aristide was ousted by a military coup, returned to power, reelected and then ousted again in 2004.

Préval was along for much of the rocky ride, following Aristide as president in 1996 and again in 2006. But he has distanced himself from Aristide's Lavalas party, which in Creole means "a cleansing flood," and he has governed more moderately -- to the frustration of much of his mentor's impoverished constituency.

He imposed economic austerity measures in his first term, including the privatization of some government services, which drew criticism for primarily benefiting Haiti's elite. But unemployment fell. Préval also championed the trials of military and police officials accused of human rights violations, a first in Haiti.

Many of Haiti's poor supported his reelection in 2006, mostly because they thought it would lead to Aristide's return from South African exile. A day after the earthquake, Aristide reiterated his desire to come back. His return would give the country a highly visible leader but would also inject a divisive political element into recovery efforts, making it unlikely that Préval would welcome him.

Rich and poor alike say Préval's administration is riddled with corruption. Many Haitians now express the conflicting impulse to see their government in action at a time of crisis while wanting to make sure it is denied access to international aid for fear it will be stolen.

Mario Viau, the owner of Signal FM, a major radio station based in the wealthy hillside community of Petionville, said he sent his employees out into the city to search for a government official to speak on the air. None could be found.

He then appealed over the radio for an official to visit his station and deliver public service announcements, ranging from how to find a missing relative to how to dispose of a dead body. What he received was a representative from Préval's office, who delivered a taped message from the president urging calm.

"We didn't feel like we had a government," Viau said. "But I wanted to put some kind of government on the radio. We have a president who doesn't like to talk at all."

Along Camus Street, a strip of cinder-block houses that begins at a school and ends at the cemetery, Alberthe Gordard gathered her bedding from the street one recent morning.

"My house," she said, pointing to a gingerbread façade listing far to the left.

Like her neighbors, Gordard and her two young children are sleeping head-to-toe in the street, blocked off by rubble and piles of trash. She gathers water from an open spigot in a plastic jug that once contained antifreeze, but it is not clean enough to drink.

"I'm hungry," she said. "We haven't seen anyone from the government. They have left us to this."

Correspondent William Booth contributed to this report from Petionville, Haiti.

Plot to Kill Indonesian President Foiled

By SETH MYDANS

MANILA — The police in Indonesia said Saturday that they had foiled plans by an Islamist group to assassinate President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, but they declined to confirm news reports that they had killed Southeast Asia’s most wanted terrorism suspect in a separate raid.

A leading expert on terrorism, Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group, said she doubted local reports that the terrorism suspect, Noordin Muhammad Top, had been killed in a 16-hour raid on a militant hide-out outside Jakarta.

Police officials said that they could not immediately confirm whether the person who had been killed was Mr. Noordin, and that they had sent a body to Jakarta for DNA testing.

As confused and contradictory reports emerged, it remained unclear whether Mr. Noordin had been in the house at the time of the raid, whether he had escaped or whether he had possibly been arrested beforehand.

“What we do know is that the police intercepted this likely attack, and they get incredible kudos for that,” Ms. Jones said, referring to the assassination attempt.

But as to the raid on the house outside of Jakarta, she said, “What I’m pretty convinced of is that the person inside the house was not Noordin Top and the person who was killed was not Noordin Top.”

The National Police chief, Gen. Bambang Hendarso Danuri, tried to dampen the rumors.

“We could not yet disclose the identity of the killed man,” he said at a news conference. “After the DNA test, we will announce it, based on facts, not based on speculation.”

The two suspects killed in the second raid, in the West Java town of Bekasi, were believed to be linked to Mr. Noordin.

General Hendarso said an accomplice had told the police that two would-be suicide bombers were planning to detonate explosives in a truck at the president’s home this month. He said a truck was found rigged with explosives, along with bomb-making material.

He said the location was significant “because it is situated just a 12-minutes drive from the president’s residence.

“Our president was a target,” he said.

The president told reporters he had been briefed about a counterterrorism operation by the police, though he did not mention Mr. Noordin.

“I extend my highest gratitude and respect to the police for their brilliant achievement in this operation,” he said.

With the disarray and decline of the region’s leading Islamist terrorist group, Jemaah Islamiyah, Mr. Noordin had come to be seen as the region’s most dangerous militant, operating a splinter faction that claimed direct links to Al Qaeda, Ms. Jones said.

He is blamed for suicide bomb attacks last month on two hotels in Jakarta that killed seven people, ending a four-year pause in terrorist strikes in Indonesia.

“There is no question that he was involved with the bombings in Jakarta,” Ms. Jones said. “He is certainly the person who has masterminded every major attack in Indonesia beginning with the Marriott Hotel bombings in 2003.”

A Malaysian citizen, Mr. Noordin claimed in a video in 2005 to be Al Qaeda’s representative in Southeast Asia and said he was carrying out attacks on Western civilians to avenge Muslim deaths in Afghanistan.

Charm Offensive

Dayo Olopade | July 20, 2009

In this Jan. 22, 2009 file photo, President Barack Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, and retired military members, gestures in the Oval Office. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

In Barack Obama's White House, there's a fine line between tourism and negotiation. On a June afternoon at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, 26 individual stakeholders in the health-care debate mounted the sprawling spiral staircase to the building's Indian Treaty Room. The progressive health-reform advocates, who ranged from professors to activists to physicians, had been invited to discuss an administration report on disparities in health care and health outcomes -- but couldn't help gawking at the ornate ceilings and marbled balcony ringing the room. After striding in with Tina Tchen, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took a lap around the folding tables, pausing to greet the White House guests personally, as an agency photographer preserved each heartfelt embrace for the HHS Web site. To maintain order during discussions, senior health-care adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle asked those who wished to speak to upend the folded paper placard bearing their name and affiliation. When she flung open the conversation with a general question -- "What about the current system needs to change?" -- each of the nametags went up like white flags.

The chance to have the ear of three powerful officials in the Obama administration was not lost on the group. In turn, each spoke for several minutes about the issues most important to them -- health technology training, LGBT principles for health-care reform, an interagency task force on minority health. "We all know that coverage does not equal access, and access doesn't equal quality," said Fredette West, chair of the Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities Coalition. "The disease we suffer from is anonymity," added Stacey Bohlen, executive director of the National Indian Health Board. DeParle -- who has been personally shepherding White House negotiations on health-care reform -- barely spoke. For 60 minutes she, Sebelius, and Tchen maintained a united front of bobbing heads and scratching pens. After the speech, a jostle of men and women pressed business cards and blueprints into their hosts' hands. Tchen waved the stack of papers and insisted they were speeding along to the president's desk. "That's our job," she said.

However, just as the thrilled invitees left the White House, word broke that the Senate Committee on Help, Education, Labor and Pensions had released the first public draft of its health-care bill. Of course, the bill will go through several iterations before a final version leaves Congress, but one thing was clear: The health-care concrete was already being poured. Did that mean the audience with Sebelius was more group therapy than grand strategy?

The Obama team assiduously courted various liberal interest groups over the course of the 2008 campaign and found itself, upon election, inundated with speaking requests, policy papers, and personnel recommendations from the same progressive chorus. After eight years in the Republican wilderness, these groups are overjoyed to have the ear of the most powerful policy shop in the world. As Howard Dean, former Democratic Party chair, sees it, "There’s always a debate [on] whether the president will change Washington or Washington will change the president. Most people bet on Washington, and they’re usually right. It’s our job to make sure this time they’re wrong."

Obama has certainly not returned to campaign mode, when literally hundreds of aides kept surrogates, key political action committees, unions, and nonprofits saying, "Yes we can." But Team Obama’s success at inspiring hope means that today "their management task is enormous," says Simon Rosenberg, president of the progressive think tank NDN. "Everybody wants to be part of the Obama magic." To keep the liberal base happy, senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett staffed the long-standing White House Office of Public Liaison with more handlers than ever before. These mediators are tasked with managing the expectations of the voters, interest groups, and opinion-makers that make up the progressive coalition. The administration has "divvied up the family" on the left and assigned issue-specific contact people, Rosenberg says -- not to fight political battles against the scattered Republican opposition but to satisfy core progressive groups, even when it can’t deliver their most desired policy goals.

In early May, the White House announced that it was changing the name of the office to the friendlier "Office of Public Engagement" and described it as "the front door to the White House" that "will allow ordinary Americans to offer their stories and ideas regarding issues that concern them and share their views on important topics such as health care, energy and education." With "desks" responsible for reaching out to governors, mayors, labor leaders, health-care advocates, businesspeople, and environmentalists, OPE is the prototypical example of the White House’s expectations strategy: The name switch earned the administration symbolic credit for making change but brings no specific new inclusiveness with it. Indeed, progressive groups seem to interpret "engagement" as simply the chance to gain an audience with the president’s team.

The White House has also made an unprecedented effort to stay connected with supporters outside Washington -- who in turn reward the president with the time, enthusiasm, and approval ratings needed to implement his agenda. Obama’s staff places several of the letters he receives from ordinary Americans in a much-publicized "purple folder," and he personally answers a few every day. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media keep his young and tech-savvy fans engaged, and the Democratic Party has used the gargantuan Obama list -- over 10 million supporters’ e-mail addresses -- to elicit constituent calls on behalf of the president’s health-care reform agenda, among other items.

The Obama administration’s strategy stands in stark contrast to Bill Clinton’s inability to manage his political base. Liberal infighting of the 1990s cost the former president the chance to enact major progressive reforms. President George W. Bush, by comparison, managed conservative expectations almost too well -- by July 2001, according to The Washington Post, Bush had "systematically reached out to virtually every element of the conservative coalition -- from anti-abortion advocates to western property rights activists to anti-tax groups to evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics to proponents of a robust national missile defense." Soon after, the man who campaigned as a "uniter" became known as a partisan hack.

Obama’s unique path to the presidency, in which many of the established progressive constituencies were either neutral or supporting Hillary Clinton until late in the primaries, and in which the bulk of his support came through an organization built around him rather than around a union or a constituency group, means that he owes no one -- and everyone. And, with the explosion of new groups formed by younger supporters, bloggers, and others, there are far more mouths to feed than there were for either Bush or Bill Clinton. As a result, the undertaking is naturally much bigger, and the possibility of backlash much more worrisome.

Thus the ability to coerce, engage and, yes, distract his own progressive coalition has become one of Obama’s signature achievements. Fred Barnes, a chief Obama critic from the right, calls the president a "master of misdirection ...a great salesman, marketing his product -- the liberal agenda, plus a few add-ons -- in a manner that disguises what he’s really up to." That’s not a very charitable description, but it’s not all wrong. The administration’s creative tactics to occupy its base -- a mixture of flattery, availability, and issues-based outreach -- keep the left from vocally demanding a quick exit from Iraq, or the stringing-up of CEOs. By placating the left privately, the White House also avoids being seen as overtly liberal by the general public -- and thus Obama can roll out progressive policies at his leisure.

While the administration may have an open-door policy for members of its progressive base, that has not always translated into actual influence. More often than not, the president and his advisers make the sausages themselves. And the real surprise is how little liberals seem to mind.

***

In late April, when most media outlets were focused on grading Obama’s first 100 days in office, Joshua DuBois, the executive director of the White House office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, was making the rounds to several groups devoted to social justice and community uplift. He took time out on a recent Sunday evening to address the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism (RAC), which educates and mobilizes liberal American Jews on various political concerns. Again, the message was about inclusion. "The president strongly believes we can’t solve these challenges here in Washington," DuBois said. "We have to connect with individuals and families and communities all across the country, and that includes community-based groups and faith-based organizations." DuBois was joined by White House economic adviser Larry Summers and senior strategist David Axelrod, who said he arrived "as an ally and friend,” asking the audience “to express yourselves when you feel that we’re losing our way." Axelrod worked a swarm of RAC donors long after his address, administering his signature solemn, mustachioed nod. "To the extent that you can rally support for us that would be greatly appreciated," he said.

The personal touch, it seems, is enough to keep countless diverse interests in line. The White House has treated major liberal groups as though they were member states of a United Nations of progressives -- sending top brass as ambassadors to the National Council of La Raza, NARAL-Pro-Choice America, Families USA, the Arab-American Institute, and others. Even first lady Michelle Obama has joined in the effort, speaking to groups of black Americans and women -- key Democratic constituencies -- about work-life balance. This diplomacy allows the White House to give each group the appearance of influence without folding dozens of warring constituencies into the phone booth where policy is actually made. A member of Unity ‘09, a secretive coalition of many of the major groups on the left that seeks to help Obama push his agenda through Congress, says the White House "keep[s] channels of communication open," while Robert Borosage, president of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), notes that "this is an administration that’s got a lot of friends in it. This is a place where you get your phone calls returned."

Even the Cabinet secretaries most pressed for time know better than to shirk their babysitting duties. Timothy Geithner, the much-maligned secretary of the Treasury, addressed the annual meeting of Independent Community Banks of America on May 13. "Everyone here should know," Geithner began, "that three days after I was sworn in as Treasury secretary, [ICBA President] Cam Fine was in my office talking about the ICBA." The substantive policy discussions may or may not involve the relevant interest groups -- in fact, the Treasury’s financial rescue plan advantages irresponsible mega-banks over the better-managed community banks in question -- but the White House strategy emphasizes making interest-group leaders feel like they are part of the action.

Then there are the many summits -- on fiscal responsibility, faith organizations, health care -- that Obama has hosted in his first few months in office. On White House turf, the conversation often involves opposing voices; at the fiscal responsibility summit in February, for example, centrist lawmakers dominated discussion, rather than the representatives from Change to Win, the American Federation of Government Employees, the Center for American Progress, and the NAACP. Still, events like these seem to placate progressives. Borosage says that "the White House has been a co-conspirator in different ways" -- including inviting several members of CAF’s Health Care for America Now (HCAN) coalition to an early March summit on health reform. And such access gives nonprofits a prominent justification for their organizing efforts. "You want people who represent women, children, labor unions, and think tanks," says Jackie Schechner, a spokesperson for HCAN. "If you’re going to bring those people into the White House, it makes perfect sense to come to us."

Inviting ideological opponents also has had the effect of neutralizing (in the case of the big health-insurance providers) or shaming (in the case of the major credit-card executives) powerful interests into a more favorable stance with respect to White House policy asks. Though Republican senators might fulminate against a Detroit bailout, the optics of a smiling passel of automobile manufacturers standing in the Rose Garden quickly blunts the voices of opposition. And when unpopular banking executives came to the White House, Obama served them an austere, if appropriate luncheon: warm water.

The administration’s charm offensive has certainly united the various liberal interest groups. "In terms of the agenda, and a willingness to share approaches ...this is better than any Democratic administration that I experienced," says Anna Burger, president of Change to Win. This heralds a capital culture quite distinct from the Washington of Clinton’s presidency, when liberal organizations were fractured and unruly. "The most striking difference is what’s built on the outside, not the atmosphere on the inside," Borosage says. "Clinton looked for support on his health-care stuff, [but] when they reached out there wasn’t much there to reach out to." Today, "there’s not much daylight between the Obama administration and the grass roots at all," Dean adds. By appearing to pull back the curtain on Obama’s agenda -- itself strikingly similar to those of the biggest progressive nonprofits -- the White House has ensured that the left is invested in the president’s success. Adds Borosage, "This is not Bill Clinton trying to sell school uniforms; this is a guy who understands that we’re in the middle of a fundamental crisis and fundamental reforms are needed."

***

The real question, however, is whether progressive groups know the difference between managing expectations and producing results.

A few months into Barack Obama’s presidency, Army 2nd Lt. Sandy Tsao mailed Obama a letter -- a letter that happened to make it all the way to the famed purple folder on his desk. Tsao, who had told her superiors she was a lesbian just days after Obama was inaugurated, asked the president to "help us to win the war against prejudice" and to repeal the Clinton-era law known as "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," which compels gays in the military to conceal their sexual orientation. Such personal letters, said the White House press shop, "impact [Obama] greatly" -- and in Tsao’s case, she received a handwritten response. The president scrawled: "It is because of outstanding Americans like you that I committed to changing our current policy."

As both letters made the rounds of liberal interest groups and advocates for civil rights and marriage equality, expectations soared. The exchange, many thought, was proof that the president who had campaigned on a pledge to repeal "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" grasped the importance of spotlighting the policy -- and would reward his progressive base with swift action. Why else write such a high-profile response to Tsao?

Yet, less than one month after Tsao received the letter from Obama, the White House put the brakes on repeal, pending a full Pentagon review. In fact, Obama explicitly pushed the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the legality of "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." So was the outreach to LGBT groups insincere? Perhaps. But the liberal hordes should have read Obama’s fine, left-handed print. Couched in the public missive to Tsao was a hedge -- parenthetical, of course -- that noted any change "needs congressional action" and thus "will take some time to complete."

This underscores the essential problem of expectations management: It deprives the expectant groups of any real agency. Most dealmakers feel honored to sit in the East Room as legislation is signed or key appointments are announced. A firm promise to "explore" or "move forward" is often enough to placate them. "When the golden hand of a White House staffer touches you," Rosenberg says, "you’re more willing to be satisfied with the attention than with the end result." Many women members of Congress and countless female leaders of civil-society groups attended the March signing of a presidential order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. But, with the photo op long over, it’s unclear whether the council has lived up to its mandate to meet regularly with all of the agency heads.

Of course, liberal groups haven’t always fallen in line. One of the greatest challenges to the administration’s approach came on the eve of Obama’s 50-minute speech on American national security at the National Archives in late May. Standing before the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, he launched into a defense of his administration’s handling of contentious issues relating to civil liberties and terrorism. "Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world," he said.

Just the day before, Obama had stood before in-the-flesh advocates for those documents he used as a backdrop for his speech. Representatives from groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch met Axelrod, Attorney General Eric Holder, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and General Counsel Gregory Craig in the White House Cabinet room. The president’s decision to convene a high-level conference with the groups -- which had been critical of his handling of military tribunals, Guantánamo detainees, and the use of torture against enemy combatants -- was in step with his previous approach to engagement with other vocal progressives.

But, unlike the participants in the health-care meeting with Sebelius, the civil-liberties groups weren’t simply grateful for the audience. They pressed the president to go after Republican enablers of the torture regime, and one attendee told Obama that his policies were akin to those of his predecessor. The president was reportedly livid; for once, expectations had been totally mismatched. In the speech on national security the following day, Obama criticized Bush administration officials for being "on the wrong side of the debate and the wrong side of history" -- but he stopped short of saying they were on the wrong side of the law. And sure enough, representatives from the same pro-prosecution groups were invited to hear their wishes go unfulfilled.

Most liberal groups tend to shrug off the idea that they are being manipulated by a savvy public-relations team. "It’s not like somebody in the Obama administration says, ‘OK, you need to do this campaign,’ and we go out and do it," says the Unity ‘09 member. "Rather, it’s that we have an incredible commonality of interests and goals. ...It’s a happy coincidence." Rosenberg is frank about the compromises involved: "They’re not trying to create unity; they’re trying to create consensus," he says. "Everyone knows that they’re going to get less than a full loaf."

Liberal groups haven’t been completely toothless. When rumors swirled that the White House might try to launch a Social Security and entitlement reform commission out of the February summit on fiscal responsibility, liberal groups pushed back hard with allies on the Hill -- -scuppering one of the pro-reform speakers.

And on some occasions, the president has found he needs his base just as much as it needs him. When it became clear that a gargantuan economic stimulus would be necessary soon after Obama took office, the transition team mobilized dozens of outside progressive groups to weigh in. In fact, the Recovery Act began with an open call for "shovel ready" projects from both local officials and nonprofit interest groups. The legislation was drafted over the course of numerous meetings with teams of nongovernmental policy analysts -- almost exclusively on the left -- who were given tailored portfolios on civil rights, Treasury or State Department issues, and even specific regional concerns. "There was a very inclusive, very broad set of outreach to a variety of different constituencies to solicit their views on important policies on the transition," says Wade Henderson, longtime president of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights. "[Obama] had a lot of decentralized efforts that focused both on expertise in the field as well as outreach to important constituencies."

Dozens of unchecked boxes remain on the progressive to-do list -- the Employee Free Choice Act, "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell," Darfur, war funding, bank regulation. Yet outside groups are still searching for the leverage -- and the motivation -- to push Obama to act. "We’re still in the honeymoon phase," Rosenberg says. "This is going to get harder, and it’s going to test [the administration’s] capacity to manage this relationship over time."

The Making of an Agent

By Laura Blumenfeld
Sunday, July 26, 2009

LESSON ONE: Get Ready To Die

The teacher walks into the mat room.

"Good morning, Mr. Mixon," the students say in unison.

"Cut that [expletive] out. Don't act like you give a crap about my morning."

Steve Mixon smiles, or maybe it's a snarl. Before he became an instructor at the Secret Service training camp outside Washington, Mixon served as a team leader on President George W. Bush's Counter Assault Team.

"Everyone's going to leave today in some degree of pain," Mixon tells the special agent trainees.

The 24 recruits, dressed in black combat pants and jackets, stiffen into four rows, jingling handcuffs. Scott Swantner clenches his jaw. Krista Bradford rubs raw knuckles. One trainee, who broke a rib, is keeping it a secret, fearing he'll be discharged.

"Everything is in play here, guys. Everything you learned from Day One," Mixon tells them in a basement that muffles rifle blasts. "Assailant control. Guillotine chokeholds."

For the members of Special Agent Training Class No. 283, this is finals time. They have been cramming here for months, since days after the election of Barack Obama, hoping to join the men and women charged with protecting the president.

Not all of them will make it.

If they fail, they will leave humiliated. If they pass, they'll become members of an elite, stealthy service during a period of exceptional pressures. At their annual party, Ralph Basham, the former director, greeted his replacement: "I'm the happiest guy in Washington because I'm not the director of the Secret Service anymore."

With the rise of Islamic terrorism, the agency's roster of protectees has grown. With the election of the first African American president, public scrutiny has exploded. Presidents typically receive 3,000 threats a year, says a Secret Service expert. Obama is outpacing the average.

"We understand the historic significance," says the current director, Mark Sullivan. "If we make a mistake, it's going to be devastating for the country. We're not going to let the country down."

That promise depends in large part on what happens inside this 493-acre compound. Unmarked, behind barbed wire and hidden in the woods, the James J. Rowley Training Center sits so close to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway that its inhabitants -- in chemical weapons suits, suicide bomber vests or white robes while role-playing the pope -- can hear the commuter traffic's oblivious swish.

Obama's security detail drills here two weeks out of every eight. The vice president's detail, the first lady's, the agents who protect foreign dignitaries and former presidents, as well as the tactical units -- the counter snipers posted on the White House roof, and the Emergency Response Team, which stops incursions into the White House grounds--also drill here.

Overseeing them are instructors like Mixon, who wears a size 52 suit jacket, whose T-shirt says "Fighting Solves Everything," and whose 2-year-old son knows how to do a one-man takedown. This morning Mixon, 40, is testing control tactics, or ground-fighting.

Forty minutes into the wristlocks and head stuns, the trainees' necks burn with scratches. Dan Batt is supposed to disarm a classmate but accidentally knees him in the groin.

"Right in the junk!" Mixon laughs.

Dan wants to apologize for his clumsiness -- his infant daughter is teething and kept him up half the night -- but the men keep wrestling, too afraid to stop. A student in the class ahead of them flunked out the week before graduation for buckling during push-ups.

"Next!" Mixon calls.

Scott Swantner ten-huts, shoulders back, towering over the others. A former rifle platoon commander with the Marine Corps, Scott lost three fingers in Iraq. In Beltsville, he attended remedial control tactics with Krista Bradford every Friday before sunrise.

"Yes, sir!" Scott says cheerlessly. For the last scenario of their four-hour exam, the mat room becomes a heavy metal bar. Red and blue lights flash in the dark. The rock band Disturbed blares from speakers.

Their instructions: "Patty McGuire has made threats against POTUS [President of the United States] and you have an arrest warrant . . . An informant told you Patty is in the bar."

In pairs, the trainees open the door.

"Why don't you [expletive] off and die?" shrieks Disturbed. The instructors pounce with sticks and training knives. They slam the trainees into the wall. They rip at their hair. One trainee shatters his instructor's cheekbone. But another freezes, goes into "brain vapor-lock," as his partner is repeatedly shot.

Krista and her partner wait outside for their turn. "If they clench their fists," Krista strategizes, "I'll pull out my baton."

Krista is 4 feet 11 inches. She moves like a gymnast, nimbly, with concentrated grace. She has lively green eyes, fine features and a buoyant ponytail. She cheers Scott, Dan and the others between drills with Dove chocolates. A social worker, she also used to work at Disney World, dressing up as cartoon characters.

"She was Minnie Mouse, for God sakes," Mixon grumbles.

Within seconds of entering the mat-room bar, Krista's partner, an Army National Guardsman who earned a Bronze Star, is knocked to the ground. A role-player drags Krista across the floor by the cuff of her pants. He straddles Krista and punches her.

"Get off me!" Krista screams.

"Get ready to die!" the music screams.

"Keep fighting!" Mixon screams.

The role-player twists Krista's arms around her neck and pulls, choking her with her own hands. She gags. Her nose is bleeding. Her cheek is bleeding. Blood blisters on her legs, bruised by training bullets while chasing assassins through the woods, trickle and ooze.

On her back, in the dark, Krista watches the role-player's face swirl into darker shades of gray. She is losing consciousness. Mixon yells, "Do something!"

In the Secret Service, the saying goes, "You never quit. You always win. Everything else is negotiable."

Krista lifts her head an inch, level with her assailant's hand. She opens her mouth.

"Here it comes! Get ready to die!" the music screams.

Krista grinds her teeth into the meat of his palm.

He releases her, and Krista and her partner stagger out of the room. Their final exam is over. A drop of sweat dangles from the tip of her partner's nose. He looks at Krista, gasping:

"Did we pass?"

LESSON TWO (Nine Months Earlier): Do Whatever It Takes

Business was slow at the Sherwin-Williams paint store. Dan Batt, a sales associate, sat cataloguing colors: Salute red, Nantucket Dune.

Dan is 24, the second-oldest of nine home-schooled children, a quiet man with sloping shoulders, fair skin and pure black hair. He has a face that often gets skipped over in a crowd, a modest chin and nice-boy eyes.

Dan smiled mildly as a teenager tramped into the store.

"But I want it, Dad!" A blast of cold Buffalo air blew in with the girl and her father.

She wanted to paint her bedroom Lime Rickey green. It was, Dan thought, a hideous color.

"This is a very, uh, fun color," Dan later recalled saying.

Dan always deferred to the customer. His wife was seven months pregnant, and they needed the paycheck.

"Yes, he said to everyone. "Yes, yes, yes."

No, this wasn't the career he'd wanted. His mother, who read her Bible, had taught him about good and bad, and he dreamed -- never mind that he is shy -- of fighting for good. When Dan's cellphone rang later at the store, "Restricted Number," he felt something lurch inside his chest. Maybe his wife was having early contractions.

Or maybe, improbably, it was the other call, the one that meant Dan had mixed his last Lime Rickey.

Twelve hundred miles to the south in New Orleans, Krista Bradford, 32, was driving her car. She almost didn't answer when her call came.

Krista had just assessed a 4-year-old autistic girl. She told the girl's mother to buy crayons and blocks, she later recalled. As a social worker, Krista was tired of rappelling into lives after they'd crumbled. She wanted to try something preemptive, such as law enforcement.

Krista herself had experienced the limits of social services. She was given up at birth in an adoption that failed, and later moved into an adolescent group house where she reached for a serving bowl and was stabbed in the hand with a fork.

"I'll be a good protector," Krista believed. "I know how important it is to be protected."

The application process took nine months, complicated by a background check that tracked three different childhood last names, and a job history that included dressing up as Jiminy Cricket and Dopey.

Eventually one afternoon, her cellphone flashed: "Withheld." "Hello?" Krista said, thinking: I'll do whatever it takes.

Four states away, in an Oakland, Calif., shipyard, Scott Swantner, 30, watched a freighter offload a container. An Iraq war veteran, he was two weeks into a job at the Pacific Maritime Association. He had the air of a man whose penalty kick had clunked off a goal post.

Earlier in the year, Scott had spent a month filling out the 34-page Secret Service application. He had flown from his Berlin Marine post to California to renew his driver's license, which had been shredded in Nasiriyah by a rocket-propelled grenade. He had passed the written test, the drug test, the vision test, the hearing test, the initial interview, the panel interview, the home interview, and the "worst experience of my life," the polygraph, which elicited every foible and shame.

Tall and broad, Scott had played right guard for the Naval Academy football team. He has thick, brown hair, buzz cut for the military. His features project success. Scott's father, a termite inspector, constantly told his winning boy, "Don't screw up."

Yet, somehow Scott had. He had fallen short on the Secret Service's physical exam, he guessed, "because of my hand." As a Marine, Scott had hoped to emulate his grandfather's World War II service in the Pacific. Instead, in Iraq, Scott lost two soldiers in his platoon -- "You feel you let them down. It'll always stick with you" -- and, later, part of his left hand.

Things that had come easily for Scott were now doubted. Secret Service screeners questioned Scott's commander: "He says he can physically do this, but can he?" Can he still shoot?

Eventually, Scott was told they had found a better-qualified applicant. Scott took the shipyard job. He was talking to a longshoreman when his cellphone beeped: "Unknown."

The voice sounded friendly. "Hey, it's Charlie White." From the San Francisco Field Office. "We want to offer you -- "

The Secret Service had never accepted anyone with his disability before but had reconsidered. They were going to give Scott a try.

The acceptance calls rang out in 24 corners of the country. In Plant City, Fla., a YMCA director felt his phone vibrate during a board meeting debating zumba dance classes. In Tulsa, a police officer exhausted from jumping fences while chasing drug dealers till 2 a.m. snapped open his phone. In Baltimore, a Home Depot manager folded his orange apron then and there in Hardwood Flooring.

Their family and friends sometimes found the news confusing: "So you're going to be a spy?" "Do you change your name?" "Will the president talk to you directly through that plastic thing in your ear?"

The new recruits -- 21 men and three women, 25 to 32 years old -- assembled in Glynco, Ga., for 12 weeks of basic federal law-enforcement training. Then they moved to a Residence Inn in Maryland. They unpacked creatine bodybuilding powder and Aveda Comforting Tea, boxing DVDs and voodoo dolls.

On their first morning, the recruits ride in government vans to the classified complex. A guard in a booth raises the gate. They cross over, into a mission called for by Congress following the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. They are admitted onto the grounds and into the secrets of the Service.

"We train unlike any other federal agency," says A.T. Smith, an assistant director, who stands by while the trainees stencil their names on their T-shirts. "We train to the edge, and then we lean over."

The center's drills are increasingly scenario-based, says Smith, who had served as Hillary Clinton's detail leader. "For years, our training was based on the lone gunman and the long-range rifle. Now it's automatic weapons, multiple explosions as a diversion to a secondary attack." An intelligence PowerPoint presentation on "The Emerging Threat" flashes from the old-style assassin, Squeaky Fromme, to chanting Islamic fanatics. Threat experts have created a new Obama-era prototype, a white supremacist who calls Obama "a mud person" and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, a Jew, "the Antichrist."

New hazards have prompted a new emphasis in training -- a kind of extreme, lethal improv -- using scenarios that are dynamic and demand responses that run counter to typical human behavior. Smith says, "Our goal is to make it instinct."

To alter reflexes, to rewire the "muscle memory" of recruits, they built 37 buildings, including fake colonial-style houses and a mock airport. Facades line the main street: a cafe, a tattoo parlor and a hardware store.

"It's like a small town," Smith explains.

Except that all day and many nights, explosions rock presidential candidates at the pizzeria. The dogs, on command, break from their leashes and maul shrieking men. Gunmen fire from the All Saints Church at the president's wife. Marine One, the president's helicopter, crashes in the swimming pool, and fleeing black Suburbans climb the curbs at 45 mph. Behind every mailbox, lamppost and flowering bush, a killer possibly squats, racking his AK. Or, he might spray a vial of sarin.

Smith smiles: "I never said it was a nice town. I said it was a small town."

LESSON THREE: Be Obsessive-Compulsive

"Your head's going to spin and you feel like you're going to throw up," says Mixon. "Don't do it in my mat room."

This is Mixon's welcome speech to SATC No. 283 on its first day. "Sometimes trainees pass out in the bathroom, so develop a buddy system among yourselves."

Krista finds a buddy -- the other woman who can't do a pull-up. Dan's buddy is the Tulsa cop who classmates swear can bench-press a Honda. Scott scans the room with the dark-browed scowl of an American eagle, privately amazed that he is even here.

Mixon distributes their "Use of Force" chart, which graphs the amount of force to use on a subject, depending on their level of menace. The trainees' eyes widen at its complexity.

"Details! Think details!" Mixon says. He walks around the room, his chest forward, like a piece of earth-moving equipment. "What is your job? The man in the most powerful office in the world -- you're standing next to him with a loaded gun."

Success, Mixon says, rests on attention to detail.

"Use the force necessary. You can hit them with your car, stab them with a big pin," Mixon says. "We in the Secret Service are super Type-A personalities, people who want to take control and win at all costs." But within legal limits, Mixon warns. "Don't get that little extra shot in there, that extra revenge . . . I want to make sure if I'm going through a door with you, that I can trust you. If not, I'm not going to let you take that walk on graduation day."

All day, instructors say, Do sweat the details:

"I expect neat hair! No goatees!"

"If you wore boxer shorts, it's the last day you do!"

"Cut off [alcoholic] drinking eight hours prior to range practice!"

"You know the old joke: We're just one assassination away from wearing the FBI badge!"

The recruits recite a list of rules. Dan reads No. 16 out loud, "No sleeping in class." He stifles a new-father yawn. Dan is the only recruit who moved his family to Beltsville. He wedged a Pack 'n Play next to the bed. He bought his 4-month-old a pink Secret Service onesie. He keeps uniforms in the bathroom, so he doesn't wake his wife and infant when he dresses at dawn.

At the end of the nine-hour hazing, the students stand, soaked and mute. A former IRS employee nods toward a sweat splash on the mat: "That's me and Scott, right about there."

The Home Depot manager stamps his foot. "One day down."

Krista exhales. "Four days and 15 weeks to go."

Krista is counting down to graduation on a hand-drawn chart, penciling an "X" when she wakes up every morning. She tallies Mixon's sessions with a dash that she crosses when completed. Holidays are coded in orange marker. She jokingly calls it her "calendar of what to dread."

Her meticulousness is actually the sign of a good agent. "You got to have a little OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] to have this job," says the firearms coordinator. "You worry about every little thing. That's what we do. That's who we are."

Why? The firearms instructor explains: "A bad guy's attacking POTUS, you fire and you miss. Who you gonna hit? POTUS!" Trainees have to score 80 percent in marksmanship. They spend months learning how to shoot and assemble their Sig Sauer P229 pistols, MP5 9mm submachine guns, Remington 12-gauge shotguns. Krista buys a finger-exerciser to build trigger muscles. She and the others will fire about a thousand rounds at practice targets such as the vacant-eyed white man with glasses and thinning hair, lifting his pistol.

They aim for "center mass," the heart. No warning shots.

"What should be the first thing on your belt?" an instructor asks.

"Spare magazine?" Dan says.

"Right. I've seen people load pagers and cellphones. They don't go bang when you pull the trigger."

The students struggle to memorize details that parse life and death. During barricade-shooting, a technician chastens Dan: "Don't expose your leg. You get hit in the fibular artery, you're dead in seconds." Though, if hit, you are still expected to fight: "You have 10 seconds where you can keep fighting." They call it "the dead man's 10 seconds." The one Secret Service employee who died in the line of duty shot the would-be assassin after he'd been mortally wounded. "He fired back. He didn't give up."

"Do not use starch or bleach on the ballistic panels," a teacher says, laundry tips for their sweaty bulletproof vests. "And if you're at the White House and hear shooting, hit the deck -- the vest does not stop ERT [Emergency Response Team] bullets."

During their sixth week, students take an emergency medicine course: "So you're standing post on the golf course, and someone gets struck by lightning ... " They learn how to treat a head of state who's been eviscerated: "Some of you with military backgrounds were taught to urinate on the intestines to keep them warm. That is not Secret Service protocol." And how to deliver a baby while standing post (happened twice last year): "I don't want to hear about you using your shoelaces or anything nasty to tie the cord. Do not let the woman go to the bathroom, or Junior is going to be bungee jumping into the toilet."

Krista memorizes her flashcards and aces the medical exam.

The "details! details!" theme follows them into a surveillance course, where trainees trail each other around Maryland malls. "Act normal," the teacher says, Rule No. 5. "If you're halfway through your low-fat blueberry muffin -- that's not really low-fat -- finish it. Otherwise, it looks suspicious. If you and your partner are friends, act like friends! And do not make out in surveillance -- it's happened."

During the rescue swimming unit, the instructor specifies, "Talk to the flailing victim. Now, there is an exception: If Mr. Obama falls overboard, do you say, 'Mr. Obama, kick your feet! Move your legs!' No. Get in the water."

The deadliest details emerge during WMD training. Much of it is classified, involving untraceable toxins that could kill the president in his hotel suite while he is showering or clipping his toenails.

"There is an unbelievable amount of unaccounted-for chemical weapons," says the WMD specialist. "And when it turns up, it better not be on your advance. But if it does, this class is going to help."

The students learn how to adjust their gas masks after they've clapped on the president's, whose straps are custom-sewn for a tight seal. They inhale caustic fumes in a gas chamber, discovering their initial symptoms -- Scott's throat itches, Dan's eyes blaze, Krista's lips sting -- to recognize a gas attack.

WMD attacks could come at any time, the instructor says in class: "You're on an advance team in Ohio, and you eat at the Golden Corral salad bar." An assassin squirts SEB toxin from a rubber ball in his sleeve onto the chopped lettuce. The entire team gets sick.

"The president is due in minutes, and you're in bed, projectile vomiting to knock the clock off the wall. Every orifice in your body is going to be exuding liquid, like doing back-to-back advances in Cairo."

The trainees stare, glassy-eyed. It is 4:30 p.m., break time.

"Okay, folks," says the WMD specialist. The students are saturated in detail, in every blood, blister, nerve, bacterial and viral agent that will clot, choke and putrefy their bodily organs.

The teacher smiles sweetly as the students shuffle toward the candy machines. "You guys have a nice day!"

LESSON FOUR: Keep Moving

The control tactics coordinator addresses Scott as "the delicate one."

Scott is huge and meat-freezer hard, aside from his injured hand.

The coordinator says, "Are we sadists? No. We find and exploit any weakness in all trainees. It's stress inoculation."

"They're terrified, that's our preferred mode," says Mixon. (When the trainees aren't looking, he coos over pictures of his toddler nuzzling cherry blossoms.)

On this sunny afternoon on the race-car pad, the students' source of terror is a tactical driving test. The armored vehicles, many from President George H.W. Bush's old fleet, roll out of a garage, "the inner sanctum."

An instructor who chauffeured George W. Bush cautions, "I hit a bump in Denver and hit Bush's head on the ceiling. He asked me when was the last time I had a drug test. Try to avoid that."

Krista slides into the driver's seat, "Anyone want a paper bag?" Her feet strain to reach the pedals.

"Don't forget to lock the back doors. Nothing more embarrassing than the president busting your chops because you forgot to lock the door," an instructor says. Then he shares one of the Service's biggest secrets -- where they hide the presidential spare keys.

"All right, Scott Swantner's up," says the evaluator, Tipper Gore's former driver, his voice drawling over the police radio. Scott shifts vehicle No. 5 into gear, facing a slalom course of orange traffic cones.

The blacktop -- 1,800 feet long, 300 feet wide -- is streaked with truck-tire marks from the Humvee-heavy limousines. One instructor executes a J-turn, performed when a driver can't ram a roadblock. He zooms backward and whips the wheel, spinning the limousine a screeching reverse 180 degrees.

The air is pungent with gas and smoking rubber.

"The track's clear. Turn on your lights and sirens," the evaluator says to Scott.

Scott must complete two runs, no fishtailing or skidding outside the lines. For Scott this is a natural. He thrives inside lines: lays out his uniform just so each night, cooks one low-sodium recipe on Saturday and eats leftovers every evening.

"Ready, set, bang!"

Scott weaves through the orange cones. "Run the course hard, as if you're taking the protectee to a hospital," the evaluator had told them.

Recently here, Obama's security detail had practiced assaults on a motorcade parade. A mock Obama, first lady and two daughters strolled, waving to cheering crowds. Suddenly, over the trees, mortars crashed. Fanatics in pickup trucks thundered out, crippling "the Beast," the president's limousine. Counter snipers in a tower fired back. The Counter Assault Team stampeded. The first family was bundled into the spare limousine, "the Tomb," and sped out of the kill zone.

Scott's class had also practiced "pushing out" of the kill zone. The maneuver: Drive a Suburban into the president's rear fender, pushing his disabled limousine.

"If you're 'pushing out' on a $3 million car, you're not out of gas," the instructor said. "You're in the woods, you're taking rounds, the limo's dead. What do you do?"

"Push it out," Scott said.

"Want to know what we do, in two words?" the instructor said. "Keep moving."

Motorcade attacks average 45 seconds, he said. "Get out of the kill zone. If Iraq has taught us one thing -- you cannot stop."

In Musayyib, Iraq, Scott's Marines kept him moving the night a Russian-made fuse tore off part of his hand. Scott was clearing houses. A group of frightened girls showed him grenade fuses inside an old helmet. "I'm taking these," Scott said, reaching down. Then, he recalled, "I heard a pop. The guys I was with wouldn't let me look down."

But they kept Scott moving. It took 15 minutes to walk to their patrol. Scott was in shock, dripping blood, but somehow he moved his feet.

Privately Scott blames himself: "I should have known." But he jokes with friends, "Give me seven!" He tells himself, "Got to move on."

And though doubtful, Scott keeps moving.

On the driving pad, the evaluator scratches his head. "I don't see any problems with this class," he mumbles, and he adds their test numbers again. "Scott might be the weakest." Scott scored 68, missing the 70-point minimum.

The evaluator announces: "I need Car 5 to stay here. Which is Scott Swantner?"

Scott bites his lip. He calls the feeling "black hole," a place where a voice warns of disappointment. "It's my voice," Scott says later, "It says, 'Don't fail.' With a little crowd of people agreeing -- my family and guys I served with in Iraq. I don't want to let people down."

The evaluator notes, "could be his fingers, driving with your thumb and index finger." On the range, it was the same. When Scott jerked the trigger, the instructor shook his head: "He doesn't have much there to hold on to the gun."

The rest of the class rumbles off the pad. The evaluator tells Scott, "We got to run through this again, get you up to snuff."

"Yes, sir."

Overhead, gray clouds crowd out the sun. Raindrops pit Scott's windshield.

Two days later, Scott joins the others outside the mat room for their control tactics midterm. One role-playing instructor moans, "I got killed 24 times today. This is embarrassing."

Mixon is giving the test, pretending to be a member of the president's political staff. Mixon the political aide races over to Scott on tippy-toes, his eyes wild, his voice high:

"Oh, my God! You gotta help me! This guy is in there, and the president's going to be here in, like, 10 minutes! I told the guy to leave and he told me to go [expletive] myself! Make him leave! He scares me!!"

Scott stalks off to investigate.

Mixon the staffer smiles, "Thanks! I'm going to go get a latte."

After each student fights the assailant, he or she is directed to a small, dark room. Except for Scott, who is told to wait in the stairwell.

"I don't like being separated like this," he says.

Out on the driving pad, in fact, the driving evaluator had made a math mistake. Scott had qualified, first try.

"This has been the longest week," Scott sighs in the stairwell. He begins to pace. It is part of him now, a survival instinct.Two words: keep moving.

LESSON FIVE: Be a Meat Shield

Dan's wife is kicking him. Third or fourth time tonight. The baby is whimpering, and Dan is sleeping through it, even though he lies closer to her crib. Dan pops in her pacifier, he later recalls, amazed by how quickly his wife wakes up. It's as if she possesses a different set of senses.

In the morning, at the center, Dan huddles in the fake lobby of a fake hotel with Krista and the Tulsa cop. On the mezzanine above them, Bill Clinton's current detail skulks along the railings, poking submachine guns around corners, practicing clearing halls.

The mandatory three-mile runs are giving Dan painful shin splints. "You still got five weeks, man," the Tulsa cop tells Dan. "You don't want to get stress fractures."

But Dan is afraid he'll be dismissed if he doesn't run. And besides, he's a guy who says yes: at the paint store to Lime Rickey, and at a recent baton drill to battling three of his biggest classmates -- a sky diver, a self-described Cro-Magnon and Scott -- all at once. Afterward, Dan tottered away in a cold sweat, as dizzy as he'd been when he fainted as an 8-year-old altar boy. "Dude, you're white. You need to get checked out," said the Tulsa cop, lugging Dan off to the emergency medical services office down the hall.

Dan's gentle nature is a problem, and it worries him. "My whole life I'm always right in the middle," he once said. He may be the most agreeable recruit, but Dan won't make it as an agent if his response is always affirmative.

On this morning, at the fake hotel, Mixon ambles over to the students and cracks his neck. He's here to teach them how the Secret Service says no.

"We'll start with basic stuff. Attacks on the rope line, lapel grabs, overzealous handshakes. "

During the George W. Bush years, an instructor says, Bush always told them if he was planning to shake hands. "We're not in that environment now. We're in a Clintonesque environment, you have to deal with spontaneous rope lines."

Mixon says: "You may say, why do I need to know this?" because new agents don't work on the president's security detail. They investigate crimes and work advance or security posts. "But my first post-standing was in Brownsville, for President Clinton. I was standing there in my new J.C. Penney suit, and Clinton dives into the crowd. The shift leader grabs me by the back of my belt loops and made me help. You could be working rope lines in a matter of weeks."

Dan watches Mixon demonstrate releasing a fan's handshake. He peels back the fan's thumb with so much force, it makes a popping sound.

"If he's still jaw-jacking, saying to the protectee, 'We need to save the three-legged mosquito!' and the protectee's giving you that 'Oh, [expletive]' look, you'll peel him off," Mixon says. "The press is always around, and he's just a knucklehead, not necessarily a threat, so -- " Mixon cuts to the Tulsa cop. "You can't punch him in the face."

During a break, Dan calls Amanda. She's busy changing the baby. They met when he was 11 and she was 9. They still speak to each other with a childhood sweetness.

When the trainees reassemble, Mixon initiates them into the most sacred rite of protection:

"If there's an attack, get as big as you can to protect him. Make a nice meat shield between the protectee and the problem."

It takes a few beats to understand "meat shield."

"And where's the shielding for the protectee?" Mixon says.

The students blink. "The shift leader?" "The limousine?"

"No," Mixon says. "Point to yourself. You are the shielding for the protectee."

Scott taps his foot. Dan and Krista exchange glances.

"Your job is to get big. Get your lats out wide. We are now a meat shield. A sandwich: Kevlar, your body, another layer of Kevlar -- covering the protectee."

For the U.N. General Assembly, Mixon says, "you'll be working foreign protectees, Sultan Abu Bin Abu Babab. In an attack, get the protectee's head down, cover vital organs. If he falls, pick him up. You may have to think for them -- 'move, move, move' -- they may be literally pooping themselves."

"Do the protectees know what our responses are going to be?" says Krista.

"The president, yes. But the first lady of Iceland, no. On 9/11, two agents snatched Cheney out of his desk, and his feet never touched the ground till he was out of danger."

For weeks, the class practices shift formations, as if working a security detail. A pudgy politician makes speeches: "Keep paying your taxes! We need the money!" Dan, Krista and Scott shadow him out of boardrooms, into ballrooms and onto a Boeing 707 replica of Air Force One. They encounter actors and role-playing agents as innocuous as a flirty redhead and as deadly as a bald man wielding a syringe of Ebola.

Mixon critiques them: "You guys made a nice meat shield," he says to Krista. When shots rang out, Krista cupped the candidate's body with her own, his greasy hair sliding over her throat. "Excellent job controlling him. Bradford got as big as she's ever gotten in her life. Mighty Midget came to the rescue."

To Scott, who repelled an autograph seeker, Mixon says, "Too much aggression. You were on him like a spider monkey jacked up on Mountain Dew."

"I'll turn it down, sir," says Scott. He's adjusting to post-Iraq rules of engagement.

And Mixon scolds Dan, who saw a man throw a bottle. "Apparently, you can throw a bottle at the president and nothing happens. Don't wait for someone to hit you. You can hit him back first."

But Mixon levels his biggest criticism at the entire class. "Everyone took steps backwards when the shooting started." He glares at a former police officer.

"I'm used to going down on a knee," the former cop pleads. It's a reflex, basic officer safety.

"Well, resist. Now you're working protection. You need to be the shield."

Students remove their earplugs and safety glasses, dazed, looking existentially perplexed. An instructor who had protected Bush shrugs:

"That's the premise of protective training -- to override human nature."

In the evening, Dan drives back to the Residence Inn, to human nature as it seems intended. He locks his training gun and bathes the baby. She eats potato puffs in her high chair and laughs at her dad on the floor doing push--ups.

Dan's wife, Amanda, a luminescent brunette, cooks them tuna casserole and tries not to think about his work. "It's hard for me to visualize," she says.

The baby is sitting on Amanda's lap, gnawing a teething ring. Dan is mulling Mixon's lesson, which he's not yet internalized.

But the words "meat shield" spark recognition in Amanda's soft eyes. When she was pregnant in Buffalo, "I slipped and fell on the ice. As I was going down, I was thinking, 'Don't fall to hurt the baby. Don't fall on your stomach.' I didn't care if I broke an arm, I had to protect the baby."

Amanda sprained her wrist. She used her body as a shield.

Dan turns to his wife, nodding, as if the tumblers in his head were finally grinding in the right combination. Click: meat shield.

"It's the instinct, the mother instinct," Dan says. "When the cubs are in danger, the mother bear gets big, as Mr. Mixon says."

Being a Secret Service agent might be a stoic, macho job.

It is also a little bit like being pregnant with the president.

LESSON SIX: Stand Your Ground

"Let's see -- gun, lip gloss," Krista says. It is 5:30 a.m. at the Residence Inn.

Dan texts Krista, "R U driving in this morn?"

Yes, but Krista has to drive in early for remedial submachine gun. She qualified on the MP5, but her supervisor said she needs practice. He also assigned her to remedial physical fitness, though her scores are on par with the Tulsa cop's. Krista jokes to Dan and Scott that she has remedial lunch and remedial breathing.

She plays the song by Pink: "So What?" She never lets the guys see her tear up. She averages 96.5 percent on her written exams.

In the bathroom, a green smear of Biore Pore Perfect mask dabs the pull-up bar Krista installed for practice. Last night, she hit her cheek while cranking out four pull-ups. Enough for her to pass.

"Don't be defined by other people's limited perceptions!" says the Post-it on her bathroom mirror.

Her instructors may see a perky, size-2 woman dispensing ibuprofen and Alka Seltzer to classmates who are beat--up or hung-over. They may see that she is only one of two recruits who'd never used a weapon or been in a fight before.

But what they don't know, Krista says, is that she'll do "whatever it takes." Tumbling as a child from failed adoptions to foster homes, with no sense of where her mother was, she used to write letters, "Dear Mrs. X, Today I graduated from high school . . ." She felt like she'd been "born in midair." Now she is determined to embrace an identity that is defined by standing your ground.

Standing one's ground -- standing post -- is the recruits' next lesson. First, a classroom lecture:

"No playing BrickBreaker."

"No hands in pockets." Hands should be up and ready; as Mixon puts it, "New York, Italian."

"In Muslim countries, no pounding a balled fist into a palm. It's like the middle finger."

"If you have to go to the bathroom, suck it up. Don't drink water. You can always get an IV after your shift."

Then, the students are tested in the tactical village. Krista and Mr. Home Depot stand outside a bookstore, where a candidate is signing books. Across the street, men squeal up and rob a bank. Some of the other recruits had chased the robbers.

"It may be a diversion, a favorite tactic of Tommy Taliban and his al-Qaeda friends," Mixon says. Never abandon your guard post, Mixon says, even if someone faints: "Make sure he's not doing the funky chicken with foam coming out of his mouth, it could be a nerve gas attack. Otherwise, it's not your problem."

A role-player nicknamed "the horse" tries to push into the bookstore. Other trainees didn't notice him, but Krista, weighing 105 pounds, blocks him with her flattened palm. A drunk rolls out of the bar next door, distracting Mr. Home Depot. Another man lopes up, wearing a suicide bomber vest.

"Bomb!!!!" Krista yells, shooting the suicide bomber. Mixon had taught them to shout so loudly, "dope dealers two blocks away should be flushing toilets."

Afterward, Mr. Home Depot says, "Can't believe I didn't see the guy with the freakin' bomb." Home Depot has such good aim on the range, he routinely rubs Krista's trigger finger with his, to transfer his magic.

"You had tunnel vision," the evaluator says to him, and turns to Krista, "Even with the horse in front of you, you saw. I watched your eyes. I'm impressed. You a former cop, ma'am?"

Krista braces for his smirk, "I'm a former social worker, sir."

"No. You're a protection agent now."

But not until Krista passes control tactics, which she fails along with four other trainees. "You've got to find that inner bitch," the coordinator says, "the thing that pisses you off, and use it."

Two weeks before graduation, the five retest. The scenario: standing post; bad guys pounce. When it's over, they can barely speak, panting:

"You do okay?"

"Who knows."

"No one knows."

"Did he shoot you?"

"I think he did."

Everyone passes except for Krista. When Mixon tells her on the spot, all her breath leaves her body.

"I know I can do it," she says, her lips pale. "I'm going to graduate." She is mottled with so many blood blisters from training bullets, a massage therapist pulled her aside to ask about an abusive relationship.

After she leaves, Mixon explains that Krista didn't "demonstrate the warrior spirit." Like Krista, Mixon grew up without a mother. Her heart gave out when he was 2. No one tucked him in at night, and he realized, as Krista did at an early age, that he would have to make his own way.

One spring evening in 1981, as a "poor, badass kid" in Kentucky, Mixon watched the news on his black-and-white TV. He saw a man in a gray suit jump up, as if he were impenetrable, and block a .22--caliber bullet meant for President Ronald Reagan. Right then, Mixon decided he wanted to be that hard man. He still keeps the old TV in his garage. Now that he has a 2-year-old, he tells the boy when he trips and cries, in a voice blunted with gruff love: "Shake it off."

As a social worker, Krista's slogan is: "positive reinforcement."

As an agent, Mixon's slogan is: "Americans sleep well in their beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm them!"

"We can't pass her cause we think she's a nice girl," Mixon says.

Over the next week, Krista sticks with her class. They dress in business suits and visit the intelligence division at headquarters, inside a vault. They see pictures of 50 "class 3" subjects who, if given a chance, would attack the president, including one grizzled white man, "whereabouts unknown, last seen in Tennessee." A class 3 must be supervised if the president visits his district. "Be creative," an instructor had advised. "Some agents take them out for ice cream, take them bowling, make sure he's on his medication. In L.A., we took class 3s to the movies when the president was in town."

They peer into the 24-hour duty desk, a glass-enclosed room resembling a flight- tracking center. The names of 37 protectees light up the wall, along with their call signs and locations. The Obama girls are at Camp David; Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are in Walnut Mountain, Ga.

The next day, the review board convenes and decides to give Krista one more try.

"My whole future depends on tomorrow, and when I pass, Jess," her pull-up buddy, "and I are going to go get eyelash extensions," Krista jokes. The anxiety has whittled her weight so sharply, she's using a safety pin to hold up her pants.

"If I had to go through the extra training and the adversity you faced," Dan tells her, "I don't know how I could get up in the morning."

Her mother helps. "Short people rule!" reads a card from Krista's birth mother, whom Krista eventually tracked down. When Krista first called, her mother gulped: "I've been waiting for this call for 19 years." Five months after Krista was born, her mother married her father. They had three more kids.

Her classmates also help. The entire SATC No. 283 turns out in the chilly predawn for Krista's test. "She's like the group mom," says one guy, twice her size. Krista had ordered shoulder holsters for them all.

But in the end it is Krista alone, one week before graduation, walking barefoot past her friends into the mat room.

Most of the guys hang back. Scott walks up to the closed door and presses against it, listening:

Krista is standing post. Two trainers jump her. She uses her gun and baton to beat them back. Then the evaluator says, "All right, now we're overseas and you're not allowed to carry a weapon." Krista must overcome them, unarmed.

"Get on the ground!" Krista screams. "Police! Stop fighting!" There's pleading in her screams. The guys in the hall are squirming, looking down at their boots.

"Stop! Stop! Aaaagh!" Krista's screams are wild, and after a minute the sounds grow guttural. "Aaaagh! Yaaagh!" Scott's forehead furrows. Goose bumps rise on the arms of a New Orleans cop who once heard the transmission of an officer friend being executed by thugs. He wants to break into the mat room. His eyes fill with tears: "It's what a radio sounds like when a cop is dying."

LESSON SEVEN: Get A Will

The firearms instructor clicks on a PowerPoint slide: a picture of a toilet.

"You're in the hopper; where's the safest place to put your weapon?"

"On the toilet paper holder?"

"No, you get lead all over the toilet paper and then . . . you see? Put the gun between your feet. Which stall do you use?"

No one tries to answer.

"The stall next to the wall. You don't want someone reaching to grab your gun. Call ahead for reservations."

Thus concludes the last Secret Service class, one day before graduation. The previous lecturer told them about alcohol counseling. Four employees had DUI arrests in the past year. She also said: "Get a will."

"Good riddance!" Dan says, tossing a bag of combat training pants into the center's laundry cart. His voice has hardened, as has his body, as has his attitude. Dan turns people down now. And when the shooting started during their final exercises, Dan became a meat shield -- "I didn't even think,it was instinct" -- repudiating a gunman's bullet with a full-bodied no.

That night, Dan and Amanda sleep peacefully. The baby's front teeth have finally cut through her gums. In the morning, at commencement, Dan mills around backstage at the fake hotel.

Everyone is there except for Krista. She was released from training for failing control tactics. She hung on until the last hour, doing advance work for a candidate at a nature preserve, tramping through goose droppings in the rain, until the training director summoned her to his office. Krista's classmates were stricken. When Scott walked past the mat room, he avoided Mixon's eyes, hunching over his new government-issued BlackBerry.

Mixon said, "I feel like I failed. I've given my all; she's given her all. In good conscience though, I would be attending her funeral next week."

Krista is back home in New Orleans now, running along the bayou, pushing the mandatory three-mile run to five, six, seven. She thinks she should have passed. "The only rule in fighting is to never quit. I never stopped fighting." She appealed the decision and is waiting to hear from headquarters. She says she'll do whatever it takes to become an agent.

Backstage, at the center's fake hotel, an instructor says: "One minute to showtime!"

"I need some Visine," says a recruit. "I drank too much last night."

They all line up: the chubbiest recruit, who lost 85 pounds to enlist; the homesick recruit, who never unpacked his suitcase; the grittiest recruit, who agonized in silence over his detached rib.

Each had beat his weakness.

Scott glances around, the doubt for once lifting from his dark brows. On their last day of training, Scott walked onto the outdoor range and plugged 24 out of 30 shots into the heart of a silhouette -- a class record, and a refutation of the claim that a seven-fingered man can't shoot.

Out in the audience, in the front row, Scott's father is beaming, holding two cameras in case one malfunctions. He flew in from California, a giant man, who says, "God help the person who comes up against Scott." And then all at once, he turns red, and lifts a thick thumb to wipe away his tears: "When we got that call at 3 a.m. from Iraq, it was very, very tough ... "

Mixon takes a seat in the back, behind the families watching the ceremony.

There is the speech: "You have completed 28 weeks of the most intensive training of any law enforcement agency in the world."

And the oath of office: "I do solemnly swear . . . so help me God."

Mixon leans forward, rubbing scarred knuckles, his gaze alighting on his pupils' open faces, his own expression different from that of the glowing parents, more knowing, a trace sad.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the special agents of Class 283!" Applause.

Mixon wanders into the crowd to say goodbye. The Tulsa cop's father exclaims, "I'm the happiest duck in the pond!"

"You got your badge!" Scott's father gushes. "You want me to hold it?"

Mixon pushes past a row of chairs to offer Scott his hand: "Congratulations."

"Yes, sir."

"Hey, cut this 'sir' [expletive] out."

Scott meets Mixon's eyes.

Mixon pulls back for a moment and then opens his arms, wrapping Scott in a hug. In a hurried, hidden gesture, Mixon lifts his mouth to Scott's ear. He whispers to the new Secret Service agent, "Stay safe."

Laura Blumenfeld is an enterprise writer on the National staff of The Washington Post. She can be reached at blumenfeldl@washpost.com.

***

About This Story

Although a few subjects asked not to be identified, in most cases the Magazine chose to omit the names of minor subjects to make it easier for readers to follow the story.

Independent’s Day

Daniel Klaidman

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Jul 20, 2009

It's the morning after Independence Day, and Eric Holder Jr. is feeling the weight of history. The night before, he'd stood on the roof of the White House alongside the president of the United States, leaning over a railing to watch fireworks burst over the Mall, the monuments to Lincoln and Washington aglow at either end. "I was so struck by the fact that for the first time in history an African-American was presiding over this celebration of what our nation is all about," he says. Now, sitting at his kitchen table in jeans and a gray polo shirt, as his 11-year-old son, Buddy, dashes in and out of the room, Holder is reflecting on his own role. He doesn't dwell on the fact that he's the country's first black attorney general. He is focused instead on the tension that the best of his predecessors have confronted: how does one faithfully serve both the law and the president?

Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall. At the other is Janet Reno, whose righteousness and folksy eccentricities marginalized her within the Clinton administration. Lean too far one way and you corrupt the office, too far the other way and you render yourself impotent. Mindful of history, Holder is trying to get the balance right. "You have the responsibility of enforcing the nation's laws, and you have to be seen as neutral, detached, and nonpartisan in that effort," Holder says. "But the reality of being A.G. is that I'm also part of the president's team. I want the president to succeed; I campaigned for him. I share his world view and values."

These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."

Holder is not a natural renegade. His first instinct is to shy away from confrontation, to search for common ground. If he disagrees with you, he's likely to compliment you first before staking out an opposing position. "Now, you see, that's interesting," he'll begin, gently. As a trial judge in Washington, D.C., in the late 1980s and early '90s, he was known as a tough sentencer ("Hold-'em Holder"). But he even managed to win over convicts he was putting behind bars. "As a judge, he had a natural grace," recalls Reid Weingarten, a former Justice Department colleague and a close friend. "He was so sensitive when he sent someone off to prison, the guy would thank him." Holder acknowledges that he struggles against a tendency to please, that he's had to learn to be more assertive over the years. "The thing I have to watch out for is the desire to be a team player," he says, well aware that he's on the verge of becoming something else entirely.

When Holder and his wife, Sharon Malone, glide into a dinner party they change the atmosphere. In a town famous for its drabness, they're an attractive, poised, and uncommonly elegant pair—not unlike the new first couple. But they're also a study in contrasts. Holder is disarmingly grounded, with none of the false humility that usually signals vanity in a Washington player. He plunges into conversation with a smile, utterly comfortable in his skin. His wife, at first, is more guarded. She grew up in the Deep South under Jim Crow—her sister, Vivian Malone Jones, integrated the University of Alabama—and has a fierce sense of right and wrong. At a recent dinner in a leafy corner of Bethesda, Malone drew a direct line from the sins of America's racial past to the abuses of the Guantánamo Bay detention center. Both are examples of "what we have not done in the face of injustice," she said at one point, her Southern accent becoming more discernible as her voice rose with indignation. At the same party, Holder praised the Bush administration for setting up an "effective antiterror infrastructure."

Malone traces many of their differences to their divergent upbringings. "His parents are from the West Indies..he experienced a kinder, gentler version of the black experience," she says. Holder grew up in East Elmhurst, Queens, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in the shadow of New York's La Guardia Airport. The neighborhood has long been a steppingstone for immigrants, but also attracted blacks moving north during the Great Migration. When Holder was growing up in the 1950s, there were fewer houses—mostly semi-detached clapboard and brick homes, like the one his family owned on the corner of 101st Street and 24th Avenue—and more trees. Today the neighborhood is dominated by Mexican, Dominican and South Asian families, with a diminishing number of West Indians and African-Americans.

As we walk up 24th on a recent Saturday, Holder describes for me a happy and largely drama-free childhood. The family was comfortable enough. His father, Eric Sr., was in real estate and owned a few small buildings in Harlem. His mother, Miriam, stayed at home and doted on her two sons. Little Ricky, as he was known, was bright, athletic, and good-natured. As we walk past the baseball diamond where Holder played center field, he recalls how he used to occasionally catch glimpses of Willie Mays leaving or entering his mansion on nearby Ditmas Boulevard. Arriving at the basketball courts of PS 127, Holder bumps into a couple of old schoolyard buddies, greets them with a soul handshake and falls into an easy banter, reminiscing about "back in the day" when they dominated the hardcourt. "Ancient history," says Jeff Aubry, now a state assemblyman. "When gods walked the earth," responds Holder, who dunked for the first time on these courts at age 16.

Holder doesn't dispute the idea that his happy upbringing has led to a generally sunny view of the world. "I grew up in a stable neighborhood in a stable, two-parent family, and I never really saw the reality of racism or felt the insecurity that comes with it," he says. "That edge that Sharon's got—I don't have it. She's more suspicious of people. I am more trusting." There's a pause, and then, with a weary chuckle, one signaling gravity rather than levity, Holder says, "Lesson learned." And then adds, under his breath: "Marc Rich."

The name of the fugitive financier pardoned—with Holder's blessing—at the tail end of the Clinton administration still gnaws at him. It isn't hard to see why. As a Justice Department lawyer, Holder made a name for himself prosecuting corrupt politicians and judges. He began his career in 1976, straight out of Columbia Law School, in the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, where prosecutors are imbued with a sense of rectitude and learn to fend off political interference. And though Holder has bluntly acknowledged that he "blew it," the Rich decision haunts him. Given his professional roots, he says, "the notion that you would take actions based on political considerations runs counter to everything in my DNA." Aides say that his recent confirmation hearings, which aired the details of the Rich pardon, were in a way liberating; he aspires to no higher office and is now free to be his own man. But his wife says that part of what drives him today is a continuing hunger for redemption.

When I ask Malone the inevitable questions about Rich, she looks pained. "It was awful; it was a terrible time," she says. But she also casts the episode as a lesson about character, arguing that her husband's trusting nature was exploited by Rich's conniving lawyers. "Eric sees himself as the nice guy. In a lot of ways that's a good thing. He's always saying, 'You get more out of people with kindness than meanness.' But when he leaves the 'nice guy' behind, that's when he's strongest."

Any White House tests an attorney general's strength. But one run by Rahm Emanuel requires a particular brand of fortitude. A legendary enforcer of presidential will, Emanuel relentlessly tries to anticipate political threats that could harm his boss. He hates surprises. That makes the Justice Department, with its independent mandate, an inherently nervous-making place for Emanuel. During the first Clinton administration, he was famous for blitzing Justice officials with phone calls, obsessively trying to gather intelligence, plant policy ideas, and generally keep tabs on the department.

One of his main interlocutors back then was Holder. With Reno marginalized by the Clintonites, Holder, then serving as deputy attorney general, became the White House's main channel to Justice. A mutual respect developed between the two men, and an affection endures to this day. (Malone, a well-regarded ob-gyn, delivered one of Emanuel's kids.) "Rahm's style is often misunderstood," says Holder. "He brings a rigor and a discipline that is a net plus to this administration." For his part, Emanuel calls Holder a "strong, independent attorney general." But Emanuel's agitated presence hangs over the building—"the wrath of Rahm," one Justice lawyer calls it—and he is clearly on the minds of Holder and his aides as they weigh whether to launch a probe into the Bush administration's interrogation policies.

Holder began to review those policies in April. As he pored over reports and listened to briefings, he became increasingly troubled. There were startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions issued by the Justice Department, which were themselves controversial. He told one intimate that what he saw "turned my stomach."

It was soon clear to Holder that he might have to launch an investigation to determine whether crimes were committed under the Bush administration and prosecutions warranted. The obstacles were obvious. For a new administration to reach back and investigate its predecessor is rare, if not unprecedented. After having been deeply involved in the decision to authorize Ken Starr to investigate Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, Holder well knew how politicized things could get. He worried about the impact on the CIA, whose operatives would be at the center of any probe. And he could clearly read the signals coming out of the White House. President Obama had already deflected the left wing of his party and human-rights organizations by saying, "We should be looking forward and not backwards" when it came to Bush-era abuses.

Still, Holder couldn't shake what he had learned in reports about the treatment of prisoners at the CIA's "black sites." If the public knew the details, he and his aides figured, there would be a groundswell of support for an independent probe. He raised with his staff the possibility of appointing a prosecutor. According to three sources familiar with the process, they discussed several potential choices and the criteria for such a sensitive investigation. Holder was looking for someone with "gravitas and grit," according to one of these sources, all of whom declined to be named. At one point, an aide joked that Holder might need to clone Patrick Fitzgerald, the hard-charging, independent-minded U.S. attorney who had prosecuted Scooter Libby in the Plamegate affair. In the end, Holder asked for a list of 10 candidates, five from within the Justice Department and five from outside.

On April 15 the attorney general traveled to West Point, where he had been invited to give a speech dedicating the military academy's new Center for the Rule of Law. As he mingled with cadets before his speech, Holder's aides furiously worked their BlackBerrys, trying to find out what was happening back in Washington. For weeks Holder had participated in a contentious internal debate over whether the Obama administration should release the Bush-era legal opinions that had authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods. He had argued to administration officials that "if you don't release the memos, you'll own the policy." CIA Director Leon Panetta, a shrewd political operator, countered that full disclosure would damage the government's ability to recruit spies and harm national security; he pushed to release only heavily redacted versions.

Holder and his aides thought they'd been losing the internal battle. What they didn't know was that, at that very moment, Obama was staging a mock debate in Emanuel's office in order to come to a final decision. In his address to the cadets, Holder cited George Washington's admonition at the Battle of Trenton, Christmas 1776, that "captive British soldiers were to be treated with humanity, regardless of how Colonial soldiers captured in battle might be treated." As Holder flew back to Washington on the FBI's Cessna Citation, Obama reached his decision. The memos would be released in full.

Holder and his team celebrated quietly, and waited for national outrage to build. But they'd miscalculated. The memos had already received such public notoriety that the new details in them did not shock many people. (Even the revelation, a few days later, that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another detainee had been waterboarded hundreds of times did not drastically alter the contours of the story.) And the White House certainly did its part to head off further controversy. On the Sunday after the memos were revealed, Emanuel appeared on This Week With George Stephanopoulos and declared that there would be no prosecutions of CIA operatives who had acted in good faith with the guidance they were given. In his statement announcing the release of the memos, Obama said, "This is a time for reflection, not retribution." (Throughout, however, he has been careful to say that the final decision is the attorney general's to make.)

Emanuel and other administration officials could see that the politics of national security was turning against them. When I interviewed a senior White House official in early April, he remarked that Republicans had figured out that they could attack Obama on these issues essentially free of cost. "The genius of the Obama presidency so far has been an ability to keep social issues off the docket," he said. "But now the Republicans have found their dream…issue and they have nothing to lose."

Emanuel's response to the torture memos should not have surprised Holder. In the months since the inauguration, the relationship between the Justice Department and the White House had been marred by surprising tension and acrimony. A certain amount of friction is inherent in the relationship, even healthy. But in the Obama administration the bad blood between the camps has at times been striking. The first detonation occurred in only the third week of the administration, soon after a Justice lawyer walked into a courtroom in California and argued that a lawsuit, brought by a British detainee who was alleging torture, should have been thrown out on national-security grounds. By invoking the "state secrets" privilege, the lawyer was reaffirming a position staked out by the Bush administration. The move provoked an uproar among liberals and human-rights groups. It also infuriated Obama, who learned about it from the front page of The New York Times. "This is not the way I like to make decisions," he icily told aides, according to two administration officials, who declined to be identified discussing the president's private reactions. White House officials were livid and accused the Justice Department of sandbagging the president. Justice officials countered that they'd notified the White House counsel's office about the position they had planned to take.

Other missteps were made directly by Holder. Early on, he gave a speech on race relations in honor of Black History Month. He used the infelicitous phrase "nation of cowards" to describe the hair trigger that Americans are on when it comes to race. The quote churned through the cable conversation for a couple of news cycles and caused significant heartburn at the White House; Holder had not vetted the language with his staff. A few weeks later, he told reporters he planned to push for reinstating the ban on assault weapons, which had expired in 2004. He was simply repeating a position that Obama had taken on numerous occasions during the campaign, but at a time when the White House was desperate to win over pro-gun moderate Democrats in Congress. "It's not what we wanted to talk about," said one annoyed White House official, who declined to be identified criticizing the attorney general.

The miscues began to reinforce a narrative that Justice has had a hard time shaking. White House officials have complained that Holder and his staff are not sufficiently attuned to their political needs. Holder is well liked inside the department. His relaxed, unpretentious style—on a flight to Rome in May for a meeting of justice ministers, he popped out of his cabin with his iPod on, mimicking Bobby Darin performing "Beyond the Sea"—has bred tremendous loyalty among his personal staff. But that staff is largely made up of veteran prosecutors and lawyers whom Holder has known and worked with for years. They do not see the president's political fortunes as their primary concern. Among some White House officials there is a not-too-subtle undertone suggesting that Holder has "overlearned the lessons of Marc Rich," as one administration official said to me.

The tensions came to a head in June. By then, Congress was in full revolt over the prospect of Gitmo detainees being transferred to the United States, and the Senate had already voted to block funding to shut down Guantánamo. On the afternoon of June 3, a White House official called Holder's office to let him know that a compromise had been reached with Senate Democrats. The deal had been cut without input from Justice, according to three department officials who did not want to be identified discussing internal matters, and it imposed onerous restrictions that would make it harder to move detainees from Cuba to the United States.

Especially galling was the fact that the White House then asked Holder to go up to the Hill that evening to meet with Senate Democrats and bless the deal. Holder declined—a snub in the delicate dance of Washington politics—and in-stead dispatched the deputy attorney general in his place. Ultimately the measure passed, despite Justice's objections. Obama aides deny that they left Holder out of the loop. "There was no decision to cut them out, and they were not cut out," says one White House official. "That's a misunderstanding."

Holder is clearly not looking to have a contentious relationship with the White House. It's not his nature, and he knows it's not smart politics. His desire to get along has proved useful in his career before, and may now. Emanuel attributes any early problems to the fact that "everyone was getting their sea legs," and insists things have been patched up. "It's not like we're all sitting around singing 'Kumbaya,' " he says, but he insists that Obama got in Holder exactly what he wanted: "a strong, independent leader."

There's an obvious affinity between Holder and the man who appointed him to be the first black attorney general of the United States. They are both black men raised outside the conventional African-American tradition who worked their way to the top of the meritocracy. They are lawyers committed to translating the law into justice. Having spent most of their adult lives in the public arena, both know intimately the tug of war between principle and pragmatism. Obama, Holder says confidently, "understands the nature of what we do at the Justice Department in a way no recent president has. He's a damn good lawyer, and he understands the value of having an independent attorney general."

The next few weeks, though, could test Holder's confidence. After the prospect of torture investigations seemed to lose momentum in April, the attorney general and his aides turned to other pressing issues. They were preoccupied with Gitmo, developing a hugely complex new set of detention and prosecution policies, and putting out the daily fires that go along with running a 110,000-person department. The regular meetings Holder's team had been having on the torture question died down. Some aides began to wonder whether the idea of appointing a prosecutor was off the table.

But in late June Holder asked an aide for a copy of the CIA inspector general's thick classified report on interrogation abuses. He cleared his schedule and, over two days, holed up alone in his Justice Depart ment office, immersed himself in what Dick Cheney once referred to as "the dark side." He read the report twice, the first time as a lawyer, looking for evidence and instances of transgressions that might call for prosecution. The second time, he started to absorb what he was reading at a more emotional level. He was "shocked and saddened," he told a friend, by what government servants were alleged to have done in America's name. When he was done he stood at his window for a long time, staring at Constitution Avenue.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/206300