By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
May 9, 2025
Roger Goodes finally had to pass on answering the question.
Of his 26 years working for the U.S. Secret Service, Goodes spent seven assigned to the Presidential Protective division during the Clinton administration. He knew the history of the Secret Service, dating back to its start in 1865 to combat counterfeit currency at the end of the Civil War, and he talked about the hiring and training process for new recruits, detailed the intricate choreography of a presidential motorcade, and explained why agents always lugged a suitcase of clothes with them every day they arrived to work at the White House.
Yet, when asked to name his favorite trip while working in the White House, Goodes was stumped.
“Oh, wow,” he murmured. “There’s so many of them.”
Goodes’ non-answer was a reminder that the law enforcement agents, military officers and enlisted personnel, and staff of political appointees who surround the president and vice president get such an intimate view of history that even with the perspective of the passage of time, it can still leave them speechless. These individuals witness both the public and private lives of the country’s top two leaders, seeing the milestones and tragedies, while taking care of the mundane tasks, such as making sure the president’s favorite beverage is available at all times.
The Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site recently assembled a panel of three individuals who served former presidents and vice presidents and asked them to give a glimpse of daily life in the White House. Held at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in downtown Indianapolis, the event on Wednesday was part of the presidential site’s 2025 “Off the Record” discussion entitled “Within Arm’s Reach,” which provided a close look at the jobs and people assigned to protect the president of the United States.
Goodes, who rose to the position of assistant to the special agent in charge on President Bill Clinton’s detail, was joined on the panel by Dana Pittard, a retired major general who served 34 years in the U.S. Army and was one of five military aides to Clinton, and Tom McNulty, a retired U.S. Navy senior chief petty officer, who served as executive chef for vice presidents Dick Cheney, Joe Biden and Mike Pence. Andrea Richter-Garry, former White House advance lead for President Barack Obama, moderated the discussion.
“A routine day is that it’s never routine,” McNulty said of working for the president and vice president. “You fly by the seat of your pants and if you haven’t figured out how to do that … you’re never going to survive the job.”
McNulty was part of the team that attended to the vice president and the second family. They handled all the tasks of daily life, including doing laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning the residence and fixing the meals. He recounted the idiosyncrasies of each vice president he and his colleagues had to accommodate, including Cheney’s preference to rise at 4 a.m., while Biden slept until 8 a.m. Also, Cheney, who was a hunter, “actually giggled” every time he pulled a stray piece of buckshot out of his mouth when pheasant was served for dinner, while Biden and Pence had the taste buds of 5-year-olds, favoring simple foods like pasta with red sauce and cheeseburgers.
“All the little, small, minute things that you take for granted or maybe you do yourself at home, we make sure that they don’t have to think about that, because they’re there to make us safe and do their jobs as the leaders of the country,” McNulty said. “We just try to make their life as simple and easy as possible.”
The White House has about 3,000 military members supporting its operations and the president every day, according to Pittard. The personnel had a wide swath of duties, he said, from the Navy valet who irons the president’s clothes and helps him get dressed in the morning to the Army soldiers who drove the vehicles in the presidential motorcade.
As a military aide, Pittard said, his duty was to help the president as he filled his three roles of commander in chief, head of state and chief executive officer of America. The military aides – who were to be within two to five minutes of the president at all times – carried the “nuclear football” and were always on hand, whether the president was meeting with military leaders or hosting a state dinner, he said.
Early in his tenure as a military aide, Pittard said he learned to take the time to read the Presidential Daily Brief, because the president would ask, “Well, what does it say?” Also, Pittard spent 91 nights in the “Truman bedroom,” which, he said, is really just a room in the basement of the White House with a bed and a television.
The suitcases that the Secret Service agents carried with them to the White House, Goodes said, contained several changes of clothes so they could be prepared for whatever the president wanted to do. A call in the morning from the Navy valet would alert the agents to what the president was wearing. If he was donning a suit, they wore suits; if he was pulling on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, they put on their running clothes. During the day, they had to be ready to change into casual clothes if the president decided to play a round of golf in the afternoon.
Goodes said the agents started the morning shift with a briefing about what had happened in the past 24 hours and what was on the agenda for the day ahead. For much of their time on duty, he said, the agents stood at their posts located throughout the White House and the neighboring Old Executive Office Building. The agents moved as the president moved, so the coverage around POTUS never lapsed, and, to keep from getting bored or losing focus, the agents would change posts about every 20 minutes.
“You protect the office of the president, no matter who sits there. That is something that’s ingrained in you from the moment you step into the White House,” Goodes said. “This is kind of cliché, but you will take a bullet for the president and they train you how to do that. They train you over and over and over and over and over and over to where you don’t think about it, you would just do it.”
During the panel discussion, Richter-Garry noted the work of serving presidents and vice presidents extends beyond the individuals to their families.
“You all won’t say this, but you’re dedicated to public service and the mission that you have devoted your lives to. It has a cost for your families and personal lives as well,” Richter-Garry said. “So (I am) just acknowledging that and appreciating that and all the families you have … to support you to do the roles that you have.”
The audience applauded to express their appreciation as well.
Goodes, Pittard and McNulty all got to know the first and second families through their jobs supporting the president and vice president. They flew on Air Force One and Air Force Two; they accompanied the president, vice president and the first and second ladies and the children on state visits and vacations; and they saw those families who lived in the White House and in the vice president’s official residence at Number One Observatory Circle love each other and sometimes clash with each other as all families do.
When the families are in pain, the personnel around them can feel it, too. McNulty remembered the death of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Beau, who lost his battle with brain cancer in May 2015. “You have to hide your feelings, your personal feelings for someone that you’ve lost, too,” McNulty said of Beau Biden, calling him a “tremendous, great man.” “You’re there to support the family.”
Goodes also served on first lady Hillary Clinton’s detail and on the detail for the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, while she attended Stanford University in California. Protecting the children is critical, he said, because if the child is hurt or kidnapped, the president would be too despondent to lead the country.
“It weighs on you, it’s the gravity of the situation and it shows how important it is,” Goodes said of the importance of protecting the family members like Chelsea Clinton. “That’s something I tried to instill in all the people that worked for me – for her – during that assignment. Even though it was a much more casual assignment (at Standford), not a political thing, it was crucial to the presidency.”
The three panelists and the moderator spent years serving in the White House and emerged with a trove of memories. Similar to Goodes’ struggle to name a favorite trip, Pittard had trouble picking just one historic moment that he witnessed as a military aide to Clinton. He noted the summit in Helsinki, Finland, where Clinton held talks with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and the trip to Cape Town, South Africa, where the U.S. president met Nelson Mandela.
“There’s so many things that you’re kind of an eyewitness to. Of course, I was just carrying a bag,” Pittard said, downplaying his role, “but it’s very cool.”
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
