By Frederick Kuzmin, July 5, 2017 — I started going to boot camp like everybody does. And I got transferred right to what we call AIT and I was in the air police, or security police, whatever you decide to call it. At the end of the course, everybody was getting their assignments, and I didn’t get anything. I asked where am I going and he says, you are staying here, we are investigating you. I asked why, and he said well you’re in the top 10% of your class, so you get to pick whatever base you want. He said, you wanted to go to Andrews Air Force base. I said yes. He said, they are putting you in the presidential unit and the Secret Service is investigating you right now. They have different military classifications like Secret, Top Secret, Crypto. I ended up having one of the good ones, the one I had was called SSIR which was Secret Service Inquiry Request. Obviously, I passed, and I was stationed at Andrews Air Force Base. It wasn’t bad.
Once I got rank, I started flying on airplanes. So I had the easiest job in the world because I was with two presidents and vice presidents. Nelson Rockefeller lived in New York, and every Friday night he’d go back to White Plains New York right outside the ritzy section. They would put us at the Hilton and for two days we sat around doing nothing, watching TV, eating good food. We couldn’t go anywhere because he might have had to leave. We had to be at the beck and call. But it was still two days of fun. It was the easiest job I had. That was a fight to be able to do that, to get away for a few days.
So I did that for a couple years, and during that time we had the Iranian crisis. We were supposed to go, but Mr. Carter decided that he wanted the Delta Force to do it rather than us, even though we were trained. The Delta Force lost two helicopters. We figured we would be next, and we were right because all of us, 58 people, we all lived in one dorm, we all had to get all kinds of shots because we knew we might be going to Iran. No problem there. So they gave us one for yellow fever, one for cholera, and one for malaria. I don’t know which one it was, but we had all 58 people in the dorm with diarrhea. There are only four bathrooms! You had people cursing you up and down. Basically there was someone there who knew this was going to happen, but they didn’t tell us! They must have known! It was for 3 days, you talk about being dehydrated! A miserable 3 days. We never did end up going to Iran. They did send us over to Saudi Arabia because of that time, there was an American Queen in Saudi Arabia; Grace Kelly.
I liked Ford, but I didn’t like Carter. He stopped so many things that I can’t even tell you. It was unbelievable. Every other base had two-star generals, on our base we had a four-star general.
I was in Andrews Air Force Base in Morningside, Maryland. It was 8 minutes from the White House. I met the two presidents and vice presidents, for Ford, Carter, Rockefeller and Mondale. Republicans first, Democrats after. The only reason Ford lost is because he pardoned Nixon and everybody really wasn’t happy about that. That’s how we elected a peanut farmer.
I wasn’t intimidated by anyone but the Secretary of the State, Henry Kissinger. He’s still around. I played chess with him, nobody else would play with him, they didn’t tell me of course! They all set me up because they all knew how good he really was. It took him four moves and then he checkmated me. He was a very smart man, if you had a question about anything, he would give you the correct answer as to what you were looking for. That’s why they kept him around so long. He was tough to hear because he had a horrible accent.
Something that most people don’t know is that there are four pilots on Air Force One. They are all colonels. Air Force One was a lot smaller than the plane that they have now, it was like the plane they showed in the movie Air Force One. I was in the Air Force from seven year to 1975 to 1982. I stopped being in the same position when Reagan took over. Reagan had his own people that he wanted in. Because of our clearances, we were allowed to go back into the presidential office of our clearances, we were allowed to go back into the presidential offices, but you had to have permission to go back there. They have a situation room where are you were not allowed to go into unless you were asked to. Generals were also always on the plane. We were on the Presidential Unit, and our job on paper was called Security Police. I loved my job. I would have stayed in, I had already worked at American Sterilizer for seven years before I went into the Air Force. I was told that if I did not come back on the day I was supposed to come back, I would lose my entire pension. And if I came back home, they would add on to my pension. In hindsight, I would have stayed in. In the Air Force you needed to know 3 people in order to get along: a doctor, a cop and a cook. Every Friday, we had steak or lobster, those were our choices. If I could do it over again, I would have stayed in and retired around the year 2000. The least I would have been was Master Sergeant.
I will tell you about the time that President Ford fell down the steps of Air Force One. Someone called him to go back inside the plane, he turned the wrong way, hit the top and rolled down the steps. The best part is what they don’t know. We all had earphones, and he was falling down the steps, and it was the Secret Service talking. We were just standing there, and someone said “What do we do?” And then someone else said “Well, pick him up!” And Ford said, when he was getting up, “Get me to the car”. People were taking pictures; the press was all there, so all you see was flashing lights. They tried to even interview me, and of course I wasn’t allowed to say anything. I remember it was the reporter Robert Pierpoint from CBS. I remember watching him on TV.
(We watched a video on YouTube of Ford falling down the steps. The airplane (Air Force One) had a name painted on – The Spirit of ’76)
We were the guys in the berets. Ford was kind of a klutz. He had a spectator when he was golfing, too. For example, he was playing golf once, and he was so far off that he hit someone in the head with a golf ball.