Washington — When you have a young woman screaming in a hallway about some sort of grievance she has with you, you have a problem. Even a Secret Service agent, surrounded by his buddies, has a problem. I know about this sort of thing from my work in the archives pursuant to my researches as a presidential historian.

One thinks back to the late 1940s of Elizabeth Bentley, an American spying for the Soviet Union. She raised an intolerable ruckus outside a hotel room with one, possibly two, Soviet intelligence operatives — both male. Her involvement with one had been romantic, but the cad let her down. Possibly, he did not pay for her turkey sandwich. Possibly, he left other bills cooling on the table. At any rate, there was hell to pay. She had a set of lungs on her like a bull moose and a face to boot. When she let out a yell, it was deafening. Of course, the Russians were terrified. Shortly thereafter, she renounced Communism, and they were glad to get back to Stalin’s Russia.