Sometimes you get involved in a conversation and it becomes so engrossing that you don't notice the time passing. All of a sudden, the conversation ends and you're surprised and a little disappointed. That's what happened on Tuesday, listening to former Secret Service Special Agent Evy Poumpouras talking to Ryan Tubridy. Evy started her career in the NYPD, before making the switch to the Secret Service. She has protected presidents and their families, she's been to Coachella with a first daughter and she was awarded a Medal of Valour for her bravery during the September 11th attacks in New York in 2001. Oh, and she speaks about 12 languages. Now, it would be easy enough for someone so talented and successful to come across as unlikeable, but Evy is the complete opposite: she's engaging, fascinating and very likeable indeed.

The current pandemic, Evy told Ryan is, in a sense, comparable to 9/11, at least in terms of how we handle ourselves during it:

"We experience these difficult moments and you have a choice who we want to be and even in something like this, we all have a choice who we want to be when it's all over. You know, we're all going to look back and be like, 'Who was I during this pandemic? How did I handle myself? Did I help others? Did I do right? Did I do right by humanity?' And that's all you can try to do."

Evy uses the words "humanity" and "human" a lot during her conversation with Ryan and it's clear that she sees "doing right by humanity" as her first duty in life. That's evident when she tells Ryan that she didn't attend the ceremony to award her the Secret Service's highest honour for her bravery during 9/11. The award, she says, didn't sit right with her:

"I felt like I just did what I was supposed to do as a human being, rather than a special agent, if that makes sense. I felt like I didn't do it because it was my job, I did it because it was the right thing to do."

In her book, Evy details how she attributed one-word descriptions – virtues, she calls them – to the presidents she worked with, each carefully-selected word chosen to reflect that president's most notable trait. For Bill Clinton, she chose the word generosity:

"He just really enjoyed giving his time to people, loved talking to people, loved connecting with people and that's why I gave him the virtue of generosity… He really was drawn to talking to people and genuinely cared about them."

Surprisingly, the virtue Evy chose for George W Bush is authenticity. Even more surprisingly, Bush's Secret Service nickname was Trailblazer(!) If she was Irish, Evy might have said that she admired the former president's lack of notions:

"Cameras on or cameras off, George W Bush was George W Bush. He was authentic, he was himself."

Who would have thought it? For more from Ryan's chat with Evy, including the story of an altercation with a Chinese official at a G20 summit and how Michelle Obama's daily routine inspired her, go here.

Becoming Bulletproof: Life Lessons from a Secret Service Agent by Evy Poumpouras is published by Icon Books.

Niall Ó Sioradáin