You are the member of an elite government operation. People know about you, but nobody knows who you are.
You're supposed to stay out of the limelight, even when you're within an arm's length of very famous and prestigious people, and you gain prestige by being around them. You try not to get into photo ops. You don't mind this, actually; it comes with the territory.
People look for you at entrances and near the famous people. You're usually well put together, with close-cropped hair and sunglasses, as much for anonymity as for the glare protection and never to give off which way you're looking. You never smile. You never allow yourself to be distracted. A split second's mistake could literally be fatal.
Your service to your country is the point, and always will be the point. You're doing as tough of a job as there is. Often, it's horribly boring. But you train, you prepare, for the moments when you have to be very alert and ready to sacrifice all--all--for your country, without more than a second's notice.
The tension, the stress, is enormous and grinds on endlessly, even though 99% of what you do is routine. You are overworked. The positions are understaffed, largely because they're government jobs and you must rely on an uninformed, unappreciative legislature to provide the funding. They do, but it's bare bones. You often have to cover for each other.
Your days are long. If you have a family, you're sometimes on the road for weeks at a time, which produces strains you never anticipated. Sometimes you choose to forget you have a family. But secretiveness is part of your identity. If no one knows, if it's across the ocean, if the press isn't along, who's the wiser?
So when you stand down, you often relax with alcohol. Lots and lots of it. And, if you're male, temporary affections of, well, guests. You deserve it, you rationalize. You try not to leave tracks, but if something happens, you smooth it over so the higher-ups don't have to look too closely. They've been there before, so they know. If you build up enough juice and then get caught, you're transferred somewhere else. But your career continues.
I had a college football coach who didn't want us drinking during the week. Games were played on Saturdays. He understood that celebrating, or commiserating, needed an outlet on Saturday night. So he just told us: Stay out of jail. Don't call me.
But the people above? They pushed the ends of the envelope much farther.
They're members of the Secret Service. Their image reflects that of the country they serve: Sometimes justified, sometimes not; a reputation getting tired and outdated; an image pretty tarnished if you take a good look; full of phony American exceptionalism; in need of a serious reboot and rebuilding.
Carol Leonning's new book, Zero Fail:The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, is brutal in its facts. It represents gumshoe reporting at its finest. At times, it delves into the gossipy and tawdry, but only because it has to. It has to show you that people should have known things sooner than they did, and sometimes failed to report them. It isn't written with 'creative nonfiction' in mind; it doesn't have to be. This one made it to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.
Leonning, reporter for The Washington Post, has built up some serious street cred with her earlier book about ex- and his exploits, A Very Stable Genius, with Phillip Rucker (also a best-seller). She continues it here in one of her main beats for the paper. In some places, all she has to do is re-open her paper's archives and consult her notes. But she does far, far more. She exposes a hot, dangerous mess caught in a deeply damaging loop. Not only are they compromised, but so are we, if people can't be protected the way they should.
To be sure, most agents uphold the pride and prestige of Secret Service work an overwhelming majority of the time. But in this line of work, screw-ups are often unforgivable--and you can't have them back. The Service learns best from those mistakes, but the price is devastating.
It describes a good-old-boy network that reminds you of police officers who close down around each other when threatened, whether deserved or not. Too often, they advance by the moniker "it's not what you know, it's who you know," when a better person should have been appointed (Obama did some of that appointing, btw). They sabotaged the first woman to be appointed the director by violating her trust. Her presence violated what's become the tickets to be punched: The director has to be an insider with previous Secret Service experience, and has to be male.
But above all, it has compromised itself thoroughly, letting transgressions go when they should have resulted in punishment and worse because someone else let something else go before, they're still on the force, and they know names can be named. Someone did squeal once, and a suicide indirectly resulted.
This stuff goes back a long way. Lincoln's bodyguard took a break, went to a bar, and paved the way for John Wilkes Booth. It affected the assassinations of McKinley and Kennedy, too, because agents, already trying to be unobtrusive, were asked to stay farther away.
It pits politicians who need to touch people against those who try to stop them from doing so. George Wallace, presidential candidate, was shot because he changed his mind and went to the rope line one last time. Mike Deaver, personal assistant to Reagan, argued that (code named) Rawhide didn't need protection that close to him. After the nearly fatal assassination attempt, Deaver changed his tune.
Reagan came to Port Washington, Wisconsin, about half an hour north of Milwaukee and in strong Republican territory, late in his second term. I wandered there to see the show and ran into a former Cedarburg High student who was a sheriff's deputy trainee. He said: "See those trees? There are snipers in there." You couldn't see a thing. He also told me that there was a gunboat on Lake Michigan nearby.
Some presidents also sneak away to liaison with unknown paramours: Kennedy and Clinton were notorious for that. We know what happened to Clinton. But in doing so, he compromised agents who otherwise understood that though it might offend them, they were sworn not to reveal activities.
Would-be assassins are normally a-political. Some of the most amiable people ever to be president, like Bush-41 and Ford, were nearly murdered by crazed maniacs. Someone who needed to tell Obama about environmental issues actually got inside the White House and the East Room one awful night. In the end, no real damage, but the breach of security, explained well by Leonning, should make us shudder. (A "jumper," as they're called, referring to jumping the White House fence, happened on ex-'s watch, too, but the guy found the doors were locked.)
When someone saw that changes were needed, they were warned not to say much and to choose carefully to whom to say it. A low-level agent wrote down and distributed a long list of recommended changes, and others cheered him on. He looked like he was getting through, but an equally low-level violation of policy (nothing like wild partying on the road) was conjured against him, and out he went.
A lot of the biggest documented screw-ups, in fact, came on Obama's watch, but mostly disconnected from something he could help (like the above breach, which happened three minutes after he'd left for Camp David. He was in California when another fool fired a few shots at the White House and hit a residence window. But his kids were around--one of them out with friends--and Michelle unleashed her rage when she found out.). He thought he'd be innovative by appointing the first female director in the Secret Service's history, but the 'network' undermined her and made her look negligent. All of that made him look so, too.
Then, of course, we have ex-, who politicized the Service even more than his evil predecessor, Richard Nixon, who was just as conniving, cold-blooded and manipulative. Some agents with a sense of duty became appalled at his antics, then disgusted by his shamelessness. Kind of like us, huh?
Under ex-, though, the Service was first politicized (by overcharging it for his overgolfing, which drains its resources, but he typically didn't care since much of the money went to his institutions, which allowed him to move it where he wanted, such as to his campaign coffers), then politicized itself in the 2020 campaign, since an enormous percentage of agents are Republican and backed him with much the same unsophisticated fervor as his most loyal minions; some agents, too, ignored the unenforceable Hatch Act. This even after he demanded huge rallies of superspreader events, which of course put agents in the way of the virus (and got some of them sick, too, along with himself. Remember when he made agents drive him around to wave at crowds?). Right along with the rest of the madness, they never budged in their support of him. Some agents blanched, though, at the inappropriate manner in which they were utilized to control protestors when George Floyd was killed.
Neither did they go right to the winner of the election, if you recall; they normally begin a high level of protection right after victory is announced. But that falls into line with ex-'s demand that the results get challenged beyond any reasonable person's conclusion. That, too, divided the Service, and it remains so today.
In the end, Leonning exposes the Secret Service in a way that makes you want to take a shower. The responsibilities with which they're assigned, and the way they're stretched thin as well as outdated technology, should scare the hell out of you. Regardless, it lurches on.
Now we again have a president that is at least trying to unite the country despite a noticeably large cadre' of domestic insurrectionists who demonstrated their wares on January 6. So you have to ask yourself: How long will the string holding back the boulder of successful attack hang on before it's once again broken? And can the Secret Service depoliticize itself this time?
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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