My book report: Wheels up, rings off

Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail:  The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, Random House, 2021

Anyone who was shocked by vanished Secret Service text messages from January 6, 2021, has not read this book.  You should.  The history of the agency, despite its James Bond-ish name, has usually been filled with failure.  

It was never intended to be a presidential bodyguard.  Only despots needed those.  The Secret Service was established in 1865 as the Treasury Department's currency police, meant to fight counterfeiters who were flooding the country with phony money and destabilizing the post-war recovery.  This it did rather successfully.  Only after two more presidents were assassinated was it hastily assigned to protect them, and for decades it remained a small, underfunded force.  The next attempt in 1932 failed mostly because Giuseppe Zingara was a bad shot.

Presidents resisted being seen as mistrustful of their fellow Americans and were reluctant to accept protection.  Harry Truman was only persuaded to abandon his morning walks in Washington in 1950, when two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to shoot him at Blair House and killed a White House policeman named Leslie Coffelt, the only Secret Service agent to die in the line of duty.  It's hard to protect someone who won't be protected.  Agents watched in dismay as John F. Kennedy entertained a string of unidentified women in the White House and elsewhere, and were driven crazy when, for example, he insisted on going for an ocean swim near Peter Lawford's beach house.  But they probably could have gotten him in and out of Texas if the detail hadn't been out drinking until 4 am, and if someone had checked high windows, and if his driver, Bill Greer, hadn't all but stopped the car after the first shot.  If.

Gradually agents were added and more effort was put into their training.  After the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, agents began to be assigned to presidential candidates, stretching the force thin again.  Another problem was presidents who had their own motives.  When George Wallace was shot in 1972, Nixon ordered the Service to protect Ted Kennedy, who wasn't even running for president, in the hope that they would dig up "dirt" he could use.  The two attempts on Gerald Ford in 1975 showed that there was more work to be done.

Their finest hour came in 1981.  At the first shot agents shoved Ronald Reagan into his car and agent Tim McCarthy stepped between him and a bullet.  It was just like the movies.  I hope Reagan appreciated that.  But twenty years later there was a systemic failure on the morning of September 11.  George W. Bush was in Sarasota visiting a school when it became clear that something unprecedented was happening in New York.  Protocol dictated that he be moved out of there at once, but Bush sat reading with the children for half an hour, then spoke on live television.  For all anyone knew, another hijacked plane was hurtling toward Emma E. Booker Elementary School.  Back at the White House, more grim slapstick:  Dick Cheney's detail hustled him down to the bunker and everyone stood in the hall for twenty minutes because even the vice-president lacked the clearance to enter.  Up on the roof, agents with rifles ("What the hell are we supposed to do?") watched as the third plane circled downtown Washington several times before heading for the Pentagon.  Communications were spotty, chaos ruled.  And before long the Secret Service was detached from the Treasury Department and folded into the new Department of Homeland Security.  

It was a new era.  Unfortunately, the new era can be summed up with the phrase "wheels up, rings off."  When guarding the president out of town or out of the country, as Leonnig puts it, Las Vegas rules apply.  She documents incidents of blackout drinking, untrammeled adultery and brushes with local law enforcement that rarely resulted in disciplinary action or public notice.  In the Line of Fire meets Animal House.  Hiring more women agents helped, up to a point.

Reading the chapters about Barack Obama's presidency, you may wonder how he and his family left the White House alive, and not just because of the racism expressed by some agents in texts they didn't bother to delete.  In 2009 a Mr. and Mrs. Salahi invited themselves to a state dinner and shook hands with the president.  In 2010 Michelle Obama and her daughters were sleeping in the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles when a homeless man wandered through a side entrance, got on a freight elevator and arrived at the door of their suite, guarded by a single agent with no one securing the stairs.  In 2011 Oscar Ortega-Hernandez drove in from Idaho, parked across from the White House and fired several shots before escaping, while police and agents ran in circles.  It took four days for a housekeeper to discover broken glass and bullet fragments on the second floor, and another week to apprehend Ortega.  (Alex Jones had told him Obama was Antichrist and he decided to do something about it.)  In 2012 there was the notorious trip to Cartagena, Colombia, which was so bad it gets its own chapter.  In 2014 a disabled veteran named Omar Gonzales jumped the fence, walked into the White House and got as far as the Green Room, armed with a knife.  Then there was Obama's visit to CDC headquarters in Atlanta, where he was found to have shared an elevator with an unidentified man and his gun.  I have no idea when this happened -- Leonnig can be maddeningly imprecise with dates in the interest of telling a gripping story.

Probably there are security failures all over the world -- remember Michael Fagan's early-morning visit to Queen Elizabeth's bedroom? --  and we only hear about the times someone with bad intentions got lucky.  Questions get asked in Congress or Parliament because that's what politicians do.  Rules are tightened, personnel are hired and fired.  Nobody's perfect, or even close.  But Carol Leonnig makes it clear that the Secret Service rarely lives up to its image.  Far too often it's the Keystone Kops with radios, sunglasses and tense expressions.  And now it's at least possible those mysteriously wiped phones contained something more sinister than racist jokes, sexting and inter-office gossip.