A multimillion-dollar system of sensors, canine patrols and human agents had gone kaput. Three years later, another “jumper” strolled unchallenged up to the eastern entrance. And yet, in September 2014, a 42-year-old man wearing Crocs and carrying a knife clambered over the fence, then lumbered across the North Lawn and into the East Room before he was tackled by an officer. No place on earth is supposed to be more secure than “Crown,” as the White House is code-named. Time and again, in Leonnig’s telling, rather than taking a bullet for the president, the Secret Service has dodged one. Donald Trump treated his protectors like a Praetorian Guard - politicizing their leadership and making outlandish demands: While recovering from Covid-19, he bundled agents into a limousine for a theatrical victory lap around Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, thereby inviting their infection. Bill Clinton also went rogue, ditching his agents to go over the White House wall without warning. Kennedy defied his detail to keep up with his round-the-clock extramarital adventures. And some presidents have thumbed their noses at their protectors. Congress has starved it of necessary funding. The agency has also been abused by its overseers - the institutional equivalent of a battered child.
One might think that this owes something to the competence and professionalism of the Secret Service, the agency we depend on to protect our leaders.
And yet, since Reagan’s close brush with a deranged gunman in 1981, no American president has been caught in the cross hairs of an assassin. Kennedy in the 1970s and ’80s, the near-fatal shootings of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. In the 1960s came the slayings of John F. The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service By Carol LeonnigĪnyone of a certain age can remember when assassination was a tragic fact of American political life.