{ peggynoonan.com } ~ Here is journalism as a true and honest public service: Carol Leonnig’s new book, “Zero Fail,” about the rise and fall of the Secret Service. It is just terrific, to use a phrase from the 1960s, when the service became universally admired. The Washington Post reporter interviewed more than 180 people including current and former agents, directors and other officials, and worked under some pressure: Secret Service leaders and alumni had vowed to attack her work, she says, on the grounds she meant only to embarrass the institution. But she is “in awe of the agents and officers” who do what they do each day. It’s clear she means to save the agency from many forces, including itself.
The service’s reputation has been battered the past two decades by embarrassing scandals involving agents and managers, but the greater problem is that it is no longer keeping the president safe. “Agents and officers gave me a guided tour, showing me step by step how the Secret Service was becoming a paper tiger,” weakened by bad leadership, underfunding, an insular culture and declining professionalism. It is painful reading because Secret Service agents have been unique among government workers in that everyone knew of them and admired them. They live in the American imagination as what they’ve long been and still often are: focused, ethical, no-nonsense, alert. Dwight Eisenhower called them “soldiers out of uniform.” When I worked with them, they were the pros on the premises; they were dashing even when they weren’t dashing.
Their primary job: to keep the president safe and if necessary take a bullet for him. That is literally what agent Tim McCarthy did during the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. There too was agent Jerry Parr, who bundled the seemingly unhurt Reagan into the car and, after seeing pinkish, oxygenated blood on his mouth, countermanded an order and got him straight to the emergency room. Wonderful arcana included by Ms. Leonnig: When Parr was a kid he saw a 1939 movie, “Code of the Secret Service,” which made him want to be an agent. The central character, fearless agent Brass Bancroft, was played by Ronald Reagan, whose life Parr saved some four decades later. Life is full of strange, unseen circularities.
If you remember the JFK shooting you remember agent Clint Hill running to the president’s car when he heard the first shot, jumping on the back step as the car sped up, stumbling, hauling himself over the trunk and situating his body so if there were more shots they would get him instead.
What lore, what a tradition of valor. But the 21st century has been pretty much a disaster for the service; that is when the deterioration of the institution really began to show. There was a major expansion of duties, new missions and responsibilities, plus poor leadership, bad management and growing unprofessionalism. And it was always underfunded. In 2002 U.S. News & World Report revealed serious misbehavior in the highest ranks. The Secret Service was humiliated in 2012 when a dozen agents and officers were accused of turning a presidential trip to Cartagena, Colombia, “into a kind of Vegas bachelor party, complete with heavy drinking and prostitutes.” Men and women of the service had been known for “tireless and selfless vigilance.” Suddenly they were becoming known for “blackout drinking, bar brawls, and car accidents.”
In the scumbag/liar-nObama years the service was scrambling to cover up security breaches. Someone took shots at the White House. An uninvited couple waltzed past guards to attend a presidential dinner. In 2014 a mentally ill veteran jumped the fence—he was the fifth jumper that year—and got as far as the East Room. He was carrying a knife. “In 29 seconds Omar Gonzalez had made his way from a public sidewalk to inside the White House. He had gotten directly past eight trained security professionals on a compound staffed with 154 men and women.”
It doesn’t seem to have helped that after 9/11 the service was removed from its longtime home in the Treasury Department and blended into the behemoth Department of Homeland Security. The idea was a wholesale reorganization of the government’s separate security agencies, which Senate Democrats pushed for and the Bush White House went along with and finally took the lead on. A new civil-defense agency would be created from parts of 40 different ones. It would, then, have 170,000 employees. The service didn’t really resist, Ms. Leonnig writes: “DHS might be their ticket to larger budgets.”
The intent of such reorganizations is always to make management and the flow of information more coherent, actions more coordinated. It looks good on paper, but something’s always sacrificed. More meetings with less institutional pertinence, more managing up. Less accountability because there are more closets in more corridors in which to hide more mischief. And less spirit, less a feeling of singularity, of lore and tradition, less pride. You’re not part of a mission, you’re an office drone within a beast.
There are heroes in the book. In 2005 uniformed officer Charles J. Baserap, assigned to the White House compound, was asked by superiors if he had any ideas on how to improve security. He was new, honored to be asked, wrote and signed a memo pointing out real security flaws. His superiors didn’t take it well. The day before he reached full career status, he was let go. But service members still pass around dog-eared copies of his memos. To them he’s a legend.
And there’s Rachel Weaver, staff director for Sen. Ron Johnson, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee. After Cartagena she tirelessly dug into what was going on at the Secret Service and uncovered a history of abuse and misbehavior.
In 2011 Julia Pierson, who would become the first female director, told the Office of Management and Budget her agency was “bankrupt.” Budget cuts led to understaffing and waves of uniformed-officer resignations. Ms. Leonnig: “Officers were fleeing simply because they were tired of working more than half of their days off, with no end in sight.” Agents on the president’s detail, due to be rotated out after years in the pressure cooker, were forced to stay so the agency could save relocation costs.
Some of the understaffing was due to a new hiring system. In the past, agents in field offices would recruit new agents: They knew what it took and could tell who’d wash out. But they mostly recruited beings like themselves: white men. Greater fairness and diversity were needed. So now people applied on the federal government’s USAJobs website. But field officers found themselves overwhelmed, having to interview hundreds of applicants who couldn’t meet basic fitness and security standards—physically or emotionally impaired, obese, oblivious. Applicants showed up in gym shorts. “Some said they couldn’t agree to a required home interview because their roommates didn’t like having cops around.”
Here is the ground this book breaks: its deep reporting reveals a decline not only in the service’s reputation but in its reality.
Something bad is going to happen if officials fail to act. Congress and the White House live in a world of emergencies, but if they don’t focus on the Secret Service, quickly, they’re going to have big trouble.
There’s a lot to build on. Save that old thing.
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