[In honor of the
150th anniversary of the Secret Service’s founding,
this week I’ll highlight a series of histories and stories related to that
unique department within our federal government. Leading up to a new Guest Post
on the organization this weekend!]
On an article
that raises a number of frustrating, vital questions.
At the end of
this week’s series, I’ll feature a post on the
recent scandals that have rocked the Secret Service and, it seems to me,
unmistakably shaken the public confidence in this shadowy but significant
government organization (at a time, as I’ll also discuss more in that Friday
post, when threats
against the president have reached an all-time high). Without downplaying
the seriousness of those scandals, however, it’s important to note that the
real 21st century difference might lie not so much in the presence
of such misbehavior among Secret Service agents, but rather in the more public
coverage of those activites by cable news networks, the internet, and all the
other media through which our 24/7 news cycle society operates.
For evidence
that the Secret Service has featured, and indeed been tragically affected by,
such issues for at least half a century (and likely throughout its history), I
turn to this
late 2014 Vanity Fair article on
the activites of the agents on JFK’s detail before and during his November,
1963 assassination. The article was excerpted from historian Susan Cheever’s
forthcoming Drinking
in America: Our Secret History (2015), and so focuses in particular on
the role that alcohol (and especially excessive drinking by a number of agents the
night before the assassination) may have played in the Secret Service agents’
inability to respond effectively or even adequately to the events as they
unfolded on November 22nd. But Cheever also nicely describes the
agency’s longer-term history, and more exactly the ways in which images of
Secret Service agents as seasoned, consummate professionals have often butted
up against realities of less professional behavior and activities.
I need to be
clear here: I’m not in any way blaming JFK’s assassination on the Secret
Service;
various conspiracy theories have done so over the years, and so it’s
important for me to make that distinction. It’s equally important not to
pretend that Secret Service agents are superheroes, rather than men and women
doing a demanding, always potentially life-threatening, and largely thankless
and unnoticed (until something goes wrong) job. Yet at the same time, there are
few individual moments in our nation’s history more striking, and with more of
immediate and destructive effects, than the assassination of a president; and
the Cheever article, like the many other studies and responses she cites, makes
plain that in this particular case the inactivity and missteps of multiple Secret
Service agents at best failed to prevent, and perhaps worsened, the horrific
events as they unfolded. As much as it might seem that the JFK assassination
has already been over-included in our collective memories, this seems like a
specific aspect of that tragedy which deserves the further attention and
analysis that Cheever nicely provides.
Next story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Secret Service connections you’d highlight?
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