[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 unanswered
questions, the timing of the agency’s founding, and historical frustrations.
I’ve blogged
before about the horrific, gradual, hard to quantify tragedy that followed a
much more overt tragic act, Abraham Lincoln’s April
14th, 1865 assassination. As I wrote in that prior post, it’s of
course impossible to know what a full Lincoln second term (and possibly beyond,
since this was pre-presidential term limits of course) might have meant, for
Reconstruction and the African American community and the post-war period and
so many other issues. But it’s also impossible for any historian or
AmericanStudier (or, y’know, thoughtful human) not to look at the presidency
of Andrew Johnson, certainly in the running for the worst
president in American history, and see as striking and frustrating a
contrast with his predecessor as it’s possible to be for two successive
presidents (and from the same administration no less).
The tragedy and
frustration of Lincoln’s assassination becomes even more aggravating when
linked to the founding of the Secret Service less than three months later, on
July 5th, 1865. It’s important to note, however, that it took nearly
three decades before the agency began guarding presidents: at first its job was
to suppress counterfeit currency, a rampant
problem during and in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War; gradually
the agency’s purview expanded to include “persons perpretrating frauds against
the government”; but it wasn’t until 1894
that Secret Service agents began protecting President Grover Cleveland in a
part-time role, and only in the aftermath of the 1901 assassination of
President William McKinley did Congress request that the
agency formally perform such protective duties. So any sense that the
Secret Service narrowly missed out on a chance to protect President Lincoln,
while great as historical melodrama, doesn’t hold up to the historical facts.
Yet even if the
nascent Secret Service wouldn’t necessarily have helped protect Lincoln from
John Wilkes Booth’s bullet, that’s not to say that we can’t be historically
frustrated that there wasn’t someone standing out the Ford’s Theater balcony to do just
that. For one thing, Lincoln had been the target of an assassination attempt (known
as the “Baltimore Plot”) before he was inaugurated in 1861; that plot had
been foiled thanks
to Pinkerton agents and a private detective named
Kate Warne, demonstrating the need for presidential protection to be sure.
And for another, even more salient thing, Lincoln did have one official bodyguard
on that April evening at the theater: a Washington
policeman named John Parker, part of a rotating four-person police detail protecting
the president. As that linked article notes, for reasons more likely of
dereliction of duty than participation in the assassination conspiracy Parker
seems to have abandoned his post at the worst possible time, a failure that
makes the inaction of JFK’s Secret Service detail seem far less dramatic in
comparison and that adds one more frustration to all the “what if’s”
surrounding Lincoln’s killing.
Next story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Secret Service connections you’d highlight?
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