[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 the silly and
serious sides to a lifelong Secret Service detail.
I imagine
everybody is aware of the Secret Service’s primary responsibility, protecting
the president and his or her administration; and thanks to the increased media attention
received by presidential families and children, both
in reality and in pop culture texts like the Katie Holmes film First Daughter (2004), we likely all
also recognize the inevitable presence of Secret Service agents in the lives of
these individuals. What we perhaps don’t always remember, however, is that many
such Secret Service details don’t expire with a term of office—that for former
presidents and their immediate family members (particularly their spouses, but
also for children through the age of 16), the Secret
Service will often be a lifelong part of their worlds, indeed one of the
most constant such presences across all the stages of the presidency and its
aftermath.
This lifelong
Secret Service presence was the subject of a comic film released only a year
after Clint Eastwood’s In the Line of
Fire: Guarding Tess
(1994), which starred Shirley
MacLaine as a president’s headstrong widow and Nicolas Cage as the eternally
frustrated Secret Service agent in charge of her detail. Although the film
culminates [SPOILER ALERT once more!] in an unexpected and very serious crisis,
the kidnapping of MacLaine’s Tess, it plays as a whole (as reflected in MacLaine’s Golded Globe win
for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical) as a light-hearted, comic examination of
the challenges that come with such lifelong Secret Service protection. Cage
wasn’t quite in the prime of his mega-acting
heyday yet, although it was only a couple years away; but the film’s
central motif in any case was a series of explosive, funny confrontations
between these two powerhouse performers and their equally stubborn characters
(a motif that continues even after the kidnapping crisis and into
the film’s concluding scene).
Yet if Guarding Tess mostly represents the
silly side of the reality and effects of a lifelong Secret Service detail, it
also helps us consider that issue in more serious ways as well. I know it’s not
easy to work up much sympathy for those who have had the opportunity to serve
in one of the most powerful positions in the world, and/or for those in their
families who got to go along for that ride. And as both
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have amply demonstrated, there are great
opportunities for former presidents to continue to make their mark in the
world. But at the same time, those opportunities, like Shirley MacLaine’s
frustrations in Tess, reflect the
fundamental reality that a former president and his or her spouse will never be
anything close to private citizens, that these figures will live lives that require
permanent Secret Service details. For a president and spouse as young as Barack
and Michelle Obama (he will turn 54 this August and she recently turned 51),
that means the likelihood of three or more decades accompanied by the Secret Service,
a prospect that, as Shirley and Nicolas can help us understand, isn’t exactly a
barrel of laughs.
Last story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Secret Service connections you’d highlight?
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