Encore: Presidential Assassinations | Protecting POTUS (NEW) | 1
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Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's June 18th, 1964 in Washington, D.C.,

You're the head of the Secret Service, and today you're testifying before the Warren Commission, the panel created by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The agency you've served for 27 years has been criticized for not doing enough to protect President Kennedy that awful day in Dallas. You're hoping to use today's testimony to lobby for much-needed improvements to the service so you can rebuild the public's trust and your agents' morale.

But after an hour of questioning, it seems the commission is mostly interested in your agent's drinking the night before Kennedy's murder. The lead investigator, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, glowers at you through his wire-rimmed glasses.

Now, do you really expect us to believe that these men, drinking in beatnik joints into the early morning hours, were as alert the next day as they should be when charged with the tremendous responsibility of protecting the president? I do not condone the drinking, sir. But I think these men responded as well as anyone could under the circumstances. Don't you think they would have been a bit sharper that afternoon had they not been drinking the night before? Sir, I do not believe their reaction time was the deciding factor. They could not have done anything differently to prevent the tragedy.

I don't think these men should be blamed, and I don't want to stigmatize them for the rest of their lives. I'm confident that it won't happen again. Warren gives you a skeptical snort. Well, how can you be so sure? Have you learned anything from the events in Dallas on November 22nd?

Finally, these are questions you've been waiting to be asked. You sit up straighter and look the Chief Justice in the eye. Well, yes, sir, we have. In the wake of these tragic events, we've conducted a complete re-examination of the service. I've been working on a report with some recommendations. All right, so Chas? We need to hire more agents, for starters. I believe we should double the size of the President's full-time detail from 28 to 50.

Anything else? Yes, sir. We're also working with IBM and the Rand Corporation to use computers to analyze reported threats. And we intend to work more closely with other intelligence agencies. But we need Congress to approve the funds. You go on to explain that in your three decades with the service, you've seen your budgets depleted. You need better salaries, more modern equipment, and additional training. You're counting on your testimony today to prompt Congress to act.

Chief Justice Warren scribbles down some notes as you're talking, then sets down his pen. Well, I want to thank you and the members of your Secret Service for the cooperation you've given to this commission. You've all been very diligent, very helpful, and we appreciate it.

Well, thank you, sir, and know that this is just the beginning. We hope to improve. We'd appreciate this commission's support so that the president will be protected to the best of our abilities. You rise to leave the meeting chamber. You're the last of hundreds of witnesses, and the commission is set to release its findings in a couple of months, including recommendations for changes to the Secret Service.

But you're not waiting around for the commission's report. You've already drafted a list of improvements that you believe will make the Secret Service the most robust protective force in the world. Losing President Kennedy that day in Dallas was a traumatic blow to you and your agents. And you're determined to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.

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From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history. Your story.

In 1964, the head of the Secret Service, James Rowley, sat before the Warren Commission and asked for help. Rowley insisted that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was not the fault of his agents, but the inevitable result of poor resources and shrinking budgets. If the Secret Service was going to keep future presidents safe, it needed more support.

Rowley got what he asked for. Over the next few years, the Secret Service hired more than 200 additional agents, modernized its systems, and broke ground on a new training facility, which would eventually bear Rowley's name. When attempts to assassinate Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan failed, many saw it as proof that the Secret Service had learned from its mistakes.

No sitting president since Reagan has been injured by a would-be assassin. But the recent attempt on former President Trump's life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania has resurfaced questions about the ability of the Secret Service to ensure the safety of the people it protects. During this attack, a bullet grazed the former president's ear and one attendee was killed. Two other people were seriously injured and the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead on sight by the Secret Service.

But how Crooks was able to position himself on a rooftop so close to the rally stage and fire off eight rounds has put the Secret Service back in the hot seat, with many asking how could this have happened.

When this series first aired, we spoke with Carol Lennig, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post and author of Zero Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. We'll hear that interview shortly. But first, we reached out to Carol for her take on the most recent assassination attempt and where the Secret Service goes from here.

Carol Lennig, welcome back to American History Tellers. Thank you so much for having me. Now, last time we spoke, you gave us a breakdown of the history of the Secret Service and how that job evolved into protecting the president. Since then, though, we've had another assassination attempt, of course, on former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania in July. As someone who knows the history and covers this beat, what was your first reaction to hearing this news?

Well, I actually got a call from my editor that evening who said, basically, Trump's been shot. You know, we need your help. It was Saturday evening. I was immediately rushing to my laptop and scanning the videos of the event. Everything I could hear and see that had been taken by bystanders and also by police.

reporters on the scene in Butler, Pennsylvania for the former president's rally. And what stunned me was the kind of clear, clear sight in front of your face that there was such a huge roof and

less than 150 yards. I didn't know the distance at the time. I found that out later, but very obviously close to Donald Trump's stage and that it had not apparently been secured because a man with a weapon had been able to clamber on top of it and shoot at Trump's stage and injure and kill people in the audience. I thought that that was one of those obvious things the Secret Service, I know, prepares for at every stage.

You say you were stunned by what seemed like an obvious lapse in security.

What do you think this says about perhaps the current state of the Secret Service? One of the things that I documented in my book, Zero Fail, and in a series of investigative stories for The Washington Post, was that the Secret Service was always, in terms of resources and training, always under strain, but especially so during a campaign season. You know, the number of people that it is responsible for protecting has mushroomed over time, especially in the wake of 9-11 and the terror attacks that

of that year.

Presidents, their children, their grandchildren, the stepchildren of the vice president, the national security advisor, the secretary of homeland security, the chief of staff, and oftentimes the deputy chief of staff are all getting some version of 24-7 protection from the Secret Service. And that expansion puts the service at a huge disadvantage when it then has to follow a

and secure them on the road. It is not far from my memory that Bobby Kennedy was killed in a hotel kitchen while he was campaigning for president and was the presumed nominee for president at the time that an assassin

caught him with a bullet, and eventually he died from those wounds. So this is obviously a period of intense introspection and investigation into the Secret Service. What have your sources inside the service or retired service members said about this recent attempt on former President Trump's life? They were mortified because the service takes this line of sight issue, being able to protect your VIP, for lack of a better word, from

from a high building, high ground, the possibility of a gunman off in the distance that has a clear shot. This is something the Secret Service considers, you know, protection 101. And so they were mortified by the fact that that security issue had not been mitigated and addressed and locked down, that that roof somehow, somebody was able without any trouble, apparently, to get up there.

What I've also heard from them is that they were really quite disappointed and insulted in some instances. Even those who had been defenders of Director Cheadle, very upset by her handling of the event. That she kind of went into turtle mode and didn't want to discuss it with anybody, didn't send Secret Service messages.

senior executives to go to a press conference in the wake of the shooting to address people's questions. Of course, people had questions. President Trump was three quarters of an inch from being shot and possibly killed. And the fact that she didn't do that was very bothersome to them. They were also angered

by some of her claims that local police were supposed to be responsible for this outer perimeter where the roof was and where the building was. And while that's true, the Secret Service does make local police responsible for that outer perimeter at a rally. It is the Secret Service that ultimately tells them what to do and explains to them how to respond to a real threat.

Now, in the aftermath, Kimberly Cheadle has resigned and you covered this event. What do you think of the resignation? Was this her office's failure, a failure of lack of imagination, as the acting director has said?

Lack of imagination is a phrase that the Secret Service often uses in the wake of an attempted assassination or a huge security breach. It means, wow, why couldn't we think that that could have happened? Why did we not imagine that that big old roof was a risk?

Cheadle's resignation, I think, was a reflection of the fact that she struggled with an internal revolt among a group of agents who didn't want a female director or didn't like that she was promoting a lot of female agents. But she kind of lost any bipartisan support she could have clung on to when she refused to answer any questions, refused to acknowledge that it was the Secret Service's responsibility by pointing the finger at locals.

And people on the Hill just couldn't stomach that. But she was also losing her own defenders inside the agency. You described the tenor inside the service as one of internal revolt. Even though Cheadle has resigned, what do you think the morale is within the Secret Service now?

I'm told by my sources, there's a great deal of stress and strain, not just because it's a campaign season, but because there are limited numbers of people on core units that are responsible and have the high stakes job.

of protection at these events. People like counter snipers, people like counter assault agents. Counter snipers are the people, a very famous one, a legend inside the Secret Service is the person who took out that gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania with one shot once he finally saw and had a clear shot at him. Counter assault agents are the agents who rushed up to the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, two of them from the Secret Service in black tactical gear and with long guns,

and they faced not the former president, they pointed their guns at the crowd. Their job is to cover and evacuate Trump or a president if they're in a presidential event and make sure that any threat is engaged with so that in this case, Trump can quickly get away with his detail agents and safely so. Those tactical teams are on unbelievably straining schedules because there are just so many fewer of them than there were

five years ago. A lot of retirement, a lot of attrition, their numbers are down. And that kind of pressure, if you only have 35 counter-assault agents in the entire Secret Service, which is what my sources have told me, you don't have very many teams to send to protect the president while he's on his way to Texas, which he was that weekend, an event he later canceled. You

You don't have very many counter-assault teams to send to the RNC. And you don't have a lot of counter-assault teams to spare to go with Donald Trump to Butler, Pennsylvania, as he planned to go on that Saturday, or to Pittsburgh, as Jill Biden planned to go that same weekend. So it sounds like the Secret Service is facing a crisis of resources and a crisis of confidence.

How are they going to solve this in the short period of time where we know campaign events are just going to ramp up? I think what you're going to see, as you did after a series of very serious security lapses that I reported on in 2014 and 2015, one, when a jumper got all the way inside the White House and passed 100 different Secret Service personnel and security members who were supposed to guard that house, specifically

supposed to make it the most secure house in the world.

What happened after that is what is in progress now, which is that the Department of Homeland Security is pulling out all the stops of its own sort of sister agencies to ensure that the Secret Service has reinforcements, that they're bulking up on all sorts of protection teams, both tactical and basic, to make sure that Trump is safe, make sure that Harris is safe, make sure that Biden is safe.

Now, the investigation is ongoing, and we will learn a lot more about this incident. But I'm wondering what changes you think need to be made to prevent something like this from happening again. I'm a reporter, and I try not to tell the government what to do. I can tell you what I found in the course of my research 10 years ago, and which my sources tell me now is still the case.

The Secret Service is full of devoted patriots, people that give blood, sweat, and tears and give up a lot of personal time, personal life for their mission, for their duty, this feeling of duty to protecting the stability of our democracy. But there's only so much blood they can give, and there's only so many places they can be at the same time.

And they describe still a strained agency, a place where they're not sure that the government recognizes their service and their exhaustion.

And that president after president after president and Congress after Congress after Congress, in their view, has failed to give them what they need to do their job. Part of the challenge is that no president who relies upon this team to protect him and, more importantly, in the eyes of most presidents, his family,

No president wants to haul up the Secret Service and scold them or question their ability and usually does not get very firmly and directly in the face of the director and say, you guys need to fix this.

And a president needs to do that for the values that this service wants to hold itself to, the standard that this group wants to hold itself to. A president needs to take that seriously and recognize them not as a internal security team, but a crucial part of our government and, again, the stability of our democracy.

Well, Carol Lennig, thank you so much for giving us a breaking news update on what is usually a history show. Thanks for speaking with me today. My pleasure. That was Washington Post reporter Carol Lennig on the Secret Service's response to the assassination attempt on former President Trump. We'll now hear our original conversation about the evolution of the agency and Carol's book, Zero Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service.

So first off, I'm curious to know what led to your investigative reporting into the Secret Service. How did you convince people inside the agency to share so much about their day-to-day operations?

It's such a good question. It started like the way a lot of good reporting ends up beginning, which is almost by accident. There was an amazing, and at the time, what we thought was the most humiliating scandal the Secret Service had ever endured. It was a group of Secret Service agents protecting President Obama. They were shipped home unceremoniously and under investigation, leaving Cartagena in Colombia, being

Because while they were supposed to be protecting the president and getting the city and the hotel secured for his visit, they actually were getting hammered, drunk, and hiring prostitutes, cavorting in their hotel rooms with these strangers they'd never met before.

That was all in the hours before President Obama arrived in 2012, and I was asked to help a colleague figure out what in the world happened. In the course of that, I met a lot of Secret Service agents who felt that we weren't accurately describing what had happened. They wanted to get it correct. They wanted to help me get it right.

And we built a lot of trust. And what I learned in the course of those conversations was that they were worried about something even bigger than hookers and, you know, a boys gone wild weekend in South America. They were really worried that the Secret Service would

security bubble around the president was porous and broken. And they said it as plainly as this. They feared that President Obama would be killed on their watch. And that drew me into a whole other realm of reporting that was so much more interesting than the bumbling, humiliating sex scandal on a foreign trip. Now, on this series, we certainly are investigating the exact moments in which

Sometimes the Secret Service has failed in which the porosity of their protection is punctured or proven. The story of President Kennedy in particular was told just recently on our series. And that was a tragedy for the Secret Service agents involved and their director, James Rowley. How did they respond to what I guess is a failure of their mission?

It was a tragedy for the country, but the Secret Service, for them, it was a trauma like a war wound, a hair shirt that agents wore for decades. Agents became alcoholics who had been on JFK's detail that day. They committed suicide in the years after. This was a pain that went deep inside.

And the response of the director at the time, Director Rowley, was to immediately help investigators but help protect the agents from the incredible guilt they all felt and to try to lift that off their shoulders.

He had a good argument in his arsenal, and the argument was that for months and years before Kennedy was assassinated in broad daylight, he had been pleading for more resources, more detail agents to keep up with Kennedy's jet-setting lifestyle and incredibly ambitious schedule. And he'd been turned down over and over again by the White House, by Kennedy himself, and by Congress.

So he was on record saying that that bubble was under strain and could not keep up.

So in the wake of the assassination, he worked triple time to rebuild the agency almost from scratch and build into its protocols a routinized, professionalized way of creating a security net around the president. It wasn't easy. Kennedy, not only was his schedule a strain, but he liked to give his agents the slip of

He was often trying to rendezvous with various women on the road and didn't really want the Secret Service in tow all the time. Of course, his death changed everything, and...

really bore the brunt of that. They made some mistakes that day, some tragic mistakes, but they were also ill-prepared for really protecting him and creating, as you said, an unporous bubble around him. Well, you mentioned mistakes that were made that day. What were they in the luxury of hindsight? Well, one of the

the most significant mistakes that the Warren Commission identified and that the agents who I interviewed on Kennedy's detail, what they shared with me was that they never really created evidence

a way to assess the possibility of him being shot from a high-rise building, right? Today, the Secret Service focuses so intensely on the line of sight. What's the line of sight to the president on every stage, at every entry into a building, at every moment in which he's exposed to the public? There were, sadly, warnings. A white supremacist

in Florida was caught on tape talking to an informant about how there were plans to kill Kennedy and that one of the ways that was being considered was to shoot him from a high-rise building with a rifle and indeed

That was presaged weeks before he was killed. And the Secret Service did not handle that incoming intelligence and take action upon it. That's one. The second that's much more humiliating and painful for the agents that I interviewed, some of them literally broke into tears when we were talking. Many of them had been drinking the night before. As one agent told me, we went out to blow off some steam. We worked hard.

like the Dickens all day, every day, with no rest. So in Fort Worth, they were gathered at a speakeasy to try to get some food, but also they were drinking some clear liquor. And some of them were out until 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m.,

even though they were on the day shift to protect the president as his motorcade traveled through Dallas. So a president is assassinated, and some of the agents have been caught drinking the night before. How did Director Raleigh not be asked to resign? You know, when I think about Washington today, there is no way he would have survived. But he was assassinated.

record as having pled for resources, having warned that the president's life was, you know, he probably didn't say it this dramatically, but that the president's life was endangered by the threadbare nature of the Secret Service's security at that time. And Rowley had that argument with Congress. Look, I asked you to do something about this. You didn't.

He'd asked Lyndon Johnson, and Lyndon Johnson, now the president, also had not taken up or acted upon his pleas for help. Rowley also worked with the Warren Commission to a certain extent, while I think deftly trying to protect his team from being responsible for this American tragedy, for solely bearing that burden.

He said poignantly when asked over and over again by Justice Warren, the head of the commission, how can it be, I'm paraphrasing here, how can it be that a man who has been out all night and taking something to drink is

isn't impaired in some way, doesn't have slower reflexes the next morning. Rowley insisted in answer to Justice Warren, yes, there may have been slower reflexes, but they are not responsible for his death. That's

That is not the reason he died that day. And he had also a good argument there. A person with a rifle from a high building had a clear shot at the president. And if a few things had broken differently, Kennedy may not have suffered the third absolutely fatal shot to the left side of his brain. But we'll never know. Well, beyond the embarrassment and tragedy,

The Secret Service has a history itself. It started, not really, to protect the president. Can you remind us how the agency started and why? Yes. It began, ironically, the day that Abraham Lincoln was killed.

He was, along with his secretary of the Treasury, very agitated and concerned about the volume of counterfeit notes in circulation in the U.S. economy. There was an estimate at that time that as much as two-thirds of the paper notes that were being traded back and forth were fabrications by essentially counterfeit gangs.

And the goal was to create a special sort of revenue force, a special secret service that would break apart these gangs, capture the plates they were using to make fabricated bills, and stop the counterfeit trade. That was the goal. His secretary of treasury met with

Abraham Lincoln on the day he was killed before he went to the Ford Theater and posited this proposal that this special unit would be developed inside the Department of Treasury. And is the pursuit of counterfeiters still an aegis of the Secret Service? It is.

Protecting the U.S. currency and making sure that it is not fake continues to be one of the Secret Service's missions, even though they are not any longer a part of the Department of Treasury. After 9-11, they were placed under the huge new behemoth agency, the Department of Homeland Security. How did that transition manifest itself? Why did they look at a financial crimes unit to protect the president?

Presidents and their Oval Office administrations had resisted adopting a formalized security force. The idea was the White House is the people's house. The whole point of the American experiment was to break away from the royals and the trappings of kings. And a palace guard...

simply didn't look very good politically. That's why it was resisted year after year after year, despite the fact that two presidents were assassinated. When a third president was assassinated, McKinley, at close range in Buffalo, New York, lawmakers and White House aides acknowledged that they had to start protecting the president's life. Somebody did. And it had to be formalized and not just catch as catch can. ♪

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When President Johnson convened the Warren Commission to look into the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there were a number of takeaways directed at the Secret Service. What kind of reforms did the agency make after that assassination? They made a lot. I really do feel, and I say in the book Zero Fail, that Rowley, along with the help of particular lawmakers, rebuilt that agency from scratch. You know, they added people.

200 new agents. They developed a computer software system. You know, computers were very new at that time, but IBM, in working with them, they started thinking about

gathering and collecting and assessing intelligence about threats against the president rather than just putting them in a file, you know, an old box of index cards. They wanted to have a more robust way of assessing threats in different cities that the president might visit. They worked on routinized, instantaneous, reflexive protection of the president. It was called attack on the principal, and agents were trained in

In how to make split-second decisions whenever a threat arose, this really professionalized the business of a Secret Service agent. That may be the most significant event in the Secret Service's rebuilding in the wake of Kennedy's death.

Because now the Secret Service wasn't just relying on good policing and good experience of former veterans of wars. They were relying on training that was specific to covering and evacuating the president from danger. Did they also receive the resources that they required?

They did. In fact, what's, again, ironic is they received essentially what Rowley had asked for in 1963 before the assassination attempt. Let's move forward almost 20 years to March of 1981. This is the moment of the attempted assassination of then-President Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. in D.C. Can you remind us what happened that day?

You know, President Reagan had only been president for about six weeks, maybe seven. He had a detail leader who hadn't really spent any time with him. And Jerry Parr, that detail leader, decided, you know, I think today's the day I need to go and spend some time with the new boss.

And Reagan has a fairly mundane day planned. He's going to go speak to a union at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C., near DuPont Circle, a place the Secret Service has been in and out of hundreds of times. It's rainy and kind of warm that day. And Parr is thinking it might be a good idea for Reagan to wear his bulletproof vest, but he's resisted it in the past because it's so sweaty and hot.

So Parr doesn't push it. But on that day, three really tragic mistakes are made. One, as the president leaves the Capitol Hilton, the Washington Hilton, forgive me,

A man named John Hinckley is lingering around a group of camera reporters who are stationed outside the Hilton to catch footage of the new president. And that area that they are standing looks like a bunch of media, but it hasn't been screened by the Secret Service. So no one knows that a man who's not a reporter is standing amid these cameras standing

feet away from the president's limousine and that he has a gun. The second pretty terrible mistake that's made is that Hinckley has indicated previously his desire to kill a president, and the Secret Service doesn't put those two dots together. A third mistake that they make is as they bring

Reagan out of the Hilton, there is no cover in the line of sight. Remember, John F. Kennedy's death is blamed on a clear line of sight for a rifle to hit him from many, many, many yards away. And in this case, Hinckley is feet away. I mean, maybe 15 to 12 feet away when he is able to pull off six shots. And

And there is no break between the public area where he is now standing and the president of the United States. There are amazing successes, however, that day. We mentioned before the attack on the principal. Jerry Parr is well-trained in the attack on the principal. And what he does, the minute he hears a gunshot, he doesn't look around. He doesn't try to figure out who got hit.

He immediately leaps behind the president, whose shoulder he is on the left-hand shoulder of Reagan, and begins shoving him as hard as he can towards the open door of the waiting limousine. He slams the president so hard that Reagan believes his rib has been broken because he hits sort of that little hump in the back seat on the floor.

Parr lands on top of him, and Ray Shattuck, another detail leader behind him, shoves the door closed while pushing both of their legs upward in a cockamamie kind of angle just so he can shut the door. And another amazing agent,

throws his body. He's blocking, obviously, Reagan's one line of sight on one flank of Reagan. He throws his arms and chest open and faces the sound of the shots, which is facing Hinckley, and he takes a bullet in the stomach to try to shield the president who's behind him. The attack on the principal execution by all of these people is sort of gobsmacking because

There were only a few seconds for them to act, and everything they did saved the president's life.

And of course, President Reagan lives. Were the Secret Service agents in that moment really aware of how dangerous a situation it was that the president was injured? Jerry Parr also, based on the attack on the principal training and his own, what I'd call battlefield wound assessment, he begins looking the president up and down, feeling along the sides of him because...

Reagan is coughing a little and spitting up a little bit of pink, what appears to be pink oxygenated blood. And Parr initially says to the driver, who is an agent too, Drew Unruh, he says, get us to the White House right now.

Drew Unruh speeds off to the White House. Parr begins assessing what's wrong with Reagan. Why is he spitting up blood? Reagan doesn't think he's been shot. He thinks he's broken a rib. He says that to Jerry Parr. Parr is not convinced that there isn't something else lingering and wrong that he can't find.

And so then he makes a new assessment as the limousine is speeding, you know, 65 miles an hour through a downtown thoroughfare. He says, take us to George Washington Hospital. And off they go. And

And that is one of also the critical pivot moments that helped save Reagan's life. A doctor later tells the media, days later when Reagan has survived, that he did not believe Reagan would survive if he had gone to the White House first. Now, it's in this situation where Reagan is shot, it's blindingly obvious that the president is in danger. But I imagine that there are threats against every U.S. president every day, right?

How does the Secret Service vet them all and try to figure out which ones are real? I don't envy the Protective Intelligence Division, a unit of the Secret Service that is responsible for taking all this incoming. You know, the number of threats against presidents have increased.

so mushroomed. As you and your listeners probably know, the threats against President Barack Obama when he came into office, the first Black president, were so enormous that at least initially they were four times as high as the volume for the previous president, George Bush. And the

the service has the incredibly daunting task of running down each of those threats to assess, is this a drunk guy in a bar who mouthed off and doesn't mean anything? Or is this mentally unstable person radicalized in some way and plotting to take action? Do they have the intention? Do they have the means? And now we have to go interview them and find out. There are...

hundreds of interviews that Secret Service agents do in field offices all over the country, trying to run down that question. You've mentioned the history of distress of Secret Service agents and the difficulty of the job, not just in vetting the threats, but just the rigors of actually being a guard of the president. What is your sense, having talked to some of these agents, of what it is like to do the job of a Secret Service agent?

You know, some of my agent sources, former and current, have joked about how it would be hard to do a television series about their lives because it's a lot of waiting in stairwells for disaster. You know, there's a lot of waiting. There's a lot of sitting, standing, impossibly draining times where they must be on the lookout and on guard

on tenterhooks all the time, even when everything looks peaceable and dull.

And I think that's part of the incredible drain on the psyche of Secret Service agents. The agent who was in charge of advanced security in Dallas the day that Kennedy was killed has since died since I interviewed him. But he relayed to me that he felt as though his head was on a stick and that it was just swiveling all the time back and forth.

the tension of looking for the arm that's coming forward or the piece of metal or a flinty shadow in your peripheral vision, that this was one of the most stressful experiences, always being on the lookout for that which you don't know is coming. ♪

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We've been talking about assassination attempts, but of course, the Secret Service is also in charge of security of the White House grounds. And there have been several breaches, 2014 and another one in 2017, where persons got inside the White House. What happened in these incidents? And what does this tell you about the agency now, recently? Well,

Well, the incident in 2014 was heart-stopping for Secret Service agents and for members of the White House staff who likened it to having a home invasion, a burglary.

And I should stress that President Obama and Michelle Obama and the children were not at home at the time. President Obama had just lifted off from the South Lawn in his helicopter with his daughters heading to Camp David for the weekend. Michelle Obama was already there getting things ready. And so as that liftoff happens...

A disabled Iraq veteran with delusions and psychological struggles found a small area of the White House fence, which was not impenetrable and not impossible to jump. And he began loping around the

And he strode up through those hedges and strode right up onto the North Portico and waited for a second and then opened the door. And the next thing you know, he's in the middle of the forest.

The layers that are supposed to be duplicative layers of protection for the White House all failed. I remember interviewing a former Secret Service agent who'd been a very senior person who said, I just can't believe all the circles failed.

And the first one was when he got over the fence, there should have been a instantaneous alarm that told everybody on all the agents and officers on the grounds, we've got an intruder and a dog, a canine dog that was on the north grounds should have been released from a waiting van. And that dog would have brought that person to ground. And then agents and officers could have surrounded him and detained him.

But instead, the person in charge of the canine dog does not have his radio headset with him, his official one, and he's listening only with one ear because he's on the phone at the time with his wife. So he doesn't know what's happening, and he has not released the dog.

The officers who are on duty that are part of the emergency reaction force don't rush to intervene and stop the intruder because they believe, as one said later in testimony, where's the dog? Where's the dog? The dog should be here. And so they don't intervene, and that's how he makes it to the North Portico. Another officer who's just been chatting amiably with her friend outside says,

She doesn't know there's an intruder on the grounds because the White House has asked many of the officers of the Secret Service to turn down the alarm boxes at the doors because they're so loud. Whenever there's a fence jumper, it creates this noise.

intense radio sound that is annoying to the guests and to the staff, and it happens a lot. So they ask them to turn that down and that communication. So she does not know that a jumper has made it on the property. She doesn't properly lock the doors. When she finally sees her colleague outside drawing his gun and realizes there's something wrong, it's too late and she hasn't properly locked it. She tries but fails, and the intruder makes...

his way in. She reaches for her weapon, but he knocks her down and begins running inside the mansion, passing the landing of steps that lead to the president's home. If the president had been home, this intruder would have been a flight and a half away from the first family.

You mentioned it was in the Obama years at the beginning of this interview, the horrible embarrassment of the Cartagena, Colombia incident. And I think that speaks to perhaps a pervading culture in the Secret Service that is a bit of a boys club.

So I'm wondering, how has the Secret Service modernized or addressed this culture and especially able to address its ability to be more diverse with agents of color or women? Unfortunately, this is an agency of patriots, and I want to emphasize that so many of them risked their careers, their jobs, their comforts.

to reveal the weaknesses of the agency because they wanted it to be stronger. But there is a subset of the Secret Service that uses the title Secret Service and the national security mission of the agency to cover up not secure protocols, but to cover up their own misconduct and their security failures.

There's a culture of foreign trips, for example, in which agents are expected to work tirelessly. They give up their jobs.

They give up children's birthdays. They give up anniversaries to always be on the road, on this permanent watch, protecting democracy. And some have felt so abused, essentially, by this job that they began to look at foreign trips and some out-of-town trips as a little bit of a perk, a place to let their hair down, a place to party. And the

The Secret Service claimed, the leadership claimed to us, they'd never seen anything like what happened in Carnahania. But in my reporting, I found that it had happened multiple times and it had been covered up over and over again. Instead of consequences, there was a cover-up because the bosses didn't want this information out because it would only come, in their view, to tar them. So their desire for promotion and political support trumped expectations

actually fixing what was rotten and starting to rot more and more of the Secret Service. President Obama, in dealing with some of these eruptions, meets with the director of the Secret Service at the time, Julia Pearson, and in a hotel in Brussels where she is briefing him on the latest

cultural problem, a group of Secret Service agents getting slammed, hammered in the Hague, and one of them passing out drunk in the President's Hotel. She's explaining to him what happened and also what actions she has taken. And he says to her, you know, your problem is you don't have enough women in the Secret Service. She says, you know, I'm working on it.

But I don't think hiring women alone is the solution, but it is part of the solution. And it's not just women agents that the agency is struggling with. There is a lawsuit that has been brought against the agency in regards to agents of color, correct?

That's right. One of the most painful periods for the Secret Service in the late 90s is when a group of Black agents bring a lawsuit against their employer. Their argument is that they've been racially discriminated against, and they have some really good facts on their side. One of the agents is able to show all of the ways he scored higher than white agents, some of whom he had trained,

who then got the jobs he applied for. And this happened over and over again for many, many Black agents, female and male. Eventually, the Secret Service, stubbornly resisting for decades, settled this lawsuit under Barack Obama and Secretary of Homeland Security Jay Johnson, who said they did not want this suit to continue.

One of the most painful parts of that was the discovery in the lawsuit, which revealed that senior leaders in the Secret Service were fairly regularly making racist jokes with each other using their work email and work phones and dismissing and discarding the concerns of Black agents on a regular basis.

So for an agency with an over 150-year history, charged with the protection of the perhaps most important American alive, there's a lot of scandal, embarrassment, and tragedy. Based on your reporting, what do you think needs to be done to improve the agency in the future?

I'm disappointed to say, despite a blue-ribbon panel making so many solid, fact-based recommendations in the wake of the 2014 jumper getting inside the White House, and in the wake of me writing a X-hundred-page book outlining all the vulnerabilities and problems in the agency and what could be done to fix it, very few of those fixes have been implemented yet.

It is going to require a president sitting down and demanding that these changes and reforms take place. The Secret Service sources who spoke to me are begging for this help. They know that it is an extremely awkward situation for a president to toy and tinker and essentially criticize the unit that protects him and his family.

But they are pleading for a president to do that. They wanted Biden to do it. They wanted Trump to do it. And they wanted Obama to do it. They were on the road to that with President Obama's blue ribbon panel that he named to make those fixes. But it all got tossed out the window when Donald Trump became president. And they're...

very little of it has been revived under President Biden. I empathize with a president who's got a pandemic to deal with, an economy that's struggling, a host of other issues, including the rising threat of domestic extremism that's got to be tackled. But these public servants need resources. They need a culture that will be shook up

that there will be consequences for misconduct, and they need a leadership team that is going to reward meritocracy rather than loyalty and cover-up. Those are the critical features that

They do have to modernize dramatically their security net and apparatus. The 2017 break-in at the White House, a jumper who got to the East door and jiggled the door and was on the grounds for 17 minutes without being detected, revealed that the White House security system was almost like a late model car that was breaking down regularly. Alarms, sensors, radios, all of them failed in different ways and...

And that modernization will require resources, and a president has to get his shoulder behind that in order for Congress to agree. Well, Carol Lennig, thank you so much for joining me today on American History Tellers. Thank you for focusing on this subject.

That was my conversation with Carol Lennig. She is a three-time winner of the George Polk Award for Investigative Reporting and author of the New York Times bestseller, Zero Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. Her most recent book with co-author Philip Rucker is I Alone Can Fix It, Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year.

Next, on this season of American History Tellers. By the time James Garfield takes office in 1881, 16 years after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, little has been done to improve presidential security. And when a disturbed job seeker demands a position in Garfield's new administration and is rejected, he begins to stalk the president, determined to exact deadly revenge.

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American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Sound design by Derek Behrens. Additional writing by Neil Thompson. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker. Our interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni. Our producer is Alita Rozanski. Managing producer is Matt Gant. Senior managing producer is Tanja Thigpen. And our senior producer is Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis for Wondery.

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