The Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency - Softcover

Melanson Ph.D., Philip H.; Stevens, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786712511 ISBN 13: 9780786712519

Publisher: Basic Books, 2003

Synopsis

Explosive and revealing, this history of a highly visible yet traditionally tight-lipped federal agency by Philip Melanson, acclaimed scholar of political violence and governmental secrecy, explores the long-hidden workings of the Secret Service since its inception in 1865. Rigorous research, photographs, and extensive interviews with former White House staffers, retired agents, Service training dropouts, and the first female agent on presidential detail uncover little-known, frequently astonishing facts about the Service’s role in traumatic national events of the past century, notably among them the assassination of JFK and the shooting of President Reagan. Included, too, are revelations about presidential demands on the agency; alcoholism, divorce, and burnout among agents; the Service’s inexplicable failure to develop profiles of potential assassins; and its institutionalization of the gender gap. Assailing the public image of the Secret Service as a highly professional apolitical organization, Melanson examines the often-detrimental influence that politics privately exerts on the agency, epitomized by Kenneth Starr’s efforts to use agents’ testimony against President Clinton in the impeachment hearings. Nor does Melanson overlook the profound new challenge facing the Secret Service, now a branch of the Homeland Security Department, in a post-9/11 world where brazen new assassination methods and terrorist plots proliferate.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

This comprehensive, sometimes critical and often dry history explains how the Secret Service grew out of the Treasury Department in 1865, with the original mission of protecting American currency against counterfeiters. Melanson, an expert on political violence and government secrecy, and Stevens (The Voyage of the Catalpa) show how, late in the century, the Service gradually (and initially without congressional authorization) expanded its mission into presidential protection. Opponents of the expansion thought assigning a guard to the president would give him the trappings of monarchy, making him less accessible to the people. The most compelling chapter examines the failure that continues to haunt the agency: the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. The authors analyze what went wrong in Dallas: Kennedy's limo driver reacted too slowly to the first bullet, failing to take evasive driving action so as to avoid the second, fatal shot. Moreover, according to the authors, Kennedy's death was a failure of intelligence-sharing between the Secret Service and the FBI. Following the assassination, the authors argue, the agency "began a pattern of lies about its fatal missteps in Dallas." All aspects of the agency's work are covered extensively: recruiting, training, intelligence gathering, the often-tense relationship between the agency and the people it tries to protect. President Johnson, in particular, rebelled against Secret Service restrictions, once literally pissing on an agent. This is a worthwhile book for assassination buffs and those with an interest in the inner workings of government.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Initially created to combat counterfeiters of U.S. currency, the Secret Service is far better known for protecting presidents. This latter task, as Melanson and Stevens note in their informative history of the organization, was not technically legal until 1951, when Congress authorized it following the foiled assassination attempt on Harry Truman the previous year. The expansion of the Secret Service since then, combined with the increase in threats and actual attacks on presidents and presidential candidates, supplies the book's grist. In search of lapses by the Secret Service, the authors make reasonable critiques of poor protection of John Kennedy and then proceed to score the service for its failure to protect George Wallace in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1981. They then turn to the topic of safeguarding the White House and to the recruitment and training of agents, and maintain a balanced tone in discussing the personal relations between agents and their presidents. Occasionally speculative, the authors generally seem fair-minded, earning their work a solid recommendation for the law-enforcement shelf. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0786712511
• ISBN 13: 9780786712519
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384