THE SECRET SERVICE

A researcher of major US assassinations and consultant on political violence thoroughly traces the history of the Secret Service and its seemingly incongruous dual missions.

Particularly since the Kennedy assassination, the Secret Service has been fixed in the public eye for what it didn’t do that day—protect the country’s Chief Executive. But the agency was originally formed under the Treasury Department solely to combat the rampant counterfeiting that, by the end of the Civil War, had flooded the country with bogus currency. Some 30 years later, in 1894, a request direct from Mrs. Grover Cleveland, who had heard rumors of a plot against her husband, resulted in three agents being posted to the Cleveland summer home (illegally, since Congress was never advised). For the next half-century, the “protectee” segment of the Secret Service mission gradually evolved from ad hoc to official (under the Truman administration). In mining the relationship between the agency and presidential families it has served, Melanson provides some fascinating insights. Exasperated by Eleanor Roosevelt’s disdain for personal protection, for example, agents offered to provide her with her own gun and train her to use it if she would constantly carry it, in return for which they would leave her alone. She agreed, then put the gun in a dresser drawer; the agency, in turn, tracked her clandestinely everywhere she went. There are others: Kennedy’s fatalism, Nixon’s fixations—he spent more on “improving security” (including landscaping) at San Clemente than the original property cost him—and Clinton’s charging into an adoring crowd with agents desperately hanging on by his belt. Now, however, with terrorist technology ratcheting up the threats against a growing list of protectees, the Secret Service’s “mission impossible” often burns out its best and bravest.

Somewhat plodding, but with gems along the path.