Book Review: Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

If I asked you what the most impenetrable “house” in not just the United States is, but likely the world, your first thought might be the White House. And you may also believe that’s because of the most elite protective service in the world, the Secret Service. But all of that is more protected veneer than it is reality. As Carol Leonnig demonstrates in her exhaustively researched, fascinating, and heartbreaking even, 2021 book, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, the real secret behind the service is how much it’s been limping along, cobbled together by sheer force of will, sweat, and luck through much of the last 30-some years. Leonnig, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Washington Post, interviewed 180 people for this book, including former agents and leaders of the Secret Service across eight presidential administrations, to craft her book. She started reporting on the Secret Service after the seemingly splashy tabloid story dubbed “hookergate,” and would go on to uncover just how many systemic issues plagued the Secret Service. What happened in Cartagena, Colombia in 2012 was only the most recent at the time public-facing example of it.

Indeed, the Secret Service, a 160 year old institution in the United States (that’s nearly 64 percent of our country’s history!), is in a lot of trouble, and those issues are longstanding, systemic, and being exacerbated by yet another Trump administration. From a macro level, the Secret Service is an insular, nearly impenetrable culture, although Leonnig’s reporting suggested she did an enviable job of penetrating it. It is a culture unwilling, perhaps even incapable, of accepting strategic change. Presidents also often lack the foresight to put in place Secret Service Directors supportive of such strategic change, instead favoring ones who make them feel good and they get along with. Mission creep over the years has also assailed the Secret Service, with an unsustainable mandate of protection stretching the ability to maintain “zero fail.” Worse still, the Secret Service has been tested on its ardent apolitical posture unlike any time in its history, save perhaps only President Richard Nixon’s time in office, with the first and now second Trump terms. Pockets of smaller issues — symptoms themselves of the systemic issues — are also a pox on the Secret Service’s functioning and ability to carry out their mission effectively: outdated technology, necessary training simulations not occurring because the funding isn’t there, strained budgets, the old boys club ethos (if you’re not one of us who rose through the ranks, then we’ll sabotage your leadership), womanizing, alcohol abuse, lingering racism and sexism, and recruitment issues.

And that was all before Trump was nearly assassinated while on the campaign trail for the 2024 presidential election in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, and another person was dangerously close to him on his golf course in Florida on September 14, 2024. As Leonnig argued in the book, it is more by sheer luck and happenstance that a president (or candidate since protection detail didn’t exist at the time of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination as the presumptive Democratic nominee in 1968 for presidential candidates) hasn’t been killed on the Secret Service’s watch since President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Maybe at this point, everyone knows the original mandate of the Secret Service. It makes for a nice trivia question to ponder why the Secret Service for much of its history prior to 9/11 was housed under the Department of the Treasury. President Abraham Lincoln wanted a remedy for the problem of counterfeit U.S. currency during the Civil War. Incidentally, before the Secret Service could be established formally, he was assassinated in 1865. From then on, arguably, the Secret Service has faced mission creep, often in a hodgepodge, narrowminded way by Congress. Within years of its inception, the Secret Service was also tasked with going after the Ku Klux Klan, mail theft, and land fraud. By 1894, the Service began secretly protecting President Grover Cleveland. Before then, President James Garfield became the second president to be assassinated in 1881. In 1901, President William McKinley was the third president assassinated. Only then did the Secret Service’s mandate expand to include protecting the president. The reason it took Congress and the American public so long to support protection, and three dead presidents, is because they regarded the idea of a president receiving protection in such a manner to be gaudy, something redolent of a king. However, it’s obviously not sustainable to a functioning government to have its leader regularly assassinated, either. By protecting the president (and vice president), the Secret Service thus also took on a new ethos: protecting democracy.

Throughout Zero Fail, Leonnig elucidates the common tension between the Secret Service and those they are charged with protecting. That is, protection versus publicity, securing the safety of the president versus enabling the president to be political. Which itself, as Leonnig notes, is reflective of a tension that has existed in America since its founding: symbolism vs. security. Americans and their leaders tend to love the appearance of security, not so much the reality of what is necessary to manifest it. One agent Leonnig talked to put it even starker in reaction to White House officials worried about bad press. Essentially, they said, you’re worried about bad press; I’m worried about the stability of the world.

Zero Fail‘s story largely begins with JFK because arguably, the Secret Service has been in a slow-motion decline since then, but it’s worth pausing briefly, as Leonnig does, on President Harry Truman. In 1950, Puerto Rican pro-independence activists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, tried to broach Blair House, where guests of the president’s typically stay, to assassinate Truman. Truman was staying at Blair House due to renovations on the White House. Secret Service Agent Leslie Coffelt was able to shoot and kill Torresola rather heroically, given his injuries. Coffelt would die from those injuries becoming the first, and still only, Secret Service agent to die while protecting the president. Wikipedia suggests William Craig was the first Secret Service agent to die in the line of duty in 1902, when a trolly car rammed into President Theodore Roosevelt’s horse-drawn carriage. Whatever the case, that is a rather remarkable feat!

Let me go over the rundown from Leonnig of presidential protective services and related incidents and issues:

• When Kennedy came into office, the Secret Service had a $5 million budget and 300 agents. Today, their budget is $3.2 billion and they have 8,3000 agents (both are actually an increase since Leonnig’s reporting from a $2 billion budget and 7,000 agents). The vast majority of the money and manpower goes toward “protective operations,” i.e., protecting the president, vice president, their families, presidential candidates, other key leaders, etc. Like other presidents, Kennedy was macabre about death threats against him. I suppose in some sense you’d have to be if you’re in that position. He even joked to agents that they didn’t want him to die because then they’d have to deal with Lyndon Johnson as the president. Zero Fail gave ample reason for why I ought to be disgusted with JFK. He was unbelievably reckless. Yes, he was a womanizer who regularly cheated on his wife, which is awful enough, but to particularly do it while president and during the Cold War, no less, was such an abdication of his responsibility of and respect for the awesome power of the presidency. It also put the Secret Service in an awkward position of allowing unvetted and unscreened women into closed quarters with the president and/or whether to remain hush-hush about it (they ultimately would until an exposé, incidentally, in the 1990s). I also did not know that prior to his assassination, JFK and Jackie Kennedy had lost their son. Tragedy upon tragedy for Jackie. In hindsight — as Leonnig would quote former agents as saying, the Secret Service’s lessons are forged in blood — a major issue with trying to secure a motorcade route is that it’s virtually impossible to secure hundreds of buildings along the route. Also, an open-air Lincoln Continental limousine wasn’t ideal, either (fun fact since I’m from there: it was customized for the president in Cincinnati, Ohio). I’m being flippant, but it seems so obvious in hindsight! Additionally, a theme throughout presidential protective detail is that agents tasked with remaining highly vigilant are worked too hard and stretched too thin. One of the agents protecting JFK the day of the assassination had worked 23 hours and did the equivalent of jogging/running 10 miles the previous day. It would also come out later that a few of the agents — again, another running theme with the Secret Service — were up partying and drinking the night before the assassination. While yes, I also understand those agents should not have been partying and drinking the night before, I return to the open limo! And that those agents were in the car behind. What were they supposed to do exactly? Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t wag my finger at Johnson, the miserable bastard. After JFK is assassinated, he was sour because the Secret Service wasn’t paying much attention to him as the newly sworn-in president. JFK just died! It’s not about you yet. They’re trying to care for his body and its return to D.C. Consider this also. One of the most dramatic events in American history transpired, the assassination of a sitting U.S. president, and the Secret Service must keep going. They do not get a reprieve to “learn lessons” or pause to take a trauma break. They have a newly sworn-in president they must protect right now. That’s extraordinary.
• As mentioned, it was after RFK was assassinated in 1968 that President Johnson increased the Secret Service’s mandate to include protection of major presidential candidates. Even so, in 1972, Governor George Wallace of Alabama was running for the Democratic presidential ticket and was shot four times by Arthur Bremer. Wallace survived, but was paralyzed. Lessons forged in blood. His attempted assassination would make candidate protection better going forward. I also learned a new reason to dislike President Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the attempted assassination. He was worried how the assassination attempt would impact the election and nearly attempted to plant evidence that Bremer was a left-wing nut. He was so awful and craven. He looks like a choir boy by comparison to what ultimately came after him in Trump (twice!), but still.
• The only other item to say about Nixon is what I alluded to earlier. He managed to warp the protective detail around him into his image: paranoid and arrogant, which angered the VP protective detail because they treated them terribly.
• President Gerald Ford was shot at twice within a three-week span in 1975, both times by women, which itself is rather noteworthy. In the first attempt, Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf acted heroically by grabbing the gun from Lynette Fromme’s hands when it didn’t go off. If I recall correctly, it was those two incidents that caused the Secret Service to tighten up its rope line procedures.
• Leonnig said the seven years from Nixon resigning in 1974 to Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 were about “professionalizing the service” and rebuilding, particularly after the odiousness of Nixon. Unfortunately, three months later in March 1981, John Hinckley Jr., thinking he was going to impress Jodie Foster by assassinating a president (another fun, if dark, trivia question), shot and wounded Reagan. Additional people shot included James Brady, Reagan’s press secretary, causing a brain injury and ultimately his death in 2014, attributed to the shot; Tim McCarthy, a Secret Service agent; and Thomas Delahanty, a Metro D.C. cop. All, at least in the moment, miraculously survived. This despite Reagan losing half his blood because the bullet nicked his artery. The confusion after the shooting was remarkable to hear relayed by Leonnig. The attempted assassination happened so close to his vehicle. But also that, once they had secured Reagan in the vehicle after the shooting, they didn’t realize right away he had been shot. They were about to go to the White House! Again, lessons forged in blood. Thereafter, presidents would enter buildings through back entrances and such, have a protective tent I believe over them when exiting vehicles, and the door to the vehicle would be open for the president. The Secret Service, after much back-and-forth with White House aides, also implemented metal detectors for anyone at the same event as the president. Shortly after Reagan’s assassination attempt, one of the agents of the Secret Service did his own psychological study on the agents to better understand the workforce, which I found rather neat and long overdue.
• President George H.W. Bush seems to have been the most liked president in modern history by the Secret Service because of how reportedly kind he and his wife, First Lady Barbara Bush, were to the detail agents, offering cookies and mothering them essentially, which would provide fodder for the stark contrast Hillary Clinton struck as a First Lady in the two terms thereafter under President Bill Clinton. While the Secret Service made those aforementioned changes to their protective strategies, even going into the 1990s, Leonnig notes how their strategic philosophy remained sheer will and determination, sweat and muscles, to protect the president.
• Just as Zero Fail made me repulsed by JFK, I was perhaps even more repulsed by President Bill Clinton. Again, I knew he was a sleazy, womanizing cheater, likely credibly accused rapist, and of course, the situation with Monica Lewinsky overlaps both those areas. But when put into the context, as Leonnig does, with the Secret Service and protecting the president, which means protecting democracy, it’s all the more ghastly and galling that the most powerful man in the world would act in such a manner. Again, like JFK before him, Clinton put Secret Service agents in untenable situations of breaking their own security protocols for women around the president and needing to remain hush-hush about what they knew to be true. As a starting point, I tend to think anyone who runs for president has to be arrogant to some level; they are seeking unimaginable power after all. However, imagine the absolute arrogance it takes to run for president and remain a cheating sleazeball, and/or to win the presidency and remain a cheating sleazeball! It’s disturbing. On the Hillary Clinton part with some agents not liking her, I’m of two minds. I don’t have a hard time imagining people put off by Hillary’s two-facedness, i.e., being one way in public as a politician and being another way in private. But also, I imagine for the Secret Service agents who badmouthed her, they weren’t used to seeing a ’90s woman, quite frankly. That is, a woman who wasn’t interested in playing the dutiful, party-planning, cookie-baking First Lady role. Anyhow, there were a couple interesting issues that arose during Clinton’s presidency aside from him being a sex pest. Frank Corder flew a two-seat propeller plane toward the White House in 1994, crashing on the South Lawn and killing himself. The fact that he was able to even get through protected airspace and that close to the White House was jaw-dropping at the time. Thereafter, the Secret Service worked more closely with the Federal Aviation Administration, albeit, that wouldn’t suffice on 9/11. The Secret Service also tried a simulation with Delta forces afterwards to see if they could penetrate the White House. While the elite special forces didn’t succeed, it was feared that if they entered on a helicopter, they could have.
• Leonnig really brought you in as a reader (or listener in my case) with table-setting for the big moments of the book: the assassination of JFK, the attempted assassination of Reagan, and the morning of 9/11, as the three standout moments. Everyone recounts how beautiful and pristine that Tuesday morning was. Reflective of that was how the Secret Service was treating it as a low-level, routine day. The president would hit Sarasota, Florida to tout his No Child Left Behind Act at an elementary school, no muss, no fuss. The head of Bush’s security detail didn’t even go with him (which the agency is superstitious about since a similar situation happened with JFK). So, the White House, with the president gone, was as ho-hum as one could expect. Then, well, all hell broke loose. Something I didn’t know about that day was that the Secret Service knew from the FAA that two planes were off course, likely hijacked, and headed to Washington D.C. But because of a communication error, the message from the FAA didn’t go up the chain of command. That only made the evacuation from the White House all the more chaotic, including the absurdity of the Secret Service leadership ordering agents with guns to the roof to, what, shoot down a 757 barreling toward them at 500 miles per hour?! Admirably, though, other members of the Secret Service also stayed in positions within the White House where they would have been killed had the plane hit the White House instead of the Pentagon. Interestingly, Vice President Dick Cheney was at the White House at the time, but neither him nor his protective detail had access to the military-guarded bunker below the White House. They were not technically inside the safety of the bunker at the time the plane would have hit. Remarkable and a testament to the chaos and how flatfooted the Secret Service (along with everyone else) was caught on that day. Another remarkable fact, which serves as another touchpoint in the tension between protection and political perception, is that Bush remained in a fixed location for 30 minutes after the Secret Service knew the country was under attack. Obviously, typical Secret Service protocol would have been to get the president on the move and out of potential danger. To be fair, at least, I could understand the White House aides’ rationale that said to not whisk the president away in front of the children and scare them. Like every other facet of our government, society, and culture, 9/11 changed everything for the Secret Service and their protection protocols going forward as well. Interestingly, Leonnig didn’t have much more on Bush across his two terms after 9/11. I would only further note that Secret Service Agent Charles Baserap (I believe) brought a variety of potential security concerns with regards to protecting the White House forward to leadership. For example, not having newer agents guarding outside permitters. He was castigated instead (the old boy culture unwilling to change!), and yet, they would go on to implement some of those changes, anyhow. Gah. Like the agent I mentioned from 1981, Baserap also surveyed agents, about 1,300 of them in 2006, who agreed with his security concerns. Just before Baserap was set to reach a status that would have prevented him being fired without cause, the Secret Service fired him without cause. If that wasn’t bad enough, they then tried to sabotage his future job prospects. That whole episode did not reflect well on the Secret Service, to say the least. If the culture ought to be anything, it ought to be welcoming of security concerns.
• President Barack Obama was the most endangered president in history at a time when the Secret Service was weakening, Leonnig said. So inundated was Obama with threats, he received a protective detail from the Secret Service earlier than usual in May 2007, only four months after announcing his candidacy when he was still a rather fledgling candidate. The Service was paying $30,000 a day to protect him. In fact, Leonnig said the Secret Service paid $124 million to protect all major candidates in 2008, up from $71 million the prior election cycle. I would be interested to know what that figure was by the 2024 presidential election. Similarly, Michelle Obama as the First Lady needed more security measures than any prior First Lady in history. What was immediately startling about this section of Leonnig’s book was how even leadership at the Secret Service, like an assistant director, were sharing racist emails with each other. Throughout the book, there are incidents like that, or where sexually explicit emails are exchanged, and I kept thinking, who does any of that, but especially on a work email?! Nevertheless, Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, who served from 2006 to 2013, didn’t seem like a good director. He elevated people who themselves participated in wrongful conduct. For security incidents, in 2011, Oscar Ortega-Hernandez shot multiple times at the White House. The Secret Service’s reaction to and follow-up of the shooting was atrocious. The Secret Service was slow to react and initially thought the shooting was the result of gang activity nearby. It was only four days later that evidence of a shooting was discovered on the Truman Balcony. The Obamas’ child (and Michelle’s mother, too), Sasha, was at the residence, and Malia was on her way home when the shooting occurred. To say Michelle was apoplectic, rightfully so, is an understatement. Leonnig could have done an entire book on the aforementioned Cartagena scandal involving the Secret Service that broke in 2012. It is beyond belief how poorly the Secret Service conducted themselves, and longtime agents at that. One agent, David Cheney, wanted to be different from his dad who put the agency and status above his family. Instead, Cheney was one of the agents “partaking” in the Cartagena prostitutes. To Cheney’s credit, I suppose, he at least confessed to his wife and then took early retirement. I was rather impressed and surprised by how fast the incident involving so many agents (and military) and prostitutes moved up diplomatic channels from hotel security to Colombia officials to the U.S. embassy in Colombia. To state what may not be obvious about why what the Secret Service agents did was so scandalous, it’s primarily two-fold: a.) President Obama was coming in the next day, and agents should be in, uh, good condition, upon his arrival; and b.) those “prostitutes” could have been foreign nationals and thus, a security risk in a multitude of ways. All of this was occurring under Secret Service Director Julia Pierson, the first female director in the Service’s history. But I attribute this issue and what was still to come with Sullivan, additional prior directors, and a culture unwilling to change its ways. It was maddening to hear how the Secret Service kept getting in their own way. Obama was also pissed off about it, and told Pierson the Secret Service needed more women to fix the “rowdy boys club.” She said she was trying. Alas, in 2014, Secret Service agents caused a drunk driving crashes. In one of the most extraordinary stories of the entire book, which again has assassinations, assassination attempts, and 9/11 in it, was Omar Gonzalez’s intrusion into the White House. Yes, intrusion. Gonzalez, an Iraq War veteran with a limp and crocs on, managed in 29 seconds to go from a public sidewalk to inside the White House, evading eight trained security professionals and 159 others who were on the White House grounds at the time. For context, President Obama had just lifted off from Marine One only three minutes before Gonzales made the jump over the fence. Leonnig gives a rundown of all the ways in which Secret Service security collapsed in a comedy of errors. First, when Gonzales jumped the fence, communications failed to properly alert other agents. Second, the emergency speakers didn’t work. Third, every agent, including the Emergency Response Team, expected the dogs to get him, as the dogs tended to be “unleashed” on fence jumpers (which incidentally, a number of jumps had occurred a few times prior and was considered largely harmless and the jumpers easily catchable). Four, the dog was late because his handler was taking a personal call. Five, nobody blocked his path and entrance into the White House (the agent was taking up a protective stance elsewhere). Six, the agents inside the White House didn’t know Gonzales had made it that far and a box of some sort that would have alerted them didn’t work as intended. Seven, the agent directly inside where Gonzales was set to enter didn’t lock the doors. Eight, and perhaps most incredibly, even after Gonzales made it inside the White House, ERT didn’t follow him inside, as they expected the Counter Assault Team, or the tactical unit tasked with going after any threat to the president and neutralizing it, to since they handled issues inside the White House. Nine, the presidential detail agents didn’t know about the intruder because they use a different line of communication than the traffic-heavy White House traffic line. Still, it was one of the agents on that detail who helped arrest Gonzales after a different officer tackled him. When Pierson came on the scene obviously aghast, a sergeant for her either lied to her or was misinformed when he told her Gonzales wasn’t armed. Gonzales had a knife. The comedy of errors for the Secret Service continued when Congress and the media found out that President Obama was in an elevator with an armed guard who hadn’t been properly vetted while visiting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia later in 2014. Unfortunately, Pierson was forced out, but I think her, like another director to come, was sabotaged by her own assistant directors, leadership, and the “rowdy boys club.” Don’t worry, though, the Secret Service wasn’t done messing up. After the retirement party of an agent, two other agents, including a supervisor, drove drunk, didn’t hear communication about a suspicious package on the White House grounds that had closed that area, ignored warnings from the agents upon arriving at the scene, ignored the cones/barrels closing off that area, and literally drove within feet of the suspicious package. Director Joseph Clancy, appointed by Obama after Pierson’s exit, seemed willfully ignorant about the problems continually plaguing the Secret Service.
• What more can I say about President Trump at this point? A lot, as it turns out, because whether it’s past actions during his first time Leonnig covers or what is currently happening under his second administration, it is infuriating and an afront to everything I have ever believed. The moment Trump descended that escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential ticket, he’s encouraged political violence. He told his supporters at numerous rallies he would pay their legal bills if they beat the hell out of protestors. This, obviously, made the Secret Service’s job more difficult dealing with such volatile environments. Admittedly, when you’re talking about a federal budget in 2017, when Trump came into office, of $4.1 trillion (not so fun fact: in 2024, it was up to $6.75 trillion), a few million dollars seems like peanuts. But what aggravates me about Trump’s fleecing of taxpayers when it came to his Secret Service protection in his first term, as Leonnig explains, and surely is occurring again under his second term, is how much of that fleecing goes back into his own pocket through the Trump Organization since often the Secret Service is having to pay to set up protection at Trump Tower in NYC, his various golf courses, like in New Jersey, and at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. Plus, you know, he considers himself a billionaire, and taxpayers are footing millions of dollars for all of his golf trips and again, also just paying him directly to do so. Trump also argued before the campaign that he would always be working and not have time to golf and railed against Obama’s golfing and the expenditures therein. He lied, as always. Anyhow, Leonnig said the Secret Service had to guard 18 members of Trump’s family, from his sons and daughters to grandchildren. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were doing extensive traveling under the auspices of the Trump Organization. The Secret Service was stretched thin, both with manpower and the money needed to protect all these people and the frequent back-and-forth golf trips. Protecting Trump Tower in NYC was $28.3 million a year alone, just from the Secret Service side of things, and mind you, Trump was rarely going to Trump Tower, but since it was his “residence,” the Secret Service had to protect it. Trump, as always, didn’t care. Back on security incidents, Jonathan Tran was another White House fence jumper in 2017, who somehow was on the grounds for 17 minutes, evaded 15 security guards and crossed 200 yards. Finally, apiece with Trump encouraging political violence is that Trump is a bully, who despite being what he is, aesthetically, makes fun of how other people look and their fitness (he didn’t want “fat” agents protecting him). If they don’t “look the part” to him, they are derided. He derided Secret Service Director Randolph Alles for his “Dumbo ears,” for example. He didn’t like that Alles was advocating in the media for his agents who needed their overtime pay and more help to protect Trump and all of his family and properties. Notably, some in the Secret Service didn’t like Trump’s tough talk after the George Floyd protests in 2020 since it made the Secret Service out to be his “brown shirts.” Still, where Trump is like Nixon, but worse, is how many Secret Service agents were all-in on MAGA, to the point of believing Trump’s lies about the results of the 2020 presidential election. Worse still, even after January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists ransacked the United States Capitol, putting in danger their fellow brother and sister agents protecting Vice President Mike Pence, a contingent of Secret Service agents believed the insurrectionists to be “patriots.” Disgusting and repulsive, not to say also alarming and dangerous. I learned for the first time that Biden didn’t immediately get the full protective detail a president-elect is afforded because Trump was disputing the results and for some reason, the Secret Service was dragging its feet. I will never understand how we, as a country, arrived at a place in 2021 to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power for the first time for that guy of all people..
• President Joe Biden’s White House aides were concerned about members of the Secret Service who were all-in on Trump. They rightfully replaced the entire presidential protective detail upon Biden assuming office.

One other theme throughout Leonnig’s rundown of various presidents from JFK to Reagan to Clinton to Trump is how presidents and their aides and advisors bemoan the routine change needed to be protected by the Secret Service. You wanted this! You sought this job! You knew exactly what it entailed. And again, while the Secret Service is protecting the president, the mission is ultimately protecting that office and what it represents for democracy. But also, it befuddles me that people seek this office and then hate being at the White House! I understand anyone, including the president, is going to take vacations. However, be a good steward of taxpayer money and Secret Service manpower and try to stay at the White House a lot more often. Considerably more often, in fact. Leonnig said travel was one of the big changes for the Secret Service when JFK became president, as they were used to President Dwight Eisenhower and President Truman remaining at the White House for weeks at a time. That seems imaginable in our modern age! Keeping the president at the “crown,” as the Secret Service calls the White House, is more fiscally prudent and safe.

Where I have respect for the Secret Service is the impossible task before them (and of course, their willingness to put themselves in harm way, if necessary). They have to remain vigilant and protective for hundreds of hours at a time, all the time, and 30 seconds, or even less, could change everything. Indeed, could change the world and history as we know it. Add to that reality all the aforementioned issues discussed, from outdated technology to being spread too thin to stepping over the line politically, and any reasonable America has to be concerned about the Secret Service and what their weaknesses ultimately represent: a danger to democracy. As the book title indicates, the Secret Service cannot afford to fail. We as a country cannot afford to let the Secret Service fail. Yet, we just expect them to keep going along, with a decades-outdated “sweat and muscles” philosophy to protect our leaders and our democracy. We’re doing the Secret Service a disservice.

Leonnig, however, did all Americans a service with this impressive, endlessly enthralling deep dive into an agency she clearly respects and admires, but rightly feels has many gaping wounds that need to be addressed. It is only luck and happenstance that has prevented the next pivot into the annals of history. That is not a strategy. That is not security. And unfortunately, it’s a rather open secret at this point, thanks to Leonnig’s reporting. Therein is where I find Leonnig’s book heartbreaking. Letting it be this way is a choice, a choice Americans continue to make through our representatives and leaders at our democracy’s peril.