The American psyche has taken a serious hit from the jaw-dropping Secret Service scandal that unfolded in the nation’s capital this week. Why? Because practically all of us, regardless of our backgrounds or our smoldering anger at political Washington’s ineptitude, believed in the myth of the agency’s invincibility. And the dismantlement of that myth has left us reeling far more than a typical, bureaucratic Washington mess.
The Secret Service agent has always had an iconic image. The dark shades. The earpiece. The sleeve-talking. The stoneface. Sworn to take a bullet for the president. And four of them have.
Who can forget Agent Tim McCarthy shielding Ronald Reagan in 1981, taking that third .22-caliber bullet meant for our president in his own gut? Jerry Parr, the agent who got Reagan into the limo and to the hospital that day, said he was seduced by the lore of the agency when he was a little kid and watched the 1939 movie “Code of the Secret Service,” which starred a young Ronald Reagan.
Secret Service agents are so cool, future presidents play them. Clint Eastwood personified the legend of the agency when he starred as a lone, faithful agent in his 1993 movie “In the Line of Fire.”
Movies and books always emphasize the patriotism and stoicism of agents. They are the very essence of what we are raised to respect in our country: Loyal, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, above any partisan political fray.
Secret Service agents are our contemporary cowboys.
You may think that image was pierced two years ago when some agents were caught after a drunken night carousing with prostitutes in Cartagena on the eve of President Barack Obama’s visit to Colombia. The frat boy behavior was repeated in spring in Amsterdam, where an agent was so drunk, he was found passed out on the hotel floor.
Heads rolled, for sure. But the disgraceful behavior may have actually reinforced the agency’s swashbuckling mystique. With the action movie version of the Secret Service still playing in our minds, we figured that if the president came under attack, these agents would leap out of bed, take a last belt of Scotch, wink at the woman and run the bad guys down, tuxedo shirttails flapping in the chase.
The reality, it turns out, is very different.
A troubled Army veteran who’s been living in his car jumps over the fence of the White House with a knife in his pocket and makes it past the guard, the dog, the sharpshooter, another guard, through the unlocked open door and pinballs around the executive mansion until he happens to run into the off-duty agent who tackles him.
Shots fired into the mansion not far from the president’s bedroom are discovered by the cleaning lady.
The Secret Service concluded those shots must’ve been between rival gangs near the White House. What? That statement alone shows a shocking lack of understanding of Washington. Any district beat cop, downtown worker or hot dog cart vendor could tell you Washington has “crews,” not gangs. And they aren’t shooting at each other from in between the tulips at Lafayette Square.
this past week about the security breaches surrounding the president almost sound like a Keystone Cops highlight reel, not a Clint Eastwood flick
The president and his family are supposed to be safe in these elite agents’ steel-reinforced hands. There’s a force field around the White House. Some kind of technology, right? Secret doors, lasers. Agents are hiding on the rooftops, in the trees.
Actually, the presidential detail was kind of a mess, short-staffed, with field agents being flown in from around the country to watch over the oft-threatened occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Whoa. Even Starbucks doesn’t rotate baristas between stores this blithely.
What we learned this week is that the president is way more vulnerable than we ever imagined and that a respected agency lied about that to us, to Congress and even to the Obamas.
There are hundreds of members of the Secret Service who work hard, who give up the entirety of their personal lives to do their duty and are ready to give their mortal lives, too. We know that.
But we will never look at them the same way again. Not even Clint Eastwood can give us back that illusion of invincibility.
