After Julius Caesar was betrayed and stabbed to death, the Roman government’s answer was the Praetorian Guard, but it soon became far too powerful and a threat to Roman liberty. In 1998, Ken Starr said the Secret Service risked becoming a Praetorian Guard. History never ceases to be relevant.
Today’s Secret Service serves a constitutional, democratic, republican society. It serves—or at least is supposed to serve—the American people by protecting the person they’ve elected to the presidency. It is sworn to protect not a king who claims to hold a throne by divine right but an individual charged with leading a free society. The US Secret Service, therefore, evolved in a unique way, and its early history contains many instances of heroism but also some disturbing foreshadowing of the bureaucratic and organizational problems that hinder presidential protectors today.
Before America had a president, General George Washington formed his own Life Guard, almost immediately after accepting Congress’s request on June 15, 1775, to lead the Continental Army against the British in the fight for independence. The Life Guard was the forebear of today’s Secret Service’s Presidential Protection Division. But there were problems even in that early protection force—a member of the Life Guard was hanged for “mutiny, sedition, and treachery” on June 28, 1776, possibly due to involvement in a plot against Washington.
In 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, the Life Guard was disbanded. It was not even revived in 1789 when President Washington and his troops marched on Pennsylvania to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, thus setting an early precedent that presidents did not need special protection.
The United States’ first election and Washington’s presidency were both unprecedented achievements in human history. No longer led by a ruler claiming divine right, the constitutional framework of the United States might have made violent coups obsolete. No kings, no coups. And what need did the country have for cowardly assassinations, when many of its leaders could settle their differences legally with duels? But the new nation would soon learn the importance of security even for democratically elected chief executives.
In 1814, America was again at war with the British, and it was not going our way. British troops marched on the capital of the new nation, seeking to burn it to the ground. The local militia was mustered to protect First Lady Dolley Madison and the presidential mansion. The militia placed a cannon at the mansion’s north gate and camped out on the lawns. After the British defeated US troops at Bladensburg, Maryland, they continued on to Washington. Chaos gripped the capital city. First Lady Madison stood atop the White House roof looking through a spyglass and received instructions from her husband, President James Madison, to abandon the mansion.
She hurriedly collected the most important items to take with her. Her servants, both free and enslaved, bravely fulfilled her orders as the British closed in. The first lady escaped with silver and other important items, hidden among the horde of citizens fleeing the British. A courageous doorkeeper and gardener saved a famed portrait of George Washington. We know many of these details thanks to Paul Jennings, a former slave who wrote the first book about working in the White House, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, published in 1865. White House staff, servants, and laborers, including slaves, have proven their loyalty to every first family over the years. The force designated to protect the first lady fled; those men and women were the last to leave.
On August 24 and 25, 1814, British troops ransacked and burned the mansion and all other government buildings. They added fuel to the fires for more than twenty-four hours. After two days, the capital city was returned to American rule by a hurricane and tornado known as “the storm that saved Washington.”
Over the next few decades, the country passed out of the “founding” era and came into its own. In 1835, Andrew Jackson’s administration saw the first recorded assassination attempt on a sitting president. A man broke from the crowd as Jackson was giving a speech, drew two pistols, and pulled the triggers. But the weapons misfired, and President Jackson, appalled at what he considered an assault on his honor as well as his body, beat the would-be assassin with his cane before the crowd joined in.
Around the same time, in nineteenth-century France, there was a man named Eugène François Vidocq, an enthusiastic and prolific criminal informant and spy for the French police. His methodology was summed up in his motto, “Set a rogue to catch a rogue.” He enjoyed his work so much that he even concocted grand criminal conspiracies just to solve them. Still, his methods inspired police worldwide. It was Vidocq who first coined the term “secret service,” which literally means to be in service to someone, but in secret.
Though that term was not yet in use in the United States, the beginnings of the Secret Service’s executive protection strategy of concentric protective layers emerged in the 1800s. Far exceeding a single layer of bodyguards, the strategy employed multiple protective layers. Like a Russian nesting doll, for an assassin to get to the centermost doll, he or she would first have to pull apart each outer layer. But each protective layer works in tandem so that if and when an assailant or assailants manage to slip past or fight through one layer of protection, they will be funneled to and caught in the next.
In 1842, Congress authorized the DC police to post a captain and three others as a permanent White House contingent to patrol and control access. Previously, local police had scheduled beat cops to patrol the area around the White House. Congressman John J. Crittenden warned that those three men “might eventually become a formidable army.” History, in some ways, has proven him correct. The police contingent at the White House grew steadily along with the DC metropolitan area. In 1853, an officer was assigned to be president Franklin Pierce’s permanent bodyguard.
The game changed significantly on April 12, 1861, when the first shots of what would become the Civil War were fired upon Fort Sumter, South Carolina. When Virginia seceded from the Union, Washington found itself across a river from enemy territory overnight.
The security of President Abraham Lincoln immediately became a priority for the country but not so much for the president. The White House was protected by the “Bucktail Brigade,” Company K of the 150th Pennsylvania regiment of volunteers, famous for their hats made from their native state’s white-tailed deer. At Lincoln’s request, however, they switched uniforms for civilian clothes because Lincoln did not want to cause a panic if the people thought that the White House had become an armed camp. Yet the presence of the regiment in itself was intended to discourage a direct assault.
The volunteers concealed their rifles at various posts for easy access (much as the Uniformed Division does today). The Bucktails were accompanied by an increase in Metropolitan Washington Police Force officers around the White House. Those forces were the precursors of the modern Uniformed Division of the Secret Service.
Another unit, the Union Light Guard, formally known as the Seventh Independent Company of Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, protected President Lincoln on his travels. The guards were the earliest precursor of Secret Service agents and the PPD. In Lincoln’s Body Guard: The Union Light Guard, one of its members, Robert W. McBride, wrote of the company members’ feeling an enormous guilt for protecting the president while other units fought and died in combat. This was especially apparent as they accompanied President Lincoln on tours of battlefields. There they felt the adrenaline rush that comes from being ready for imminent attack after long stretches of boredom while standing post at the White House—an experience no different from that of Secret Service agents, officers, and technicians today. There is a psychological burden associated with living one’s daily life in comfortable surroundings—a relative heaven—while standing ready to enter hell at a moment’s notice.
Even so, President Lincoln was largely defenseless from lone assassins or independent assassination teams. In at least two incidents snipers nearly killed him. In August 1864, while he was on a pleasure horseback ride, his hat was knocked off as a bullet passed clean through it; the president believed it was an unexplainable accident. Then, while observing the Battle of Fort Stevens, the surgeon accompanying Lincoln was shot by a sniper as the president approved shelling houses used by Confederate troops.
Plainclothes units formed during the Civil War became some of the first government outfits to refer to themselves as “secret services.” Brigadier General Lafayette C. Baker, a Union spymaster, ran the Domestic Secret Service out of the State Department under Secretary of State William Seward. After President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, a constitutional right requiring that an arrested person be taken before a judge or magistrate to be notified of the reason for arrest, Baker’s Secret Service imprisoned 38,000 people in internment camps with no right for them to see a judge or have a trial for years, on the premise that they had participated in “anti-war activities.”
Other forerunners of today’s Secret Service were found in the private sector but still served the government. Allan Pinkerton operated the Union Intelligence Service and National Detective Agency. Pinkerton was an expert detective and very successful spymaster. If he is considered the first unofficial chief of the Secret Service, the first unofficial black special agent would be John Scobell, hired in 1861; the first female Secret Service agent would be Kate Warne, hired in 1856; and the most famous unofficial female Secret Service operative would be Hattie Lawton, known by her aliases HLL or Hattie Lewis—all successful Pinkerton agents. Warne and Lewis pioneered Pinkerton’s Female Detective Bureau, formed in 1860, and were extremely successful assets in the Union’s Civil War victory. As part of the “Pinkerton Black Agents” and a “black dispatch,” Scobell carried out undercover missions in the deep South—under the guise of being a slave, even at times owned by Warne and Lewis—returning to Pinkerton with vital intelligence.
On one undercover mission to Baltimore, Kate Warne uncovered the “Baltimore Plot,” a plan to assassinate President-elect Lincoln while he was traveling to Washington for his first inauguration. Pinkerton headed the first president-elect detail, and President-elect Lincoln kept his travel schedule. Under Pinkerton’s command, the soon-to-be president traveled in disguise, then changed into normal clothes on arrival; the papers later accused him of cowardice for doing so. The agents carried multiple concealed pistols. Preceding modern Secret Service strategy by more than a century, Warne went ahead of the detail to sniff out “sleepers,” as Pinkerton called them. Through their concentric and comprehensive protection, far more than a due-diligence bodyguard, President Lincoln lived to be inaugurated.
But even at that early stage, bureaucratic squabbles emerged. General Baker and Allan Pinkerton each claimed to be the real head of Lincoln’s Secret Service and refused to work together. On various occasions they even arrested each other’s operatives. Following the war’s end on April 9, 1865, Baker was put on trial for domestic war crimes and found guilty. He was fined one dollar. Meanwhile, Pinkerton continued the Pinkerton National Detective Agency after the Union Intelligence Service dissolved. Congress and President Lincoln left a void by not specifically delegating new responsibilities, such as fugitive hunting, investigation of land and bank fraud, and investigation of interstate white-collar crimes to existing law enforcement agencies. The existing agencies were unsure of how to operate beyond state lines. Banks, railroads, and other interstate businesses hired their own forces, often Pinkerton’s, to shut down criminals (and strikers).
President Lincoln and Congress were responsible for the creation of a new division within the Treasury Department under a one-year congressional appropriation. It was called the Secret Service Division (SSD). Its sole mission was to rein in the out-of-control currency issues that threatened the nation’s economy during the period following the Civil War. Presidential protection was not yet part of its mission, but it would soon be made tragically clear how important that mission was.
On April 14, 1865, five days after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, President Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln attended a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. On his travels, President Lincoln was without Union Light Guard, Pinkerton’s, or General Baker’s men. The concentric-circles strategy was gone, and the president thought that some local detectives would be sufficient bodyguards. His White House protection detail had been reduced to just three detectives.
During the officers’ search of the theater’s balcony, they failed to notice the measures the assassin had set up; he had drilled a peephole, disabled a lock, and fabricated a hidden lock to barricade the door. One of Lincoln’s protectors left the theater to drink at a nearby bar. The assassin, a well-known actor and outspoken anti-Lincoln zealot named John Wilkes Booth, eyed the president through the peephole. He schmoozed his way past an usher into the darkened balcony box. Once inside, he barricaded the door. He then turned and fired a .44-caliber ball into the president’s skull, then slashed an army major accompanying the Lincolns with a long knife. Booth then leaped from the box down onto the stage and escaped. Simultaneously, another member of the actor’s cabal attacked Secretary of State Seward, stabbing him multiple times as he rested in bed in his home across the street from the White House. The attacker inflicted horrific knife wounds but fled following a struggle as Seward’s two sons and a soldier stationed at the house saved the cabinet member’s life.
Baker dispatched agents to hunt down the cabal. Booth was eventually shot to death at a farm in Maryland; four other conspirators were tried and hanged. Baker personally accompanied agents to protect the new president, Andrew Johnson.
Baker and his men soon found themselves at odds with the sleazy pardon brokers who visited President Johnson night and day. After Baker removed Lucy Cobb, a favor seeker and alleged mistress to the new president, from the White House and restricted her access to the president, Johnson fired Baker, just as Cobb had wanted. Through the decades, numerous presidents have put their protectors at odds through their personal dalliances, and, as many chose poorly, have put themselves and the country at great risk. President Johnson was the first on record to jeopardize his security, not out of principle but for personal pleasure.
Lucy Cobb returned to the White House in 1866. That same year, the State Department’s domestic Secret Service ended. President Lincoln’s legacy lived on in the newly formed Secret Service Division (SSD) under the Treasury Department. Many of Baker’s agents found employment there and brought their expertise with them.
The unit was devoted to stopping the rampant counterfeiting that had cropped up in the wake of the Civil War. At that point, nearly two-thirds of the nation’s currency was estimated to be counterfeit. If SSD couldn’t bring integrity back to the economy by eliminating counterfeiting, the nation would surely fall to anarchy. The agency’s chief, William P. Wood, led the first “war” on white-collar crime. Wood was a Mexican-American War veteran and had arrested the violent abolitionist John Brown for horse thievery. Wood set his sights on the biggest bank owner and counterfeiter, William E. Brockway, called by newspapers “the counterfeit king.” Following his arrest, Brockway struck a deal with the prosecutors: he revealed the hidden locations of the plates he had used to make hundreds of counterfeit bills, up to $1,000 notes, and provided information on many other operations. In the division’s first year, the Secret Service shut down two hundred domestic counterfeiting operations.
In 1881, tragedy struck the presidency again. For weeks, a mentally ill stalker, Charles J. Guiteau, had been following the undefended president, James Garfield. He had twice aimed and cocked his single-action revolver at the president but had not pulled the trigger. Stalking the president and writing him increasingly threatening letters was the stalker’s sole obsession. On July 2, 1881, he tracked Garfield by using the president’s schedule, which was routinely published in the newspapers. He stood in the crowd, which included the president’s two sons and secretary, at the Washington, DC, train station, waiting for the doors of the president’s train to open. As they opened, the crazed man drew a pistol from concealment, fired a shot that grazed Garfield’s shoulder, recocked, and fired again. The crowd wrestled the assassin to the ground. The president died two and a half months later after fighting an agonizing infection. A mere sixteen years after President Lincoln’s murder, history was repeated. Even after the second assassination, Garfield’s successor, President Chester Arthur, refused protection in any form. The lessons of history were ignored again as debates over solutions fell to the wayside.
In 1884, SSD became involved in executive protection by happenstance as Congress broadened the division’s authority to fight illegal gambling, mail and land fraud, and other forms of white-collar crimes. SSD chief James Brooks designated two agents to search for suspicious activity at the White House after agents discovered an assassination plot. Ten years later, at the request of SSD chief William Hazen, the agents were still there. First Lady Frances Cleveland learned of another plot: to kidnap her children. In both plots, the conspirators’ aim was to harm the president as punishment for the Secret Service’s efforts to quash gambling.
Fearing that the first family’s protective detail would become a political liability, President Grover Cleveland removed it as soon as he learned about it—the agents, at the first lady’s request, had kept their protection a secret from even the president. But President Cleveland did request an SSD agent to accompany him when traveling to his summer retreat, and so SSD became directly involved in presidential protection.
In its founding and formative years, “Secret” in the agency’s name meant undercover, and its agents called themselves “operatives” but were referred to as Treasury agents, “T-men,” or detectives by the Treasury. In 1875, Chief Hiram Whitley issued permission for operatives to fabricate their badges at their own expense. Operatives worked alone without partners, undercover, and in plain clothes. The agency reimbursed little more than travel and the cost of telegrams to report back to field offices and headquarters. As a result, many operatives were labeled “fake cops” and were regularly accused of trespassing and overreaching their authority because they were from a “made-up” government division. Simply put, many Americans had never heard of the SSD. The “secret” was causing problems for operatives on remote missions. They pushed for standardization and further reimbursements, but to them “secret” simply meant deep undercover.
“Secret” was and still is little more than a carryover of a colloquialism used by Seward, Baker, Pinkerton, and others during the Civil War. However, throughout the history of the Secret Service, that colloquialism has been falsely interpreted to justify the withholding of information from Congress, the president, its own employees, and the people of the United States. But no legal backing for keeping information “secret” exists. Over time, that theory has been used by chiefs and directors to suggest that the Secret Service is essentially different from other law enforcement agencies. It is not. Yet Secret Service directors continually attempt to justify their actions of thwarting transparency and accountability based on the hollow vestige of “secret,” doing so out of their ignorance of history.
During the Spanish-American War, the Secret Service protected President William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president, part-time. After the war, the detail was again reduced to an on-request service, at the president’s discretion. On September 6, 1901, during a victory tour following his reelection, the president insisted on appearing at a ten-minute meet-and-greet at a music hall in Buffalo, New York. Secret Service operative George Foster, the president’s frequently called upon protector, along with operatives Samuel Ireland and Albert Gallaher, scanned the crowd. Seventy-five Buffalo police, soldiers, and Pinkertons guarded the perimeter. More people arrived than expected, and an event coordinator panicked and demanded that the soldiers, who were there purely for decoration, form a gauntlet inside the hall. The operatives lost their buffer zone and field of view as the eager line of visitors pressed right up to the president. The operatives should have whisked the president away, but Foster surely knew that the president would have been furious and blamed the operatives and the agency for overreacting. He most likely then would have disbanded his protection altogether and thus become completely vulnerable at all future events.
In the heat, many visitors wiped their brows with handkerchiefs, and the soldiers, inexperienced with protection, did not enforce the rule to keep hands out and open. One man, Leon Czolgosz, was sweating more than the visitors around him. He stepped ahead in line, drew a pistol from a handkerchief, and fired two shots into the president’s abdomen, killing him.
In thirty-six years, three American presidents had been assassinated. Two had not had Secret Service protection; the other had been protected only part-time. Agent Rufus Youngblood wrote of that era in his 1973 memoir: “The presidency had become a surer route to the cemetery than Russian roulette.” Something had to change.
McKinley’s vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded him after the assassination, became the first president to receive congressional authorization for full-time Secret Service protection. But SSD had to find the new president first. When President McKinley died, Vice President Roosevelt was on vacation, hiking in the wilderness with his family.
At first, the fiercely independent “TR” considered SSD protection a personal tyranny and a waste. Of the five permanent Secret Service operatives protecting him night and day, he said, “they would not be the least use in preventing any assault upon my life. I do not believe there is any danger… and if there were it would be simple nonsense to try to prevent it.” Then came a near miss: A man in a tuxedo maneuvered his way through every White House security layer of officers, operatives, and the White House usher. For minutes the overly obliging president found himself cornered and alone with the dangerous “crank,” as he called the man. The president escaped, and agents searched the man’s tuxedo and found a large revolver. From then on, the president accepted the protection. As he admitted in a letter to a friend, “The secret service men are a very small but very necessary thorn in the flesh.” A person admitted to the president’s presence without proper clearance would become known as a “gate-crasher,” and though such people typically have benevolent intentions, their ability to schmooze past security measures leaves a president’s protection at the mercy of the gate-crasher’s whim.
But with increased protection duties came increased risk to the protectors. On September 3, 1902, in Lenox, Massachusetts, a railcar collided with President Roosevelt’s carriage. The president was injured but survived. Secret Service operative William Craig, a British military veteran, died after being thrown from the carriage. The president felt humbled by the loss and sacrifice, the first death of a Secret Service employee while on the job.
Roosevelt’s respect increased for those who risked everything to protect him. Well known and deeply meaningful to those inside the agency are photos of Roosevelt’s children reporting to the morning briefings and roll calls on the White House grounds alongside the police contingent protecting the White House, another precursor of today’s Uniformed Division. Those early images show the love and dedication crucial to the job of protecting the First Family and serving in the Secret Service in any era.
During Roosevelt’s administration, as its role expanded, the Secret Service encountered a new rival. A new federal agency, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), under the Department of Justice, was created in 1908 in response to the Secret Service’s complaints to Congress that DOJ too often “borrowed” its operatives. Its wish was granted but the BOI was born as a “bureaucratic bastard” and manned by SSD operatives who quit to join the new agency. That was the Secret Service’s first exodus of manpower to another government agency, but it would not be the last.
One of the early SSD agents to jump to the BOI was William Burns, who eventually headed the agency and became a mentor to a young Bureau staffer named J. Edgar Hoover. Burns taught Hoover how to lobby Congress effectively and create a base of support among members, which Burns had learned from his work in the SSD. Hoover would turn the BOI into the FBI, pioneering his “G-man vision” for FBI agents, inspired by Secret Service operatives and techniques. The bitter rivalry between the Secret Service and FBI for national, presidential, and congressional favor continues to this day.
In 1917, Congress made threatening the president a federal crime. As a result, the Secret Service expanded, creating “Room 98,” the precursor of the Protective Research Section, hidden in the Treasury Annex. Inside, operatives investigated, analyzed, researched, and turned over information on threatening individuals to prosecutors or mental facilities. Room 98 held a library containing every threatening letter and a dossier on every threat. Once a file was created on an individual, it was never removed. Those with a “presidential complex,” the term for a dangerous obsession with the president, were graded by their motivation and capacity to carry out any threat. Agents from field offices all over the country would put Treasury-related investigations on hold to investigate, monitor, or even follow the subjects of those dossiers, especially when the president was traveling nearby.
Yet for all those expansions, would the SSD be able to thwart the kinds of assassins who had killed Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley and nearly killed others? The assassinations of Lincoln and McKinley had commonalities. Each assassin had made threats by letters and threatening speeches. Each had stalked his target on several occasions, and each had made use of a concealed firearm, as well as charm or false claims, to get close to the president before attempting their deadly acts. President Lincoln’s murderer had even made secret modifications to the president’s booth at the theater. For “stalkers,” SSD made a serious commitment to diligently investigate those who threatened the president; thoroughly investigate security details in advance of presidential trips; and improve upon specialized training so operatives could think like “a rogue to catch a rogue.” But what of the “approacher,” the spontaneous type who had killed President Garfield and would later pose a threat to President Franklin Roosevelt?
In 1930, the White House Police Force, first formed in 1922, became part of the Secret Service. Congress funded the force’s first White House alarm and pass holder system, its expansion of manpower, and its members’ desire for combat marksmanship training. The White House Police Force had a simple, effective plan of protection: Balancing security and optics, in the event of attack the approachable-looking White House police officers at the perimeter, armed with .38-caliber special revolvers, would fight and fall back to the White House. As the attackers advanced on the North or South Lawn, additional officers, using gun boxes filled with shotguns, Thompson submachine guns, and other weapons hidden throughout the White House, would intercept them. The spirit of that plan remains today, and the White House Police Force eventually developed into today’s Uniformed Division.
The election of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 brought about a major reorganization of the federal government, including the Secret Service.
In 1933, during his first year in office, President Roosevelt appointed his longtime friend Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to head the Treasury Department. Morgenthau, a young Jewish entrepreneur, had become friends with Roosevelt when each had run his own Christmas tree farm business in upstate New York. In Morgenthau, Roosevelt saw a strong and impartial ally impatient with government bureaucracy. Morgenthau was comfortable as an outsider who could enter a completely new organization and fix it. He had no prior law enforcement experience and might have seemed poorly qualified for the job, but indeed he was the most qualified because he gave no significance to politics or personal loyalties. Later described by one famous Secret Service agent as possessing freezing water in his veins, Morgenthau cared little for how hard men worked; his focus was on results. A ruthless administrator, he cut out anything and anyone who got into the way of measurable progress. Aside from being integral to Roosevelt’s New Deal economic plan, he set his own mission to overhaul the lagging Treasury Department and its worst offender, the Secret Service.
Morgenthau recognized that presidential protection had long been increasing in difficulty and complexity, yet under Secret Service chief William Moran and White House detail chief Edmund Starling, he believed that the guard protecting the president still relied far too much on hope and chance.
Moran and Starling made advances but fell behind the biggest threats: vehicle bombs, poison or bombs sent through the mail, “approachers,” and warnings of ground-based assaults on the White House. Chief Moran’s greatest achievement was instituting badges and standardizing operatives’ firearms, as they had previously had to purchase their own. Starling was a personal confidant of several presidents. He was very good at coordinating with White House staff and workers to find each president as he tried to sneak off—and he also left behind a detailed memoir of his life in the SSD.
Changing times called for swift solutions, and an incident with an approacher early in the Roosevelt presidency made that clear. On February 15, 1933, an approacher, Giuseppe Zangara, managed the first critical assassination attempt on a president under full-time Secret Service protection. In Miami, President Roosevelt gave a short speech sitting on the back seat of his limo before a crowd of 8,000, all unscreened. Zangara, who had previously plotted to ambush President Herbert Hoover, pushed his way to the front of the crowd to try for Roosevelt. To Zangara’s dismay, the president’s speech ended and Miami Mayor Anton Cermak began his own speech as Roosevelt sat down in his limo, shielded from view. The SSD’s plan had been to move Roosevelt while the mayor was speaking, but against protocol, they had acquiesced to Roosevelt’s demand for the limo to wait, engine off, so he could leisurely read a telegram.
Zangara fired six shots. Five hit flesh, but none struck the president. Cermak was grievously wounded. A woman standing next to the shooter hit his arm with her purse and spoiled his aim. Operatives from the follow-up car closed in. A twenty-three-year-old civilian, a New York City police officer, and a Secret Service operative were hit, but all survived. Cermak died three weeks later. The errant sixth bullet missed Roosevelt by inches. Had the president been standing just where the mayor was, he would have been shot at close range as Secret Service protectors watched. The assassin died in the electric chair, but presidents’ continued use of slow open convertibles would continue to plague the Secret Service. One wonders why it inexplicably went along with it.
Even after the assassination attempt, the president’s SSD operatives described Roosevelt as “fearless.” He became close with them thanks to their help in pulling off what came to be called a “splendid deception,” as SSD operatives shielded from the press and public as much as possible views of the president that revealed his dependence on his wheelchair. Agents hoisted the president up and helped him stand, and at times they even helped him dress.
Two full years after the Miami assassination attempt, Starling had increased the president’s detail from five to only nine agents. One new addition was Michael Francis Reilly, who recognized that in near misses, the Secret Service had contributed to the president’s survival, but the only thing separating its successes from its failures had been luck. And under Starling’s leadership of the White House detail, that was not changing.
New Secret Service leadership came when Frank Wilson was made chief in 1936, replacing Moran. To the operatives, Chief Wilson was an outsider planted among them by Morgenthau, but Wilson prioritized the SSD’s war on counterfeiting above all else, including even presidential protection. Chief Wilson had participated in finding the kidnapper and murderer of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s baby. When the BOI and the power-hungry Herbert Hoover couldn’t crack the case, the SSD and the Treasury had solved the “crime of the century” by turning to the public for help. Eventually a gas station attendant noticed one of the ransom bills’ serial numbers and the jig was up.
Chief Wilson’s SSD again turned the public into a major asset by forcing it to educate Americans on how to spot fake bills—and Wilson did so against the wishes of many appalled SSD veterans who coveted their believed secrecy. Despite more than seventy years of the Secret Service losing the war on counterfeiting since its creation, Chief Wilson, using innovative approaches and determined leadership, cut counterfeiting nationwide by 88 percent in two years. Newspapers gleefully reported how American “store keepers and children alike” detected and rejected fake money as amateur sleuths catching criminals alongside local police and the feds. By 1942, Frank Wilson’s Secret Service had won the second counterfeiting war.
Chief Wilson would have sealed the fate on “secret” when he penned his memoir, Special Agent: A Quarter-Century with the Treasury Department and the Secret Service, if not for one catastrophe soon to follow. But with the war on counterfeiting won, Chief Wilson was all ears to Agent Reilly on how to turn presidential protection around.
That same year, an approacher in a crowd threw a dagger and missed President Roosevelt by inches (the dagger was found afterward to be rubber). That was one of several near misses that cemented a truth for Reilly: the president’s detail could not protect against assassins such as the ones who had killed Presidents Garfield and McKinley and nearly killed Roosevelt in Miami. For the White House Police, the same mentality was recognized: from 1937 to 1940, twenty fence jumpers were caught around and in the White House. Though none committed any violence during those attempts, some were found with knives or guns. Still, those breaches spurred little to no change.
Everything changed dramatically on December 7, 1941. Mike Reilly had just been promoted to assistant supervising agent within White House Protective Operations. He was the highest-ranking Secret Service employee on site, as Wilson and Starling were miles away, off duty. When Reilly heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, he realized that it had been designed to cripple the US Navy. Therefore, he reasoned, a larger strategy to cripple the entire US command-and-control structure targeting the president and White House was likely and could be imminent. He wasted no time obtaining the permissions of his off-site superiors. He called in every agent he could find, issued more firearms, and started new patrols.
Wilson and Morgenthau each conducted midnight inspections of the White House defenses. They found the Oval Office officer on duty snoring. Secretary Morgenthau estimated that two dozen enemy agents with guns and bombs could plow into the White House with a heavy truck and, with little resistance, slaughter every Secret Service protector, with the president meeting the same fate. The White House was nearly as vulnerable as it had been during its sacking by the British in 1814.
Reilly was placed in charge of the White House detail and, out of respect, kept Starling on as “codirector” for another two years. But it was Reilly’s show now, and he had his work cut out for him. On his first day on duty, President Roosevelt requested to be taken on a drive around Washington in a show of national resilience. Despite years of begging for them, the Secret Service had no armored cars, Reilly, unlike Starling, was willing to work outside the specific allocations from Congress. Two hours after the president requested the ride, Reilly and Wilson procured the first presidential armored car, a custom-built Cadillac limo that had been seized from the Al Capone crime network.
As war on Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire was declared, the Treasury, Congress, and the president deluged the Secret Service with emergency war funds that allowed Reilly to make a number of critical changes.
The permanent White House detail was expanded from eleven agents to seventy. The size of the White House Police Force doubled. Marksmanship training was increased and would soon save the life of another president. Temporary vehicle barricades were installed. An underground zigzag tunnel was built connecting the White House to the Treasury Building’s vault, which was turned into the president’s own bomb shelter and temporary underground command center.
In addition, the Secret Service established a bomb team with the help of local police and military units. A military police unit posted .50-caliber antiaircraft machine guns on the White House roof, and a .50-caliber-armed car patrolled the area. Gas attack filters were added to the White House. Agents and officers received Geiger counters, and all White House occupants were issued gas masks. The military’s White House Signal Corps (WHSC) (the precursor of the modern, White House Communications Agency, or WHCA) was established at the White House and created the Secret Service’s first secure White House radio system.
Thus the White House was transformed into a true “complex.” Comprising 18.5 acres, it included the North and South Lawns, the State Department Building (now known as the Old Executive Office Building) to the west, the White House at the center, and the Treasury Building to the east, all under the Secret Service’s protective jurisdiction.
President Roosevelt, not to be held back by the challenges of his paralysis or the obvious risks to his life during wartime, scheduled four major international trips. All were fraught with near catastrophes. After he returned safely from Mexico, one of the Mexican president’s guards, who had protected him on the trip, made an attempt on the life of the Mexican president, Manuel Ávila Camacho, revealing himself to be a Nazi operative. In Casablanca, General George Patton frantically tried to get the president to leave when intelligence showed that the Nazis knew he was there.
On trips to the Middle East and the Soviet Union, Reilly and the president dodged Nazi magnetically guided torpedoes, German submarines (two were destroyed on one presidential trip), and sea mines, as well as one incident of friendly fire, when an escort ship accidentally fired a torpedo at the president’s ship. It barely missed.
But the success of those trips only encouraged Roosevelt, who announced that he wanted to personally visit American troops fighting in Italy. At that point, Reilly drew the line and exercised his override authority, refusing to allow the president to place himself in such danger. He knew that the president was sure to demand that he be fired, but Reilly, seeing zero chance of success in keeping the president alive if he went to oversee the landings, was finally the first operative to exert the “override authority.” Amazingly, the president backed down.
Roosevelt’s declining health in the later years of World War II created an increased focus on his vice president, Harry Truman. Vice presidents had not historically been protected by the Secret Service, but Morgenthau eventually assigned three men to Truman, who initially assumed that the strangers in his office were visitors. That simple effort, which very nearly didn’t happen, helped ensure continuity of government when Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, while staying in Georgia of his mistress and having his portrait painted.
In just a few years, the Secret Service had gone from failing to winning. It was all due to Henry “The Morgue” Morgenthau, Frank “The Untouchable” Wilson, and Mike “The Irish Cop” Reilly. SSD evolved from a gentleman bodyguard to effective protectors of a wartime leader, as well as winning another war on counterfeiting—which was won through transparency. But with World War II’s end, fatigue calling in its debts, and the death of President Roosevelt, who had continually requested the postponement of agent retirements, the job and its stresses finally took their toll. Protection is a marathon, not a sprint, and those three leaders, though incredible, had failed to ensure that their efforts would be maintained. They failed to adequately pass the torch to the next generation of leaders. That was the beginning of the service’s degeneration.
On President Truman’s first full day as president, he strode right past his exhausted White House detail and out the front door and headed for Pennsylvania Avenue. He had always enjoyed a long, fast walk before breakfast. Sunrise walks were the hallmark of his style. Foolishly, the SSD failed to see that he would not be able to hold the schedule his predecessor had over four terms. Only one agent noticed Truman leaving and caught up with him on the lawn. The Southeast Gate White House Police officer urgently phoned the detail, who, panicking, caught up to the new president a half mile away on 15th Street. The president said, “Well, now, it’s very nice of you to join me.”
Why had the first agent not exercised his override authority? The agent believed that if the detail had not known Truman was walking the streets unprotected, approachers and stalkers would not have known either. It was a gamble, a protection style yet again based more on hope and chance than on procedure.
Throughout World War II, the Secret Service employed only about three hundred agents in total. On Starling’s White House detail, there were about twenty-five permanent agents rotating in three shifts. Under Reilly, that number had immediately increased to seventy. But the additional forty-five-plus were not new hires; they were transfers from field offices across the nation serving temporarily. Field agents were shipped in to guard the president as he traveled or stayed at the White House, an imperfect practice at best.
Meanwhile, the biggest threat to the president was the White House itself. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had not been comfortable utilizing any of the $50,000 annual federal allocation for upkeep of the executive mansion while the government rationed food and called upon Americans to scrounge scrap metals, and grow “victory gardens” in parks and their yards to aid the war effort. During the war, therefore, the White House had fallen into disrepair. Even the allocation was little match for the now structurally unsound building.
In 1948, as First Daughter Margaret Truman played the piano in the sitting room, a leg of the piano suddenly crashed through the floor and into the rotting support beam directly below. It was the last straw for President Truman. Through embarrassing meetings with congressmen and visiting dignitaries, he shamed Congress into funding an extensive renovation.
In 1950, the White House received congressional support for its long reconstruction. With strong input from the military, Secret Service, and security professionals, the entire structure was rebuilt from the inside. Steel beams were added, along with air-conditioning, a basement and subbasement, and a nuclear fallout shelter, ready for the Cold War.
The president had to move his family to Blair House, across the street from the White House at the corner of Jackson Place and Pennsylvania Avenue. They would stay there for most of the duration of the four-year project.
From Blair House, President Truman continued his morning walks, which had become increasingly popular. There was even a walking club set up, where unofficial tickets were handed out to those seeking to join the pack. His Secret Service protectors, of course, were terrified. Chief Urbanus Baughman later reflected that the walks “represented the kind of ‘habit’ that was hand-picked for the assassin.… [The daily walks] made Mr. Truman a slow moving target, the delight of a sharpshooter.” Anxious agents walked close to the president and his entourage; Baughman implemented a follow car brimming with agents with submachine guns to follow the president, which they did in secret, in case of a drive-by attack or car ramming but admittedly useless in case of a sniper attack.
Only seven Secret Service men, a mixture of agents and White House Police, ensured Truman’s protection day and night during his stay at Blair House during the renovation. When the president departed and arrived at Blair House, the detail would be bolstered by additional agents and White House Police.
Chief Baughman’s much-needed and well-conceived presidential security plan, called “defense in depth,” was hard to implement at Blair House. Pennsylvania Avenue in those years was open to both pedestrians and vehicles. The chief’s three layers (inner, middle, outer) intertwined like chain mail with each man an interconnected link. Agents with agents and officers with officers, they worked in pairs and maintained line of sight with each other. Doors could be unlocked but were always manned, ideally from both sides, in case of a bomb threat, fire, firefight, or a combination of the three. Secret Service men at the outer layer, carrying sidearms only, would identify and engage approachers, gate-crashers, or any other kind of potential threat, while the inner circle evacuated the president. Agents or officers near those engaged would then communicate with the rear layers, aid in stopping the threat, and, equally important, aim to prevent any gaps. The philosophy behind “defense in depth” did not fit well with Blair House’s physical shallowness. An attacker needed only to burst in from the public street and then race up two flights of stairs to arrive in the president’s bedroom. Unlike today, pedestrians, cars, and buses rushed by all day long. Unscreened crowds often formed just outside the building. There was only a knee-high fence that guarded the bushes under the windows. All the protective measures considered “needs” at the White House, such as the fence, were disregarded as “wants” at Blair House.
On November 1, 1950, aside from the occasional construction noise, all was quiet at the White House western front. Local newspapers had published the president’s provided schedule, just as they always did. President Truman arrived with his detail at the back entrance of Blair House so crowds could not close in. All upper-floor windows were open so air could circulate throughout the house. The Secret Service often worried about the street-level entrances and the ushers, chefs, and housemen going in and out. The main doors were open, their screen doors closed and manned by Secret Service employees.
President Truman had lunch with Mrs. Truman, and just before 2 p.m. he lay down to take a nap prior to a 2:30 cemetery commemoration with British officials.
The outer ring of perimeter security consisted of four Secret Service White House Police officers. Officer Leslie Coffelt manned the west side security booth. Officer Joseph Downs manned the west entrance. The east security booth was covered by Officer Joseph Davidson. Officer Donald Birdzell was covering the stone staircase to the east side front door. Agent Floyd Boring made his rounds to everyone at their posts. Agent Vincent Mroz, the new guy on the White House detail, hovered around Blair House’s interior. Agent Stewart Stout guarded the president’s bedroom on the second floor’s east side. At the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Jackson Place, Metro Police officer Marion Preston directed traffic.
Two men had been driven by Blair House in a taxicab earlier that morning. After canvassing the neighborhood, they returned to their hotel and inquired about a late checkout, confident that they would return. After lunch, dapperly dressed for the occasion, they took a bus filled with sightseers to the Treasury, east down Pennsylvania Avenue. They walked past Blair House again, made a final survey, and split up. At 2:20 p.m., the novice gunman, Oscar Collazo, approached from the east, as the trained gunfighter, Griselio Torresola, moved in from the west.
Collazo stood unnoticed at the east entrance steps, between Officer Birdzell, stationed atop the steps into Blair House, and the security booth, where Agent Boring and Officer Davidson conversed. Seeing Officer Birdzell, who was facing the door, he drew a Luger pistol from concealment and pulled his trigger on him. The officer heard a sharp quiet metallic click and turned to see Collazo slapping the back of his Walther P38 semiautomatic 9 mm pistol, which had failed to fire. Agent Boring and Officer Davidson took notice just as the assassin’s gun discharged, sending the first bullet into Officer Birdzell’s knee.
President Truman awoke. Mrs. Truman went to the president to confirm her suspicion that the noise had been a car’s exhaust backfiring. Chief Baughman had just left his barbershop and was walking back to the Treasury Building. He, too, thought he heard the sound of a car backfiring. But the trained officers knew what the sound really was and turned to see Officer Birdzell descend and hobble into the street.
Reporters, photographers, and tourists wandering by dived over fences and hedges, fleeing in all directions. Metro Police officer Marion Preston ran toward the shooting, gun drawn, and a bullet passed through his jacket. Officer Birdzell, thinking fast and remembering his training, continued to shoot and move. That forced one of the assassins further from the protectee, and reduced the chance that the three officers’ return fire would hit one another or any civilians.
After the first shot, Officer Coffelt, at the west security booth, turned east. Officer Downs was entering Blair House through the open west basement entrance. Downs climbed back up the stairs to address the first shot. That’s when Torresola, utilizing his compatriot’s shot as a distraction, stepped to Officer Coffelt’s booth and fired three shots into Coffelt’s back. Torresola then rapidly pivoted and turned his Luger toward Officer Downs, shooting him three times. One shot almost severed Downs’s neck. Downs backed into the Blair House kitchen, drew, and fired one shot at Torresola but missed; then, clutching his neck, he collapsed, unconscious. The door into Blair House was now wide open for the second assassin to enter.
Agent Vincent Mroz headed to a second-story window to take aim at one of the assassins below. His first carefully aimed shot missed; a tree blocked his second. Agent Stewart Stout instructed the first lady and president to stay where they were and lie low. He grabbed a Thompson submachine gun and stood at the top of the staircase. For an assassin to reach the president, he would have to somehow make it past Stout’s .45-caliber, fully automatic defense. Stout followed protocol exactly, but the housemen yelled at him, called him a coward, and urged him to join the fight. Agent Stout held fast, and the inner layer held.
At that moment, Torresola had a choice to make: he could either enter the building over Officer Downs’s body and head upstairs to the president or aid his fallen compatriot, who was on the east side facing down four police guns. Had Torresola chosen to enter through the basement door; had Agent Mroz taken a different route than the assassin; and had Agent Stout buckled under the accusations of cowardice and likewise run outside to aide in the gunfight, he would have had an unfettered path to the president and first lady. Agent Stout kept his post. Agent Mroz decided to take the fight to the enemy outside and ran down the interior steps to the west doorway entrance. If he could rush out, he would outflank the two assassins.
The two White House officers fired five quick shots each. Agent Boring was calmer. His first shot missed. His second hit one of the assassins square in the chest, knocking him flat on his face.
President Truman, unattended, leaned out his window and stared bewilderedly at the gunfight below. A Metro officer in the street yelled at the president, “Get back!”
Had Torresola looked up, he might have seen the president and had a clear shot, but instead he fired his last round at the agents and officers at the east end, then moved to a new fighting position. The sidewalk trees, bushes, and knee-high fence offered him intermittent cover. The new position disrupted the clear line of sight and fire between him and the Secret Service trio, who turned their fire on Torresola, who knelt, reloaded, and returned fire.
At one point during my employment with the Secret Service, a colleague had the opportunity to take a look at some of the old evidence files describing that incident. One uncorroborated witness taking cover reported to authorities that a plainclothes man on the (then) State Department Building side of the street had drawn his own handgun from concealment, taken careful aim, and fired one shot before walking off, but no such mystery shooter was ever reported publicly.
At the exact moment that the “plainclothes man” took a shot at Torresola, a few feet away from Torresola, Officer Coffelt, bleeding to death and slouched in his booth, took careful aim with his .38 special Colt revolver, just as he had been drilled in all his years of White House Police marksmanship training. He fired one shot before falling unconsciousness. The shot struck its mark.
Torresola was dead, a clean hole on the right side of his head and a gaping mess on the left from the single bullet that had passed through it. Officer Preston sprinted to a nearby drug store and phoned police. The Battle of Blair House was over.
The president’s limo arrived soon afterward, and President Truman decided to keep his 2:30 appointment. His detail was glad to have him leave so they could get things under control.
Due to the brave work of so many agents and officers, the president had lived and the nation had been spared an enormous trauma. But it had come at the cost of the life of Officer Leslie Coffelt. In his honor, President Truman wrote a letter to the chief of the Uniformed Division, establishing the White House Police Benefit Fund. With it, the Secret Service White House Police would hold the exclusive rights to sell White House memorabilia carrying the White House and presidential seal. The fund was to be used for scholarships and to boost the morale of the workforce and champion their values, marksmanship, and sacrifice. None of those values was more worthy of honor than those of Officer Coffelt, who, with his last breath and final shot, had saved the president’s life.
Not long afterward, the White House Police Force used the fund to accomplish all of those goals. The fund started a scholarship for officers’ children, helped officers’ families in desperate need, and assisted families of officers who had died. The fund also aided the White House Police pistol, rifle, and shotgun teams, which competed in and won championships worldwide. It boosted morale and kept the Secret Service operating at the forefront of combat marksmanship. The teams also hosted their own national and international competition as a way of honoring Coffelt’s memory and giving back to police units nationwide that so often aided in presidential protection when the president traveled.
As an emergency measure, President Truman’s detail was bolstered with even more agents transferring in from field offices. The Battle of Blair House was the most violent and lethal in the history of the Secret Service’s PPD. As of late 2017, Officer Leslie Coffelt remains the only employee of the Secret Service to have sacrificed his life in direct protection of the president.
The incident, for a time at least, curtailed President Truman’s walks. Agents drove him to fenced areas whose area and perimeters were secured. That way he could enjoy his walks and be protected. His protectors and their families appreciated the change.
Truman’s successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, had one of the most amiable relationships with his Secret Service protectors that a president has ever had. But that brought its own challenges. Throughout his two terms of office, the Secret Service’s experience in protecting the overly agreeable Eisenhower lulled them into complacency. Chief Baughman and the White House detail summarized their troubles as “Three G’s—Golf, Gettysburg, and Grandchildren.” Agents had to clear golf courses—easy open ground for snipers—before the president could play through, requiring the creation of the agency’s first countersniper program. As for the grandchildren, some agents even became “honorary Camp Fire Girls” while escorting the first granddaughters to summer camp. After a great debate with the president, SSD finally closed a visitors’ observation tower at the Gettysburg battlefield site to secure the president’s nearby farm from snipers.
At the beginning and end of President Eisenhower’s two terms, he became stubborn and brash when it came to foreign travel, leading to several near misses. In secrecy, SSD agreed to President-elect Eisenhower’s campaign promise: a hair-raising trip to the front lines during the Korean War, where, according to agent Rufus Youngblood, “more than once the areas he visited were overrun and taken hours later by the enemy.”
Eisenhower nearly died when his heart couldn’t handle the altitude of Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1959, only to be saved by a quick-thinking Secret Service agent who’d brought a spare oxygen tank. In India, his open convertible was nearly crushed when local police became unable to control the enormous torrent of onlookers.
But it was Vice President Richard Nixon who had the closest brush with death during the Eisenhower administration. On a trip to Caracas, Venezuela—another trip that the Secret Service had argued against from the start due to safety concerns—Nixon insisted that his car lead the motorcade. He led it into an ambush. However, the SSD had succeeded in one change; using closed cars instead of convertibles.
Two large trucks rushed in front of the motorcade, cutting it off. Crowds, seemingly unarmed, surrounded the vehicle. Nixon’s change in that arrangement of the cars in the motorcade nearly doomed everyone as the crowd’s weapons materialized. All of the layers of protection were cut through in seconds. Stones, mud, and wooden bats pulverized the vehicles’ windows. Members of the crowd communicated to one another, identifying Nixon’s location in the motorcade; then they focused on breaching the window closest to the vice president. Had the Venezuelan military not come to the SSD’s rescue at the last minute, the crowd could have killed Nixon there—or when he reached his destination, where it was later learned that four hundred Molotov cocktails had been stockpiled for an even larger assault. For that, Chief Baughman called the vice president and later candidate Nixon “an assassin’s dream boat” and urged the public not to elect him.
Nixon survived the trip and went on to run for president in 1960. He was defeated by a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. The Kennedy administration brought the promise of a new, youthful era in US politics. In practice, it also brought fresh new problems for the Secret Service and would end with one of the most tragic episodes in the agency’s—and the nation’s—history.