New Book Says Secret Service Cut Corners on Obama's Protection

The U.S. Secret Service has cut corners in ways that may have jeopardized the safety of President Obama, according to a new book by a veteran Washington journalist and author, Ron Kessler. The book, "In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect," details instances of "laxness in how they protect" Obama, according to a source at Random House, which will officially release the book Aug. 4.

While the agents assigned to protect Obama and other principals are described as dedicated and valiant, Kessler asserts that in recent years the management of the agency "has betrayed its mission by cutting corners, risking the assassination of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and their families," the publisher says. One current agent tells the author: "It's a miracle we have not had a successful assassination."

But neither the publisher nor Kessler himself, in an interview, would say what corners were cut or what the laxness entailed and how they endangered the president.

"In the President's Secret Service" covers much previously plowed ground, including the Kennedy assassination and the bloody 1950 attempt on the life of President Truman. But it also discloses assassination plots that have never been revealed previously, provides an insider's account of the Reagan assassination attempt, and regales (or dismays) readers with various salacious details ranging from Spiro Agnew's private life to the wild-child antics of the Bush twins.

"Jenna would purposely try to lose her protection by going through red lights or by jumping in her car without telling agents where she was going. As a result, in a total waste of manpower, the Secret Service kept her car under surveillance so agents could follow her," Kessler writes in an excerpt first obtained by The New York Post. Kessler also writes that Henry Hager, Jenna's fiancé at the time and now her husband, became so inebriated at a 2005 Halloween party that Secret Service agents took him to Georgetown University Hospital. Another time, he avers, Hager agents in Jenna's detail had to intervene when he became belligerent with other customers in a Georgetown saloon.

While such incidents may be in keeping with the normal high jinks of presidential families who chafe at being inside the protective cocoon, Kessler does not find it amusing; his treatment is a no-nonsense, ground-breaking look at an agency where a single lapse can result in tragedy. As a consequence, his narrative adopts the same ethos of the front-line agents in the presidential protective detail.

Kessler has written similar treatments of both the FBI and the CIA. Yet the Secret Service, he told Politics Daily on Monday, was an even harder culture to crack. "Everybody assumed they wouldn't talk, so nobody tried," he said. "But I've been gathering string for years, and ended up talking to a hundred agents." As a political writer, Kessler is identified as a conservative, which may have helped him with the old-school agents he interviewed. But, he told me, "this is a bipartisan book."

That's fitting, because assassination is a bipartisan plague. Inexplicably, it took the murder of three U.S. presidents (Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley), along with near-hits on both Roosevelts and a harrowing daytime shootout in downtown Washington that claimed the life of a heroic Secret Service agent in Truman's detail before this country got serious about protecting its presidents. Today, it's a thankless task that tests the patience of the First Family daily and which requires vast resources, skilled and tireless agents, a healthy dose of good luck, and eternal vigilance. In Ron Kessler's telling of the tale, there is ample room for improvement – especially now, in the Age of Terrorism.