In the President's Secret Service by Ronald Kessler

In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect by Ronald Kessler

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


An interesting and important book written by the absolute wrong person. There's all this great history of the Secret Service, assassinations thwarted and succeeded, criminal investigations, a scathing indictment of service management and how it treats its people.

…And then the other half of the book is gossip about protectees. Because, yes, okay, he acknowledges the Secret Service has a code of silence so that protectees will trust them, which is important for maintaining safety. But telling the truth about public figures is more important! By 'telling the truth,' we mean 'selling books by marketting them as personal tell-alls.' It might have been more explicable if there was actually anything new or interesting here, but there isn't. LBJ was disgusting, Nixon was weird, Clinton was always late -- these are not revelations, they're Wikipedia footnotes.

Also, the political bias was appalling. Like how the Bush twins, all their public underage drinking and fake id's and bar fights, that's just kids who need to grow up a bit. But Carter's nine-year-old kid, her acting out was a character flaw. Uh-huh. That was the subtlest of it.

And don't get me fucking started on what he says about the race discrimination in employment lawsuit brought against the Secret Service and how the Service overreacted to it by "reverse discriminating" and promoting undeserving minority agents, but the Service doesn't have a race problem, obviously, you can tell because it's 17% African-American which is higher than the proportion in the population in general and that's definitely evidence. That thing where a black agent was given a noose as a "joke" by a white instructor is just an -- uh -- hey, look over there! In conclusion, reverse discriminating against white people is bad.

And really don't get me started comparing what he says there to what he says about women agents. Apparently there isn't a representational problem there because the Secret service is slightly more than 10% female. Oh, well then! I assume we're not supposed to notice the blatant double-talk here since the sections are over 100 pages apart. Shocker, my memory is longer than that.

Someone else needs to write this book and make it not suck.




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