The Speaker was not amused. The plaza was promptly liberated. Photographs were taken. But it is high time to touch, ever so gingerly, a subject many Washingtonians fret about but are loath to address-the bloat and behavior of the Secret Service.
Recently Sen. Pat Moynihan and some colleagues had a disagreeable experience at the hands of the elements (it was cold and rainy) and the Secret Service at a presidential bill-signing ceremony in Texas. After the signing, when the president departed, the congressional delegation could not. Secret Service agents “froze” the site and took their time about unfreezing it. Were the swarms of agents with weapons and walkie-talkies coping with some special threat? No, it was the by-now routine interlocking-overlapping of walls of security between the Republic’s chief executive and the public that made him that. A protracted stand in December mud does concentrate the mind, and for Moynihan and some others, herded here and detained there, it was one time too many at the mercy of “strutting agents with high-power rifles.” It was one more proof that the Secret Service is becoming too big for its britches.
The Secret Service, which at first was preoccupied with catching counterfeiters, did not begin protecting presidents until after the third assassination, that of McKinley in 1901. It did not protect presidential candidates until the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy. Since the 1960s the Secret Service, like government generally, only more so, has burgeoned. This, because its protection mission is not controversial, and no one wants to say “enough, already.”
Times have changed. For the worse, naturally. President Monroe was faulted for excessive formality because he complained that diplomats constantly dropped in on him uninvited and expected tea. John Quincy Adams regularly swam stark naked in the Potomac, accompanied only by a servant in a canoe. All day long citizens wandered into his White House to pester him for loans, jobs or other favors. A British visitor shrank from the “brutal familiarity” with which President-elect Jackson was treated when traveling from Tennessee to Washington. It was not as brutal as the treatment White House furniture got from the crush at his Inaugural blast, which was an open house. Tyler founded Washington’s metropolitan police essentially to guard the White House but Pierce in 1853 became the first president to have a personal guard Oust an old Army buddy).
Enemy cannon were across the river and spies infested the city but almost anyone at any time could wander into Lincoln’s White House. Through the late 19th century presidents regularly received the public each day in the East Room. Until FDR there was a New Year’s Day receiving line for anyone who joined the queue out on the street. Security became serious during World War I but then until Dec. 7, 1941, the White House lawn was again a public park. Portions of the mansion’s first floor were open to everyone. You could even park on the narrow street between the White House and what is now the Executive Office Building.
The world has become more dangerous for leaders because of the lethality of portable weapons and the ideological fevers that inflame individuals. Still, dangers do not justify excesses. There must be limits, even to prophylactic measures against menaces. All government agencies strive, from primal urges of their organisms, to maximize their missions. The Secret Service’s mission is the safety of a few people, particularly the president. Like any agency, it always says more is better. Indeed, it always says more is necessary because any failure of its mission is dreadful.
But such failure is not the only bad thing that can befall a republic. Another is an unrepublican disproportion in the president’s traveling retinue, an unseemly grandiosity surrounding leaders, an inflation of the aura of officiousness and majesty. Prime Minister Thatcher was nearly killed by an IRA bomb, Prime Minister Major was the target of an IRA mortar attack, yet British security, although efficient, is scarcely noticeable. Presidents travel around America embarrassingly enveloped in firepower, as though this were a banana republic bristling with plotters. Moynihan believes that a “ubiquitous, overlarge and too frequently inconsiderate Secret Service” is becoming “a praetorian guard.” It threatens the quality of American democracy by treating the president “as a person under constant threat, and all others as possible suspects.” There are congressional spouses who stay away from State of the Union addresses because the Secret Service has made these occasions physically and emotionally unpleasant. Thus Moynihan: “This armed intrusion into the simple ceremonies of the Republic is a disgrace and a danger.”
But Moynihan ends his philippic limply, with the sort of flinch that begets the problem: “No care can be too great to protect the president and the vice president. But there is such a thing as excess and it ought to be avoided in a republic. " The phrase “no care can be too great” is an instance of, and an invitation to, excess. Like the phrase “life is priceless,” it sounds good but is inapplicable as policy. If we really regarded life as priceless, we would ban (among a zillion other things) left turns by cars-and then cars. We don’t believe that “no care can be too great” to protect life because the price-in money, comity and liberty-would be excessive. The same is true concerning the care we take of leaders.
We have lost the admirable attitude–call it republican relaxation–that once characterized Americans’ intimacy with their government. But is it really impossible to recapture the era–this is not ancient history–when President Truman jauntily strolled across the street to his bank? Most Secret Service agents are public-spirited and civil, but there is a lack of moderation in the definition and management of their mission. Enough–no, much too much–already.
