Recent news regarding the Secret Service? I only know what I hear from my mom, who regards Donald Trump in pretty much the same way the Ayatollah Khamenei regards The West. Get her started on Trump, the Secret Service and insurrections, and before you know it you'll be forced into a detour of Everything Wrong With America.
I walked into this book knowing very little about the U.S. Secret Service. I knew they'd been "implicated" in various things, but that was about it. I also, like most other people, have seen movies like JFK and In the Line of Fire, so I had a few (mostly incorrect) assumptions about what the Secret Service does and how they do it.
As it turns out, the Secret Service began as an anti-counterfeiting unit within the Treasury Department. After Lincoln's assassination fake currency was a big problem, and the Secret Service was charged with rooting out counterfeiters. It wasn't until much later that the Secret Service was tasked with protecting the President from assassination, and it was even later that the Secret Service was removed from the Treasury Department, freed from weeding out counterfeiters, and folded into the Department of Homeland Security.
And as we all now know, sometime between JFK's assassination and the present day the Secret Service grew less professional, less efficient, and less admired by the general public. Somewhere along the way the Secret Service became more of an exclusive boy's club, in which agents spend their time off getting drunk and hiring prostitutes in foreign locales. Many within the Service's ranks have been publicly shamed for such antics, but the organization as a whole has been slow to adapt to changing times.
Not that the Service was always in such desperate need of reform. No one's blaming them for Kennedy. It was a long slide downhill, and the worst moments seem to have occurred from the Obama administration onward.
So yeah, all of the above is what I now know about the Secret Service. I'm no expert, but Zero Fail has taught me a few things I didn't already know. This said, it's not an especially interesting book, and the insights it offers aren't as wide-ranging as I had hoped for. Everything before Obama was, for the most part, old news to me, and I often felt like the author should have started the book with that presidency. Going all the way back to the origins of the Service didn't offer that much more context, and I felt that bringing more recent personalities to the forefront would have made for a more interesting narrative.
And you know what? The Service's failures during the Trump administration aren't even the most interesting parts of this book. My mom won't want to hear that of course, and I won't try to convince her one way or the other, but yeah, the juiciest bits happened before Trump was even up for election.
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