American History Tellers - Presidential Assassinations | Interview | 5

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

The job of guarding the President’s life belongs to the men and women of the United States Secret Service. There have been many highs and lows in the agency’s more than 150-year history ��� most poignantly the assassination of JFK in 1963. On today’s show Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig joins host Lindsay Graham to discuss the agency’s response to assassination attempts over the years, and her book Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersSupport us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's June 18th, 1964 in Washington, D.C. You're the head of the Secret Service, and today you're testifying before the Warren Commission, the panel created by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The agency you've served for 27 years has been criticized for not doing enough to protect President Kennedy that awful day in Dallas. You're hoping to use today's testimony to lobby for much-needed improvements to the service so you can rebuild the public's trust and your agents' morale.

But after an hour of questioning, it seems the commission is mostly interested in your agents drinking the night before Kennedy's murder. The lead investigator, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, glowers at you through his wire-rimmed glasses. Now, do you really expect us to believe that these men, drinking in beatnik joints into the early morning hours, were as alert the next day as they should be when charged with the tremendous responsibility of protecting the president?

I do not condone the drinking, sir. But I think these men responded as well as anyone could under the circumstances. Don't you think they would have been a bit sharper that afternoon had they not been drinking the night before? Sir, I do not believe their reaction time was the deciding factor. They could not have done anything differently to prevent the tragedy. I don't think these men should be blamed, and I don't want to stigmatize them for the rest of their lives. I'm confident that it won't happen again. Warren gives you a skeptical snort.

Well, how can you be so sure? Have you learned anything from the events in Dallas on November 22nd? Finally, these are questions you've been waiting to be asked. You sit up straighter and look the Chief Justice in the eye. Well, yes, sir, we have. In the wake of these tragic events, we've conducted a complete re-examination of the service. I've been working on a report with some recommendations. All right, so Chas? We need to hire more agents, for starters. I believe we should double the size of the president's full-time detail, from 28 to 50.

Anything else? Yes, sir. We're also working with IBM and the Rand Corporation to use computers to analyze reported threats, and we intend to work more closely with other intelligence agencies. But we need Congress to approve the funds. You go on to explain that in your three decades with the service, you've seen your budgets depleted. You need better salaries, more modern equipment,

and additional training. You're counting on your testimony today to prompt Congress to act. Chief Justice Warren scribbles down some notes as you're talking, then sets down his pen. Well, I want to thank you and the members of your Secret Service for the cooperation you've given to this commission.

You've all been very diligent, very helpful, and we appreciate it. Well, thank you, sir, and know that this is just the beginning. We hope to improve, and we'd appreciate this commission's support so that the president will be protected to the best of our abilities. You rise to leave the meeting chamber, near the

last of hundreds of witnesses, and the commission is set to release its findings in a couple of months, including recommendations for changes to the Secret Service. But you're not waiting around for the commission's report. You've already drafted a list of improvements that you believe will make the Secret Service the most robust protective force in the world. Losing President Kennedy that day in Dallas was a traumatic blow to you and your agents. And you're determined to ensure

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Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. Find what piques your imagination. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial, and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Hey, this is Nick. And this is Jack. And we just launched a brand new podcast called The Best Idea Yet. You may have heard of it. It's all about the untold origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. Music In 1964, the head of the Secret Service, James Rowley, sat before the Warren Commission and asked for help.

Rowley insisted that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was not the fault of his agents, but the inevitable result of poor resources and shrinking budgets. If the Secret Service was going to keep future presidents safe, it needed more support. Rowley got what he asked for. Over the next few years, the Secret Service hired more than 200 additional agents, modernized its systems, and broke ground on a new training facility, which would eventually bear Rowley's name. When attempts to assassinate Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan failed, many saw it as proof that the Secret Service had learned from its mistakes. No president since Reagan has been injured by a

would-be assassin. But in recent years, there have been ominous signs that the Secret Service remains vulnerable to security breaches. In 2012, the agency was rocked by a scandal in which agents assigned to President Barack Obama brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms. And twice, in 2014 and 2017, intruders have gotten onto the White House grounds. One made it as far as the East Room, where he was just steps away from the first family's private residence. My guest today found enough of these Secret Service failings to write a book about them. Carol Lennig is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post and the author of Zero Fail, the Rise and Fall of the

Secret Service. She joins us today to discuss the fallout from the JFK assassination, the attempt on Reagan's life, and what the Secret Service's recent struggles mean for its future. Here's our conversation. Carol Lennig, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you so much for having me, Lindsay. So first off, I'm curious to know what led to your investigative reporting into the Secret Service. How did you convince people inside the agency to share so much about their day-to-day operations? It's such a good question. It started like the way a lot of good reporting ends up beginning, which is almost by accident. There was an amazing, and at the time what we thought was the most humiliating scandal the Secret Service had ever endured. It was a group

of Secret Service agents protecting President Obama. They were shipped home unceremoniously and under investigation, leaving Cartagena in Colombia because while they were supposed to be protecting the president and getting the city and the hotel secured for his visit, they actually were getting hammered, drunk, and hiring prostitutes cavorting in their hotel rooms with these strangers they'd never met before. That was all in the hours before President Obama arrived in 2012, and I was asked to help a colleague figure out what in the world happened. In the course of that, I met a lot of Secret Service agents who felt that we weren't accurately describing what had happened. They wanted to get it correct.

They wanted to help me get it right. And we built a lot of trust. And what I learned in the course of those conversations was that they were worried about something even bigger than hookers and, you know, a boys gone wild weekend in South America. They were really worried that the Secret Service security bubble around the president was porous and broken. And they said it as plainly as this, they feared that President Obama would be killed on their watch. And that drew me into a whole nother realm of reporting that was so much more interesting than the bumbling, humiliating sex scandal on a foreign trip. Now, on this series,

we certainly are investigating the exact moments in which sometimes the Secret Service has failed, in which the porosity of their protection is punctured or proven. The story of President Kennedy in particular was told just recently on our series. And that was a tragedy for the Secret Service agents involved and their director, James Rowley. How did they respond to what I guess is a failure of their mission. It was a tragedy for the country, but the Secret Service, for them, it was a trauma like a war wound, a hair shirt that agents wore for decades.

Agents became alcoholics who had been on JFK's detail that day. They committed suicide in the years after. This was a pain that went deep. And the response of the director at the time, Director Rowley, was to immediately help investigators but help protect the agents from the incredible guilt they all felt and to try to lift that off their shoulders. He had a good argument in his arsenal, and the argument was that for months and years before Kennedy was assassinated in broad daylight, he had been pleading for more resources, more detail agents to keep up with Kennedy's jet-setting lifestyle and incredibly ambitious schedule. And he'd been turned down over and over again by the White House, by Kennedy himself,

and by Congress. So he was on record saying that that bubble was under strain and could not keep up. So in the wake of the assassination, he worked triple time to rebuild the agency almost from scratch and build into its protocols a routinized, professionalized way of creating a security net around the president. It wasn't easy. Kennedy, not only was his schedule a strain, but he liked to give his agents the slip. He was often trying to rendezvous with various women on the road and didn't really want the Secret Service in tow all the time. Of course, his death changed everything, and agents really bore the brunt of that. They made some mistakes that day, some tragic mistakes, but they were also ill-prepared for really protecting him and creating, as you said, an unporous bubble around him.

Well, you mentioned mistakes that were made that day. What were they in the luxury of hindsight? Well, one of the most significant mistakes that the Warren Commission identified and that the agents who I interviewed on Kennedy's detail, what they shared with me was that they never really created a way to assess the possibility of him being shot from a high-rise building, right? Today, the Secret Service focuses so intensely on the line of sight. What's the line of sight to the president on every stage, at every entry into a building, at every moment in which he's exposed to the public. There were, sadly, warnings. A white supremacist in Florida was caught on tape talking to an informant about how there were plans to kill Kennedy and that one of the ways that was being considered was to shoot him from a high-rise building with a rifle.

And indeed, that was presaged weeks before he was killed. And the Secret Service did not handle that incoming intelligence and take action upon it. That's one. The second that's much more humiliating and painful for the agents that I interviewed, some of them literally broke into tears when we were talking. Many of them had been drinking the night before. As one agent told me, we went out to blow off some steam. We worked like the Dickens all day, every day, with no rest. So in Fort Worth, they were gathered at a speakeasy to try to get some food, but also they were drinking some clear liquor, and some of them were out until 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m., even though they were on the day shift to protect the president as his motorcade traveled through Dallas.

So a president is assassinated, and some of the agents have been caught drinking the night before. How did Director Raleigh not be asked to resign? Mm-hmm. You know, when I think about Washington today, there is no way he would have survived. But he was on record as having pled for resources, having warned that the president's life was, you know, he probably didn't say it this dramatically, but that the president's life was endangered by the threadbare nature of the Secret Service's security at that time. And Rowley had that argument with Congress, look, I asked you to do something about this, You didn't. He'd asked Lyndon Johnson, and Lyndon Johnson, now the president, also had not taken up or acted upon his pleas for help.

Rowley also worked with the Warren Commission to a certain extent, while I think deftly trying to protect his team from being responsible for this American tragedy, for solely bearing that burden. He said poignantly when asked over and over again by Justice Warren, the head of the commission, how can it be, I'm paraphrasing here, how can it be that a man who has been out all night and taking something to drink isn't impaired in some way, doesn't have slower reflexes the next morning. Rowley insisted in answer to Justice Warren, yes, there may have been slower reflexes, but they are not responsible for his death. That is not the reason he died that day. And he had also a good argument there. A person with a rifle from a high building had a clear shot at the president. And if a few things had broken differently, Kennedy may not have suffered the third absolutely fatal shot to the left side of his brain. But we'll never know. Well, beyond the embarrassment and tragedy, the Secret Service has a history itself. It started not really to protect the president. Can you remind us, the day that Abraham Lincoln was killed. He was, along with his Secretary of the Treasury, very agitated and concerned about the volume of the paper notes that were being traded back and forth were fabrications by essentially counterfeit gangs. that would break apart these gangs, capture the plates they were using to make fabricated bills,

and stop the counterfeit trade. That was the goal. His secretary of treasury met with Abraham Lincoln on the day he was killed before he went to the Ford Theater and posited this proposal that this special unit would be developed inside the Department of Treasury. And is the pursuit of counterfeiters still an aegis of the Secret Service? It is. Protecting the U.S. currency and making sure that it is not fake continues to be one of the Secret Service's missions, even though they are not any longer a part of the Department of Treasury.

After 9-11, they were placed under the huge new behemoth agency, the Department of Homeland Security. How did that transition manifest itself? Why did they look at a financial crimes unit to protect the president? Presidents and their Oval Office administrations had resisted adopting a formalized security force. The idea was the White House is the people's house. The whole point of the American experiment was to break away from the royals and the trappings of kings. And a palace guard simply didn't look very good politically. That's why it was resisted year after year after year, despite the fact that two presidents were assassinated. When a third president was assassinated, McKinley,

at close range in Buffalo, New York, lawmakers and White House aides acknowledged that they had to start protecting the president's life. Somebody did. And it had to be formalized and not just catch as catch can. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House.

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What kind of reforms did the agency make after that assassination? They made a lot. I really do feel, and I say in the book Zero Fail, that Rowley, along with the help of particular lawmakers, rebuilt that agency from scratch. They added 200 new agents. They developed a computer software system. Computers were very new at that time, but IBM, in working with them, they started thinking about gathering and collecting and assessing intelligence about threats against the president rather than just putting them in a file, you know, an old box of index cards. They wanted to have a more robust way of assessing threats in different cities that the president might visit. They worked on routinized, instantaneous, reflexive protection of the president. It was called attack on the principal.

And agents were trained in how to make split-second decisions whenever a threat arose. This really professionalized the business of a Secret Service agent. That may be the most significant event in the Secret Service's rebuilding in the wake of Kennedy's death, because now the Secret Service wasn't just relying on good policing and good experience of former veterans of wars. They were relying on training that was specific to covering and evacuating the president from danger. Did they also receive the resources that they required, finally? They did. In fact, what's, again, ironic is they received essentially what Rowley had asked for in 1963 before the assassination attempt.

Let's move forward almost 20 years to March of 1981. This is the moment of the attempted assassination of then-President Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. in D.C. Can you remind us what happened that day? You know, President Reagan had only been president for about six weeks, maybe seven. He had a detail leader who hadn't really spent any time with him. And Jerry Parr, that detail leader, decided, you know, I think today's the day I need to go and spend some time with the new boss. And Reagan has a fairly mundane day planned. He's going to go speak to a union at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C., near DuPont Circle, a place the Secret Service has been in and out of hundreds of times.

It's rainy and kind of warm that day, and Parr is thinking it might be a good idea for Reagan to wear his bulletproof vest, but he's resisted in the past because it's so sweaty and hot, so Parr doesn't push it. Reagan to wear his bulletproof vest, but he's resisted in the past because it's so sweaty and hot, so Parr doesn't push it. But on that day, three really tragic mistakes are made. One, as the president leaves the Capitol Hilton, the Washington Hilton, forgive me, a man named John Hinckley is lingering around a group of camera reporters who are stationed outside the Hilton to catch footage of the new president. And that area that they are standing looks like a bunch of media, but it hasn't been screened by the Secret Service. So no one knows that a man

who's not a reporter is standing amid these cameras, feet away from the president's limousine, and that he has a gun. The second pretty terrible mistake that's made is that Hinckley has indicated previously his desire to kill a president, and the Secret Service doesn't put those two dots together. A third mistake that they make is as they bring Reagan out of the Hilton, there is no cover in the line of sight. Remember, John F. Kennedy's death is blamed on a clear line of sight for a rifle to hit him from many, many, many yards away. And in this case, Hinckley is feet away. I mean, maybe 15 to 12 feet away when he is able to pull off six shots. And there is no break between the public area where he is now standing and the president of the United States. There are amazing successes, however, that day.

We mentioned before the attack on the principal. Jerry Parr is well- We mentioned before the attack on the principal. Jerry Parr is well-trained in the attack on the principal. And what he does, the minute he hears a gunshot, he doesn't look around. He doesn't try to figure out who got hit. the president, whose shoulder he is on the left-hand shoulder of Reagan, and begins shoving him as hard as he can towards the open door of the waiting limousine. He slams the president so hard that Reagan believes his rib has been broken because he hits sort of that little hump in the back seat on the floor. Parr lands on top of him, and Ray Shattuck, another detail leader behind him, shoves the door closed while pushing both of their legs upward in a cockamamie kind of angle

just so he can shut the door. And another amazing agent throws his body. He's blocking, obviously, Reagan's one line of sight on one flank of Reagan. He throws his arms and chest open and faces the sound of the shots, which is facing Hinckley, and he takes a bullet in the stomach to try to shield the president who's behind him. The attack on the principal execution by all of these people is sort of gobsmacking because there were only a few seconds for them to act, and everything they did saved the president's life. And of course, President Reagan lives. Were the Secret Service agents in that moment really aware of how dangerous a situation it was that the president was injured. Jerry Parr, also based on the attack on the principal training and his own, what I'd call battlefield wound assessment, he begins looking the president up and down, feeling along the

sides of him because Reagan is coughing a little and spitting up a little bit of pink, what appears to be pink oxygenated blood. And Parr initially says to the driver, who is an agent too, Drew Unruh, he says, get us to the White House right now. Drew Unruh speeds off to the White House. Parr begins assessing what's wrong with Reagan. Why is he spitting up blood? Reagan doesn't think he's been shot. He thinks he's broken a rib. He says that to Jerry Parr. Parr is not convinced that there isn't something else lingering and wrong that he can't find.

And so then he makes a new assessment. As the limousine is speeding, you know, 65 miles an hour through a downtown thoroughfare, he says, take us to George Washington Hospital. And off they go. And that is one of also the critical pivot moments that helped save Reagan's life. A doctor later tells the media, days later when Reagan has survived, that he did not believe Reagan would survive if he had gone to the White House first. Now, it's in this situation where Reagan is shot, it's blindingly obvious that the president is in danger. But I imagine that there are threats against every U.S. president every day. How does the Secret Service vet them all and try to figure out which ones are real. I don't envy the Protective Intelligence Division,

a unit of the Secret Service that is responsible for taking all this incoming. You know, the number of threats against presidents have so mushroomed. As you and your listeners probably know, the threats against President Barack Obama when he came into office, the first Black president, were so enormous that at least initially they were four times as high as the volume for the previous president, George Bush. And the service has the incredibly daunting task of running down each of those threats to assess, is this a drunk guy in a bar who mouthed off and doesn't mean

anything? Or is this mentally unstable person radicalized in some way and plotting to take action? Do they have the intention? Do they have the means? And now we have to go interview them and find out. There are hundreds of interviews that Secret Service agents do in field offices all over the country trying to run down that question. You've mentioned the history of distress of Secret Service agents and the difficulty of the job, not just in vetting the threats, but just the rigors of actually being a guard of the president. What is your sense, having talked to some of these agents, of what it is like to do the job of a Secret Service agent? You know, some of my agent sources, former and current, have joked about how it would

be hard to do a television series about their lives because it's a lot of waiting in stairwells for disaster. You know, there's a lot of waiting in stairwells for disaster. You know, there's a lot of waiting. There's a lot of sitting, standing, impossibly draining times where they must be on the lookout and on guard on tenterhooks all the time, even when everything looks peaceable and dull. And I think that's part of the incredible drain on the psyche of Secret Service agents. The agent who was in charge of advanced security in Dallas the day that Kennedy was killed

has since died since I interviewed him. But he relayed to me that he felt as though his head was on a stick and that it was just swiveling all the time back and forth. The tension of looking for the arm that's coming forward or the piece of metal or a flinty shadow in your peripheral vision, that this was one of the most stressful experiences, always being on the lookout for that which you don't know is coming.

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Buy it now. Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. We've been talking about assassination attempts, but of course the Secret Service is also in charge of security of the White House grounds, and there have been several breaches, 2014 and another one in 2017, where persons got inside the White House. What happened in these incidents? And what does this tell you about the agency, you know, now, recently? Well, the incident in 2014 was heart-stopping for Secret Service agents and for members of the White House staff

who likened it to having a home invasion, a burglary. And I should stress that President Obama and Michelle Obama and the children were not at home at the time. President Obama had just lifted off from the South Lawn in his helicopter with his daughters heading to Camp David for the weekend. Michelle Obama was already there getting things ready. And so as that liftoff happens, a disabled Iraq veteran with delusions and psychological struggles found a small area of the White House fence, which was not impenetrable and not impossible to jump. And he began loping around the north lawn, around the rose bushes that typically, and the hedges that typically sort of create a boundary

of sorts in front of the North Portico. And he strode up through those hedges and strode right up onto the North Portico and waited for a second and then opened the door. And the layers that are supposed to be duplicative layers of protection for the White House all failed. I remember interviewing a former Secret Service agent who'd been a very senior person who said, I just can't believe all the circles failed. I remember interviewing a former Secret Service agent who'd been a very senior person who said, I just can't believe all the circles failed. And the first one was when he got over the fence, there should have been a instantaneous alarm that told everybody on all the agents and officers on the grounds, we've got an intruder and a dog, a canine dog that was on the north grounds should have been released from a waiting van. And that dog would have brought that person to ground and then agents and officers could have surrounded him and detained him.

But instead, the person in charge of the canine dog does not have his radio headset with him, his official one, and he's listening only with one ear because he's on the phone at the time with his wife. So he doesn't know what's happening, and he has not released the dog. The officers who are on duty that are part of the emergency reaction force don't rush to intervene and stop the intruder because they believe, as one said later in testimony, where's the dog? Where's the dog? The dog should be here. And so they don't intervene, and that's how he makes it to the North Portico. Another officer who's just been chatting amiably with her friend outside, she doesn't know there's an intruder on the grounds because the White House has asked many of the officers of the Secret Service to turn down the alarm boxes at the doors

because they're so loud. Whenever there's a fence jumper, it creates this intense radio sound that is annoying to the guests and to the staff, and it happens a lot. So they ask them to turn that down and that communication. So she does not know that a jumper has made it on the property. She doesn't properly lock the doors. When she finally sees her colleague outside drawing his gun and realizes there's something wrong, it's too late and she hasn't properly locked it. She tries but fails, and the intruder makes his way in. She reaches for her weapon, but he knocks her down and begins running inside the mansion, passing the landing of steps that lead to the president's home.

If the president had been home, this intruder would have been a flight and a half away from the first family. You mentioned it was in the Obama years, at the beginning of this interview, the horrible embarrassment of the Cartagena, Colombia incident. And I think that speaks to perhaps a pervading culture in the Secret Service that is a bit of a boys' club. So I'm wondering, how has the Secret Service modernized or addressed this culture and especially able to address its ability to be more diverse with agents of color or women? Unfortunately, this is an agency of patriots, and I want to emphasize that so many of them risked their careers, their jobs, their comforts to reveal the weaknesses of the agency because they wanted it to be stronger. But there is a subset of the Secret Service that uses the title Secret Service and the national

security mission of the agency to cover up not secure protocols, but to cover up their own misconduct and their security failures. There's a culture of foreign trips, for example, in which, you know, agents are expected to work tirelessly. They give up their Christmases. They give up children's birthdays. They give up anniversaries to always be on the road on this, like, permanent watch protecting democracy. And some have felt so abused, essentially, by this job that they began to look at foreign trips and some out-of-town trips as a little bit of a perk, a place to let their hair down, a place to party. And the Secret Service claimed, the leadership claimed to us, they'd never seen anything like what happened in Cartagena. But in my reporting, I found that

it had happened multiple times, and it had been covered up over and over again. Instead of actually fixing what was rotten and starting to rot more and more of the Secret Service. President Obama, in dealing with some of these eruptions, meets with the director of the Secret Service at the time, Julia Pearson, and in a hotel in Brussels where she is briefing him on the latest cultural problem, a group of Secret Service agents getting slammed, hammered in the Hague, and one of them passing out drunk in the President's Hotel. She's explaining to him what happened and also what actions she has taken. And he says to her, you know, your problem is you don't have enough women in the Secret Service.

She says, you know, I'm working on it. But I don't think hiring women alone is the solution, but it is part of the solution. And it's not just women agents that the agency is struggling with. There is a lawsuit that has been brought against the agency in regards to agents of color, correct? That's right. One of the most painful periods for the Secret Service

in the late 90s is when a group of Black agents bring a lawsuit against their employer. Their argument is that they've been racially discriminated against, and they have some really good facts on their side. One of the agents is able to show all of the ways he scored higher than white agents, some of whom he had trained, who then got the jobs he applied for. And this happened over and over again for many, many black agents, female and male.

Eventually, the Secret Service, stubbornly resisting for decades, settled this lawsuit under Barack Obama and Secretary of Homeland Security Jay Johnson, who said they did not want this suit to continue. the most painful parts of that was the discovery in the lawsuit, which revealed that senior leaders in the Secret Service were fairly regularly making racist jokes with each other using their work email and work phones and dismissing and discarding the concerns of Black agents on a regular basis. So for an agency with an over 150-year history, charged with the protection of the perhaps most important American alive, there's a lot of scandal, embarrassment, and tragedy. Based on your reporting, what do you think needs to be done to improve the agency in the future? I'm disappointed to say, despite a blue-rib making so many solid fact-based recommendations in the wake of the 2014 jumper getting inside the White House, and in the wake of me writing a X hundred page book outlining all the vulnerabilities and problems in the agency and what could be done to fix it. Very few of those fixes have been implemented. It is going to require a president sitting down and demanding that these changes and reforms take

place. The Secret Service sources who spoke to me are begging for this help. They know that it is an extremely awkward situation for a president to toy and tinker and essentially criticize the unit that protects him and his family. But they are pleading for a president to do that. They wanted Biden to do it, they wanted Trump to do it, and they wanted Obama to do it. They were on the road to that with President Obama's blue ribbon panel that he named to make those fixes, but it all got tossed out the window when Donald Trump became president, and very little of it has been revived under President Biden. I empathize with a president who's got a pandemic to deal with, an economy that's struggling, a host of other issues, including the rising threat of domestic extremism that's got to be tackled. But these public servants

need resources. They need a culture that will be shook up, that there will be consequences for misconduct, and they need a leadership team that is going to reward meritocracy rather than loyalty and cover-up. Those are the critical features. They do have to modernize dramatically their security net and apparatus. The 2017 break-in at the White House, a jumper who got to the East Door and jiggled the door and was on the grounds for 17 minutes without being detected, revealed that the White House security system was almost like a late model car that was breaking down regularly. Alarms, sensors, radios, all of them failed in different ways. And that modernization will require resources, and a president has to get his shoulder behind that in order for Congress to agree.

Well, Carol Lennig, thank you so much for joining me today on American History Tellers. Thank you for focusing on this subject. That was my conversation with Carol Lennig. She is a three-time winner of the George Polk Award for Investigative Reporting and author of the New York Times bestseller, Zero Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. Her most recent book, with co-author Philip Rucker, is I Alone Can Fix It, Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year. From Wondery, this is the fifth and final episode of Presidential Assassinations from American History Tellers. In our next season, in 1848, the discovery of gold sent people from around the world flocking to California,

hoping to strike it rich. In the ensuing frenzy, San Francisco became a boomtown, and fortunes were made and lost virtually overnight. But for many of California's inhabitants, the mines had a dark side. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. Our producer is Alita Rozanski. Managing producer is Matt Gant. Senior managing producer is Tanja Thigpen. And our senior producer is Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marsha Louis for Wondery. Dracula, the ancient vampire who terrorizes Victorian London.

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We'll reveal how author Bram Stoker raided ancient folklore, exploited Victorian fears around sex, science, and religion, and how even today we remain enthralled to his strange creatures of the night. Thank you.