Assaults on the Presidency are uniquely suited to directing our thoughts into the conspiratorial thickets. Politics has always involved the formation and manipulation of factions, and it is tempting to conclude that all actions in that sphere, even the darkest tragedies, are the product of deliberate and intricate, if secret, planning. All of this points to why, for some Americans, it’s almost easier to believe that the recent serial failures of the Secret Service—which led, on Wednesday, to the resignation of its director [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/us/julia-pierson-secret-service.html ], Julia Pierson—are the product of some veiled collusion. It seems inconceivable that the most technologically sophisticated power in the world was incapable of tackling an intruder [ http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/omar-gonzalezs-white-house-run ] running across the White House lawn, like a punt returner headed for the end zone. Worse, amid the rash of hair-trigger law-enforcement shootings in the news, is that the Secret Service’s initial statement about the incident fell just shy of self-congratulation—they said that “the officers showed tremendous restraint and discipline in dealing with this subject”—when an aggressive response would have been reasonable, if not outright necessary. Extreme restraint in the face of actual impending danger is indistinguishable from passivity.
Earlier this month, as the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, Barack Obama’s detail allowed an armed man with a history of violence into an elevator with the President—and didn’t realize it until the man later handed his gun to his supervisor. Better that this was the result of cold malice than of abject incompetence, a certain line of thinking goes, because a conspiracy is, by definition, a limited affair. (Hillary Clinton and Joseph McCarthy had it wrong with their talk of conspiracies that were “vast” and “immense”—past a handful people, a conspiracy is demoted to a scheme or maybe a mob. By the time it can be aptly described as “immense,” it’s virtually a ballot referendum.) Incompetence, however, knows no bounds; neither does negligence.
These incidents have pushed to the fore a common, unspoken fear for the President’s safety that has abided the Obama years. Early in his ascent to the stratosphere of political possibility, Obama was commonly compared to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.—the suggestion being that his election would, after a long winter of cynicism, reintroduce idealism to American life. In polite dialogue, one mentioned that Kennedy and King have something more than idealism in common: an ugly legacy of assassination. Occasionally, the unpleasantness surfaced, as when Hillary Clinton ineptly mentioned [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/clinton-calls-vp-chatter-completely-untrue/ ] Robert F. Kennedy as a rationale for her decision to remain in the Presidential race through June, 2008, despite being behind: “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”
At this juncture, it’s also easy to forget that, early in his first Presidential campaign, candidate Obama’s popularity with white voters outstripped his standing among black ones. There were many reasons cited for this: his lack of name recognition, the sheer number of black leaders who’d already endorsed Hillary Clinton, the canard that African-Americans somehow found his “blackness” credentials to be suspect. But the least openly discussed element of this reticence was simple fear. Just ahead of the 2008 South Carolina primary, black voters told me that they considered voting for Clinton as a favor to Michelle Obama. When one woman said that she wouldn’t vote for Obama because “he has two daughters, and he needs to be around to help raise them,” she was not referring to the demands of the Presidency cutting into his quality time with his kids. Congressman John Lewis, whose skull was fractured by police officers during a march on Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, in 1965, explained it succinctly when I spoke to him in 2008: “Those of us who lived through Martin Luther King’s assassination have never gotten over it.”
These murmurs were so consistent that Steve Kroft asked Michelle Obama about them directly, during an interview on “60 Minutes” in early 2007. “This is a hard question to ask,” Kroft said. “But, a number of years ago, Colin Powell was thinking about running for President, and his wife, Alma, really did not want him to run. She was worried about some crazy person with a gun.” Michelle replied that the dangers of the Presidency were not novel. “I don’t lose sleep about it,” she said. “Because the realities are, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station”—certainly the first time that this particular demographic truth has been enlisted as a reason to be optimistic about a black man’s prospects.
We’ve become accustomed to the sight of a black President governing through these dangers—ever-present, contextual, and undiminished—in the way that sirens become ambient sound in New York City. This is one of the less frequently noted accomplishments of his Presidency. In 2008, Obama projected calm amid political turbulence. As President, this demeanor has been part of the reason that such fears have receded to the extent that they have. Yet a population that lived through the September 11th attacks can scarcely ever confuse remote likelihoods with complete impossibilities. Dictatorships are measured by the basest actions of the tyrants who control them, but the metric of democracy is the actions of its citizenship. The bipartisan outrage that has emerged this week is not a sign of a political thaw; it’s an indicator that neither party cares to see America reduced by the unquantifiable sum that Dealey Plaza or Ford’s Theatre diminished it.
The Secret Service that was antsy about the prospect of a newly inaugurated Obama walking along Pennsylvania Avenue in January, 2009, is, as Vox reported [ http://www.vox.com/2014/9/29/6859903/president-obama-has-faced-three-times-as-many-threats-on-his-life-as ], handling three times the number of death threats that attended other Presidencies. It is doing so on a severely limited budget. Speaking before a House inquiry into the security lapses, Pierson remarked that the budget sequester has left the Service nearly five hundred and fifty people short of their optimum number of personnel. This at a time when the factions we need to be most concerned with are driven not only by the President’s identity but by American foreign policy and the dictates of the interminable war on terror. What signal does Secret Service ineptitude send to foreign adversaries? Last weekend, the President spoke of how the American intelligence community had underestimated the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham’s ambitions. No one vaguely familiar with the assassination of William McKinley or with anarchist “propaganda of the deed” killings of heads of state can take comfort in the idea that a loosely organized band united by ideological zealotry is incapable of wreaking havoc.
To the conspiracist, the feverish intent of secret cabals animates every facet of daily life. The realist knows that a single individual enabled by complacency or negligence can alter the path of history. The danger of the Secret Service’s failures is not in the narrowly averted disasters; it’s in the capacity of those failures to generate even more dangers on their own.
Some Blacks See Secret Service as Flawed Shield for the President
Members of the Secret Service waiting for President Obama in Evanston, Ill., on Thursday. Several breaches in security have rocked the agency recently. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
The furor that led to this week’s resignation of the director of the Secret Service resonated deeply among blacks, outraged that those supposed to be guarding the first black president were somehow falling down on the job — and suspicious even without evidence that it may be deliberate.
“It is something that is widespread in black circles,” said Representative Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, who like Mr. Cummings is an African-American Democrat who has been approached repeatedly by voters expressing such a concern. “I’ve been hearing this for some time: ‘Well, the Secret Service, they’re trying to expose the president.’ You hear a lot of that from African-Americans in particular.”
Both Mr. Cummings and Mr. Cleaver said that they did not believe the Secret Service lapses reported recently had anything to do with Mr. Obama’s race and that they had tried to dispel the notion among their constituents. But the profound doubts they have encountered emphasize the nation’s persistent racial divide and reflect an abiding fear for Mr. Obama’s security that has unnerved blacks still mindful of the assassinations of Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It is a longstanding fear. Colin L. Powell’s wife urged him not to run for president in 1996 out of fear that he might be targeted. And when Mr. Obama took office in January 2009, the Secret Service recorded an alarming surge in threats against him. The threat level since then has actually fallen back to a rate more typical of previous presidents, officials said, but potential racial animosity persists in risk calculations by the Secret Service as it seeks to protect Mr. Obama.
The Secret Service does not discuss the nature of threats against Mr. Obama in much detail, but said the agency was fervently devoted to his security.
“The Secret Service is committed to protecting the first family and the president at all costs,” said Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the agency. “We recognize that protecting the president is a sacred trust we have with the American public and that they place in us. It’s never mattered to the service who the president is because we recognize that trust.”
Mr. Obama has consistently made a point of expressing faith in the Secret Service teams that surround him each day. “The president has no shortage of appreciation for the men and women who serve in the Secret Service, their bravery, their sacrifice, their determination, and the hard work and the courage they put on the line every day,” Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman, told reporters on Thursday.
But concern over Mr. Obama’s security has been a quiet but consistent theme from the beginning of his rise in politics. Michelle Obama expressed worry even before he was elected to the Senate in 2004. She later said she dreaded the day he would receive Secret Service protection because it would indicate that threats were being made. And in fact, the agency assigned agents to guard him starting in May 2007 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/us/politics/04obama.html ], the earliest a presidential candidate has ever been provided protection.
It became such a refrain during that campaign that Mr. Obama found himself constantly reassuring supporters even as some of his aides fretted that his possible vulnerability would discourage some blacks from voting for him. “I’ve got the best protection [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/us/politics/25memo.html ] in the world,” Mr. Obama reassured supporters who brought up the issue. “So stop worrying.”
The Secret Service did detect a spate of threats around the time Mr. Obama won the presidency and took office. But without providing numbers, the agency flatly denied reports that he had received three or four times as many as other presidents and added that they eventually subsided. “After his first election, there was a spike in his numbers,” Mr. Donovan said. “They’ve leveled out and they’ve been consistent and similar to his predecessors.”
For many blacks, the recent series of missteps by the agency charged with his protection has echoed powerfully. “One of the greatest fears of a first black president was harm being done to him,” Roland Martin, the talk show host, said on his radio program [ http://rolandmartinreports.com/blog/2014/10/newsone-now-audio-podcast-secret-service-on-the-hot-seat/ ] this week. The ability of a fence-jumper to make it all the way into the White House brought that home. “I can understand one or two, but for five layers to fail in the White House of all places?”
Charles D. Ellison wrote on The Root, a black-oriented online news site, that the episodes raised questions [ http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2014/09/secret_service_can_t_slip_up_with_this_president.html ]. “There could be only two reasons that Secret Service protection for President Barack Obama is slipping these days,” he wrote. “Either agents missed the memo that he’s the first black president or they really are just that overwhelmed.”
Such sentiments are not uncommon. Joshua DuBois, a former White House aide to Mr. Obama, said the president’s security feels personal for many blacks. “There’s a broad extended family around the country of moms and aunts and uncles who feel a real sense of kinship with this first family, and they want to make sure they’re protected and whole,” he said. “So you see a lot of concern right now.”
Some supporters of the president have long asserted that he has been treated with less respect by political opponents and the media, attributing that to his race. That has fueled suspicion that perhaps the Secret Service has not been as committed to him either.
Donald W. Tucker, one of the first black members of the Secret Service, who retired from the agency in 1990 and wrote a book [ http://www.dontuckerbooks.com/index.php ] about his experiences, said that he had no reason to believe the agency had not protected Mr. Obama vigorously but that he heard the concern regularly.
“I would say over 75 percent of the African-American community are suspicious and think that could be a situation, based on all the other things they think has happened to President Obama because he’s an African-American, politically,” he said. “They’re adding that to the pot.”
Representative Steven Horsford, a Nevada Democrat who is black, was among those who grilled Julia Pierson during a hearing before she resigned as Secret Service director this week. “I was at my church on Sunday and people were asking about it; they were concerned about it,” he said in an interview afterward. “They are shocked and outraged by the lack of competence.”
Mr. Cleaver said that even though “I’m as paranoid as anyone else,” he rejected the suspicion and added that its prevalence troubled him. “There’s nothing further from the truth, and it’s a little dangerous for us to allow that thinking to grow and spread,” he said. “To the degree we can dismantle it, we should. I’m going to dispel it as much as I can.”
Michael D. Shear and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
Ex-Secret Service Agent: Obama Should Appoint Allen West To Head Secret Service He argued that the U.S. has brought in the military to protect the White House before — during World War II. October 1, 2014 http://crooksandliars.com/2014/10/ex-secret-service-agent-obama-should [with comments]
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