The Secret Service Isn’t What Hollywood Promised Us It Was

What a lousy movie it would make! Some slightly-built small-town 20-year-old, known to his schoolmates as a nerd and a loner who was rejected for membership in the school rifle club because he was a bad shot, manages, in the hour or two before a presidential campaign rally, to make his way to the top of a nearby roof with his dad’s AR-15 and — despite his mediocre shooting ability, and despite bystanders who notice him and his gun and alert the police to his presence about an hour before the candidate is brought out onstage — comes within an inch or so of killing the most recent ex-president and leading contender for re-election to the Oval Office, while taking out one audience member and wounding two others.

A Secret Service sniper eliminates the assailant quickly enough, and it soon emerges that, unlike virtually every other American kid of his age, he has left little or no online record of his opinions, political or otherwise. As I say, if somebody made a movie of it, you’d feel cheated. You’d feel that your intelligence was being insulted. You’d walk out of the theater complaining that none of it made any sense and that every detail of the story was, for one thing, in utter contradiction to everything we think we know about the Secret Service. In America, you’d say, assassinating a former president in this day and age just isn’t that easy. This isn’t some banana republic, after all.

Hollywood Told Us the Secret Service Cared

But what do we know about the Secret Service, and where did we get our knowledge from? For one thing, we got it from movies like In the Line of Fire (1993), in which an evil genius, played by John Malkovich, is obsessed with the assassination of JFK and determined to ensure his immortality by taking out the current president, who is running for re-election, and concocts an elaborate plot to do precisely that. Malkovich’s character — who goes variously by such aliases as McCrawley, James Carney, and Booth (in honor of John Wilkes Booth), but turns out to be an embittered former CIA agent named Mitch Leary (and who has certain creepy similarities to the maniac played by Dennis Hopper in Speed, released the following year — is also obsessed with someone else: Frank Horrigan, a veteran Secret Service agent played by Clint Eastwood, who, Leary knows, was once considered the best and brightest member of that agency but who, having been on the detail that was guarding JFK on that fateful day in 1963, is still haunted by his failure to save the president. (READ MORE: Did God Save Donald Trump?)

For years Horrigan has been working the other side of the Secret Service — chasing down counterfeiters — but after Leary phones Horrigan and makes clear his obsession with him, Horrigan arranges to be placed on the president’s protective detail. What ensues is a perfect thriller, with Leary phoning Horrigan to play head games with him, not terribly unlike the way Hannibal Lecter does with Clarice Starling. He taunts him about his failed marriage and torments him about the drinking problem that Horrigan developed after Dallas. He even places himself in dangerous proximity to Horrigan only to make a run for it the moment he’s recognized. It’s a first-rate cat-and-mouse game. Meanwhile, Horrigan’s attempts to pin down Leary’s real identity prove fruitless while his efforts to persuade White House staffers to keep the president out of the limelight for his own protection are swiftly and condescendingly rebuffed. As it turns out, Leary comes up with an ingenious (and not inexpensive) way to cobble together a deadly weapon and sneak in into a high-securty presidential campaign fundraiser, and Horrigan is confronted with the nightmarish possibility of feeling responsible for the deaths of not one but two presidents.

Anyway, no more spoilers, just in case you haven’t seen it. Bottom line: In the Line of Fire is a gripping portrait of two men: One of them a would-be assassin with training in covert intelligence who carries out an elaborate plot to achieve his end, and the other a highly experienced, gifted, and dedicated Secret Service agent who, aware of this serious threat, focuses intently on tracking down the intended perpetrator and on protecting the president — with his own life, if necessary. The tension ramps up impressively: never a dull moment. In short, In the Line of Fire is a terrific piece of work. And until the real-life events that took place in Butler, Pennsylvania, the film, allowing for the usual touches of Hollywood excess, came off as a credible enough procedural.

Cheatle’s Disgraceful Performance

Then, suddenly, we were exposed to the mind-boggling incompetence — if that’s what it is — of the present-day Secret Service. There followed, this past Monday, a House committee hearing at which the director of that agency, Kimberly Cheatle — who was apparently appointed to her post in the first place because she had a connection to Jill Biden, whose priority during her tenure has reportedly been the hiring of more female and minority agents, and who agreed to appear before the House committee only because she had been subpoenaed — bobbed and weaved and dodged and stonewalled to a truly astonishing degree, serving up meaningless word salads and bushels of bureaucratese and repeatedly trying to pass the buck to FBI investigators and declining to “speak to specifics.” No matter what the question, she claimed not to know the answer. She wouldn’t even say whether she’d have resigned if Trump had been killed. As podcaster Dan Bongino noted, “Even the Democrats were ticked off.” (READ MORE: Clueless Kim Cheatle)

Indeed, rarely in recent years have members of both parties at a high-profile committee hearing seemed to be almost entirely in sync. Kweise Mfume (D–Md.) challenged Cheatle’s refusal to resign. Pete Sessions (R–Texas) accused her of playing a “shell game.” Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) called one of her answers “bullshit” and accused her of being “full of shit.” Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) called her answers “completely unsatisfactory.” Pat Fallon (R–Texas) said, “Your agency got outsmarted and outmaneuvered by a 20-year-old.” Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Fla.) pointed out that people in the crowd recognized Thomas Matthew Crooks as a threat even though the Secret Service didn’t. (Crooks and Cheatle: it sounds like the name of a shady law firm in some comedy.) Asked by Greene if she had a timeline of the events that occurred at the Trump rally in Butler, Cheatle replied that, yes, she did, but it did not contain “specifics” — an answer that caused the chamber to burst out in laughter. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did herself proud, insisting that it was unacceptable under the current circumstances to have to wait 60 days for a report explaining what went wrong in Butler. (READ MORE: Security Breach From Pearl Harbor to Butler PA)

There was a lot of competition for the honor, but perhaps the committee member who made the most apropos comment was Jared Moskowitz (D–Fla.), who compared Cheatle’s performance to those of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania whose now legendary arrogance and ineptitude last Dec. 4 at a House hearing on campus antisemitism ended up losing two of them their jobs. (The comparison proved apt: Within 24 hours, Cheatle had resigned.) As suggested by Nick Langworthy’s (R–N.Y.) comment that hers was “the worst performance I have ever seen” in a congressional hearing, Cheatle did even worse than those university presidents did: She made the Secret Service look more secretive, and in a more reprehensible manner, than one ever imagined. She also made it look as if the job of the agency’s employees — at least some of those at the very top of the organization — isn’t to serve the American people and their elected leaders, as a flick like In the Line of Fire might lull you into believing, but to serve, at best, their own shabby career ambitions, and, at worst, some nefarious cause that, at this point, one hardly dare suggest.

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