“America wants to project the image of being free and open, ‘of the people.’ As recently as 1881, sixteen years after Lincoln’s assassination and fresh off James Garfield’s, the country rejected the idea of a presidential security force because it smacked of ‘royals’ hiding behind an imperial guard. Despite the inherent dangers, Bill Clinton and JFK continually subverted their detail agents to get closer to their adoring fans – the latter famously ditching his detail to go for a swim at a public beach in California. Reagan’s handlers engaged in a heated debate with the Service over the optics of using metal detectors at the president’s first public appearance after the attempt on his life. Even internally, agents have nearly come to blows over such issues, including whether long guns on the White House roof would create the impression that the leader of the free world lives in a military compound…”-Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret ServiceIn protecting the life of the President of the United States, the Secret Service has one of the most important jobs in the world. Given the number of guns and unstable persons in the country, along with the fact that roughly fifty percent of the population hates the president at any given time, and it also has one of the toughest jobs. With a cool name, a patina of professionalism, and sixty years since the last murdered president, the Secret Service also seems like it works. By the time you have finished Carol Leonnig’s Zero Fail, that conclusion has been heavily scrutinized. Indeed, without ever saying it directly, it is hard to leave with any other impression than that the safety of America’s chief executive is more a matter of blind chance than anything else. *** Zero Fail is subtitled The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. This implies that the presidential protection detail once occupied lofty heights, from which it has only recently tumbled. Thus, it is a bit ironic that Leonnig begins her narrative with John F. Kennedy, and the Secret Service’s greatest failure. On November 22, 1963, three shots were fired at President Kennedy as he sat in an open vehicle traveling through Dallas, Texas. After the first shot rang out, Kennedy’s driver hesitated, and looked behind him, instead of mashing the accelerator of the powerful limo. As Leonnig notes, this pause – contrary to protocol and training – left Kennedy wide open for the kill-shot. To make matters worse for the Secret Service, the Warren Commission later discovered that several Secret Service agents had been out drinking and carousing till the wee hours, appearing for duty sleep-deprived and hungover. Though it cannot be said that this directly led to President Kennedy’s death, it certainly proved a bad look. Things would not improve going forward. *** Once finished with President Kennedy, Leonnig moves in chronological fashion through the next ten presidents, taking us all the way to 2020. At nearly 500 pages of text, Zero Fail is nothing if not ambitious. Structurally, it is divided into five big sections, each meant to represent a different stage of the Secret Service’s progression toward ineptitude. The important thing to mention here is that Zero Fail is an institutional history, as opposed to an operational history. In other words, this is a forensic examination of a bureaucracy, rather than a comprehensive account of what the Secret Service has done in the field. Leonnig is not really interested in retelling close calls, or in describing training, tactics, or technology. To be sure, there are some set pieces, such as the aforementioned Kennedy assassination. She also covers Squeaky Fromme’s attempt on Gerald Ford, and John Hinckley’s shooting of Ronald Reagan. These high-drama moments, however, are delivered almost grudgingly, without any real verve. It’s hard to underplay events of such potentially world-historical import, but Leonnig somehow manages. *** Instead of presenting the things that make the Secret Service interesting, Leonnig is hyper-focused on office politics, bad-boy behavior, and the increased politicization of the agency. More precisely, Zero Fail is the end-result of Leonnig’s work as an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, and much of the “explosive” material presented within these pages has already appeared in a series of exposés. At times, this genesis is very apparent, as the book reads like a series of newspaper articles glued between two hard covers, rather than a single coherent volume. For example, Leonnig devotes an entire chapter to a low-level White House guard who wrote a memorandum criticizing the Service’s preparedness. Later, this man did not have his contract renewed, which Leonnig implies amounts to retaliation. Clearly, I was supposed to feel shock and outrage. Instead, this seemed a needless digression. Every entry-level employee in history thinks that he or she can solve every organizational problem after two days on the job. This guy was no different. Often, I sensed that many of Leonnig’s sources – like this memo writer – were biased, aggrieved, or settling old scores. Nevertheless, the sheer number of people talking to her to proves the point that there is something exceptionally rotten at the core of the Secret Service. ***Zero Fail can be incredibly frustrating in what it chooses to expound upon, and what it chooses to ignore. When a Cessna crashes on the White House lawn, it seems a good time to discuss the Secret Service’s air defenses, or lack thereof, especially in the post-9/11 era of suicide flights. Leonnig chooses to go a different route, wallowing in Bill Clinton’ sordid behavior for page after page. Even as she pumps a series of blabbermouthed agents for gossip, she never discloses what kind of confidentiality rules govern the behavior of Secret Service members. This feels like something that should’ve been touched upon, given that – agency name aside – there doesn’t seem to be a single person able to keep their thoughts to themselves. Still, Leonnig obviously wanted to tell a particular story, and I can’t criticize her for that. The tale she unfolds is an ugly one, an agency rife with misogyny and racism, where people get ahead by navigating office politics, not by merit. Leonnig’s biggest and most entertaining scene is the Cartagena scandal, where a bunch of on-duty Secret Service agents got drunk and hired prostitutes while being paid to protect President Barack Obama. The shameful episode – only one of many – came to light only when an agent refused to pay a prostitute for services rendered. *** There is a certain can’t-look-away-ness to the revelations that the Secret Service is little better than a college fraternity. Ultimately, though, Zero Fail feels very inside-the-Beltway, and there is an assumption that you are going to be inherently vested in the career arcs of civil servants you’ve never heard of. Meanwhile, Leonnig doesn’t follow some obvious threads that her reporting has identified. She mentions politicization, for instance, but does not discuss what – if anything – is being done to ensure that agents are not intentionally undercutting the man or woman they’re supposed to protect with their own lives. In 1984, Indira Gandhi was murdered by her bodyguards; what’s to keep that from happening here? With the insane toxicity of the political climate, this kind of hypothetical no longer seems beyond the realm of possibility. *** The meaning of Zero Fail is simple: the Secret Service isn’t allowed a bad day. There is only one measure of judgment, and if a president dies, it doesn’t matter at all how many things they did right over the years. Unfortunately, as Leonnig shows, they actually haven’t done too well. This is not to suggest that individual agents haven’t acted honorably, even courageously. At the “Battle of the Blair House,” to highlight one such moment, White House guard Leslie William Coffelt died in a gunfight with Puerto Rican nationalists trying to kill Harry Truman; he killed one of the gunmen with his last conscious act. But even the Service’s proudest moments – such as their response to Hinckley’s attack on Reagan – rest heavily on sheer luck. Hinckley, after all, got off six shots. With that on my mind, I finished with a lingering phrase repeating itself: When, not if. When, not if.