Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “That is a kind of books that may go down because the seminal work—the determinative work—on this discipline. . . . Terrifying.”—Rachel Maddow

The primary definitive account of the rise and fall of the Secret Service, from the Kennedy assassination to the alarming mismanagement of the Obama and Trump years, proper as much as the rebellion on the Capitol on January 6—by the Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Occasions bestselling co-author of A Very Secure Genius

 

Carol Leonnig has been reporting on the Secret Service for
The Washington Publish for many of the final decade, bringing to mild the secrets and techniques, scandals, and shortcomings that plague the company as we speak—from a poisonous work tradition to dangerously outdated tools to the deep resentment inside the ranks at key company leaders, who put defending the company’s once-hallowed picture earlier than fixing its flaws. However the Secret Service wasn’t all the time so troubled.

The Secret Service was born in 1865, within the wake of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, however its story begins in earnest in 1963, with the dying of John F. Kennedy. Shocked into reform by its failure to guard the president on that fateful day in Dallas, this once-sleepy company was radically reworked into an elite, extremely educated unit that may redeem itself a number of instances, most famously in 1981 by thwarting an assassination try in opposition to Ronald Reagan. However this fame for braveness and excellence wouldn’t final ceaselessly. By Barack Obama’s presidency, the once-proud Secret Service was operating on fumes and beset by errors and alarming lapses in judgment: break-ins on the White Home, an armed gunman firing into the home windows of the residence whereas confused brokers stood by, and an enormous prostitution scandal amongst brokers in Cartagena, to call only a few. With Donald Trump’s arrival, a sequence of promised reforms had been solid apart, as a president disdainful of public service as an alternative abused the Secret Service to rack up political and private positive factors.

To discover these issues within the ranks, Leonnig interviewed dozens of present and former brokers, authorities officers, and whistleblowers who put their jobs on the road to talk out a couple of hobbled company that’s in determined want of reform. “I will likely be ceaselessly grateful to them for risking their careers,” she writes, “not as a result of they needed to share tantalizing gossip about presidents and their households, however as a result of they know that the Service is damaged and wishes fixing. By telling their story, they hope to revive the Service they love.”