On May 2, the Great Kills Book Discussion Group will convene to discuss Ronald Kessler’s The First Family Detail, which provides riveting and highly astonishing facts as well as firsthand accounts concerning several United States Presidents, their respective families, United States presidential candidates and the United States Secret Service Special Agents (“SSSAs”) who serve and protect the immediately aforementioned entities. My reading of Kessler’s extraordinarily revealing work (I am hereby issuing the caveat that my comments concerning some of the reported incidents in The First Family Detail are predicated upon the rebuttable presumption that the incidents depicted in The First Family Detail are veracious. While Mr. Kessler is a highly esteemed, famous and responsible writer, I feel compelled to qualify my following comments because some of the incidents reported in The First Family Detail exert the effect of leaving a reader stupefied, and are often attributed to a source identified merely as “an agent,” which is understandable in terms of encouraging Special Agents to speak with complete candor regarding sensitive matters, but which also creates a situation whereby verification of some incidents is not a facile task. The book provided me with a surprising and engrossing experience, one that my book discussion group participants will share.

As I commenced reading Mr. Kessler’s engrossing new book, I was coerced to cast a few glances at the cover of said book, as I thought perhaps The National Enquirer commenced issuing a large-print version and the large-print version had become inadvertently wedged in-between the pages of The First Family Detail. Incidents of reported chronic skirt-chasing by certain former presidents are oft-cited in this book. Shortly after my graduation from college, I recall America being besieged with the seemingly ubiquitous images of (then) Presidential candidate William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton and Gennifer Flowers on virtually every nightly newscast, and can vividly remember the Monica Lewinsky scandal, so the depiction of President Clinton as being equally qualified to be the Leader of the Free Clinic as well as the Free World did not represent a novel school of thought to me. However, I was surprised to read that President Lyndon B. Johnson was reportedly a serial adulterer, and that he often used to engage in trysts with his paramours while onboard the presidential plane when Lady Bird Johnson was also present on the same plane, albeit in a different cabin. (If Wife Swap was in existence in 1965, and former United States Attorney General Janet Reno changed places with Lady Bird Johnson, I doubt that even the SSSAs on the presidential detail would have been effective in protecting President Johnson from Ms. Reno’s wrath!)

Other leading political entities of this country are described in incidents that indicate said entities are in egregious need of a Barney or Sesame Street refresher in basic manners, or an intervention by Dr. Phil. Gigantic chasms between the amiable public personas of respective denizens of The White House and their respective snarling private demeanors will serve to further surprise readers. (One incident that Kessler recounts involves SSSAs instructed to essentially conceal their respective selves in drapes if a certain former First Lady walked by, so deep is her reported disdain for law enforcement personnel, even those perfectly willing to sacrifice his/her life to ensure the maintenance of the relevant former First Lady’s earthly existence. The query that immediately leapt to my mind upon reading these near-farcical passages was, “What if the relevant Secret Service Special Agent became entangled in the drapes and was too ensnared to properly perform his/her protective duties?”) Kessler emphasizes the urgent need for Americans to discern past the respective veneers of political candidates to ascertain the respective true character of said candidates. “…the FBI Academy teaches that the best predictor of future is past behavior. Yet over and over, voters have ignored warning signs of poor character and candidates’ track records and focused instead on their promises, their celebrity, and their acting ability on television. It’s a blindness they would never extend to choosing a friend, a new employee, an electrician, or a plumber…” (As the French philosopher, magistrate and writer Joseph de Maistre observed, “Every country gets the government it deserves.”)

Extending beyond the reportedly sometimes appalling and overtly hostile acts of some of America’s leading citizens to others, including but not limited to the SSSAs, is the oft-repeated statements attributed to SSSAs that the Secret Service, especially since the Secret Service came under the rubric of The Department of Homeland Security in 2003, is woefully underfunded, resources are not allocated properly and there is a system-wide erosion of professional integrity plaguing the Secret Service. I was mindful of the quote attributed to Socrates, “Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers,” clearly lamenting the character (or lack thereof) of the youth inhabiting Ancient Greece. So, I reminded myself that it is apparently part of human nature to regard one’s generation as superior to the next succeeding one.

However, Mr. Kessler provides illuminating examples to buttress the relevant SSSAs’ respective statements in that regard. One rather startling and frightening example concerns SSSAs being reassigned on an ad hoc basis from President Obama’s detail to provide personal protective services to the staff assistant to a high ranking Secret Service officer when the relevant staff assistant experienced a quarrel with her neighbor. And, of course, those with even a passing familiarity with the American news will recall the incident involving the Secret Service officer who breached his contract with a prostitute in Cartagena, Colombia, while the pertinent SSSA was in that nation as part of President Obama’s official security detail. As was proven veracious in the financial industry, much to the economic devastation of so many around the globe, the Secret Service has reportedly joined those institutions that are afflicted with some management and certain staff members who fail to realize that they are stewards serving an institution with a specific mission, not individuals who are the alleged recipients of unbridled power to be misused for their own respective selfish ends or for matters beyond the scope of authority of the Secret Service. (As Juvenal so sagaciously penned centuries ago, “Who will guard the guards themselves?”) Kessler stresses the vital importance of the need to restore integrity to the Secret Service, citing its once stellar reputation within law enforcement circles (“…FBI (special) agents tend to admire Secret service (special) agents more than they do any other law enforcement officers”) and the dire necessity to re-implement pertinent firearms training, upgrade of weapons currently used by SSSAs so as to render said weapons on par with the weaponry SSSAs might be facing in a battle against armed foes and stricter adherence to physical fitness standards for all SSSAs. Kessler repeatedly reports the complaint of career SSSAs that too many supervisory Secret Service personnel acquiesce to the often irresponsible demands of protectees and the staff of protectees that SSSAs cease to implement comprehensive security measures (for example, scanning only every other attendee with a “magnetometer” at an event where Vice-President Joseph Biden was the featured guest speaker to save time in a strategy that blatantly created a situation where an entity armed with a gun, knife or grenade could have evaded detection prior to admittance to said event). Kessler describes an agency where far too often, political and personal whims of non-security experts (including some protectees) are unreasonably permitted to undermine the professional efforts of the SSSAs who remain ultimately responsible for the respective lives of protectees.

On a more esoteric note, Kessler discusses the myriad of investigative tools employed by SSSAs when endeavoring to ascertain any potential credible threat to a protectee, including SSSAs interviewing a psychic. Kessler also mentions the various other duties that an SSSA may be properly assigned to, including but not limited to investigating counterfeit currency creation and circulation, fraud against the United States and other crimes of a financial nature.

When I next had occasion to speak to my niece, I dreaded her reaction to the corruption, misuse of power and misallocation of various sorts of resources within the Secret Service, as my niece had decided to celebrate her newly-imbued right to vote by reading The First Family Detail. I was fearful that some of the apparently non-bowdlerized sections of the book, describing some of the (reported) less than noble acts of the past leaders of the free world, would serve to discourage my niece from her newly-found political interest. I was completely wrong. Amanda stated to me, “Auntie, this book describes an absolutely terrible situation! It must be rectified immediately!” I sighed, agreed with my niece and commenced to attempt to soothe her jangled nerves. “Yes, the corruption level in Washington, D.C. today would cause Machiavelli to state, “I was wrong; the ends do not justify the means,’ President Clinton’s reported serial philandering is rather disconcerting…” Amanda sharply interrupted me, “Oh, grow up, auntie! I’m not referring to corruption per se or President Clinton’s reported serial philandering! I am referring to the fact that Bo and Sunny Obama are totally devoid of Secret Service protection! When I began glancing through the book, I thought the acronym ‘POTUS’ referred to, ‘Pets of the United States!’ I reasoned that all is just and proper, with a “phalanx of special agents surrounding the POTUS,” until I read that the ‘P’ in ‘POTUS’ refers to the President – the human! Geesh! Have we learned nothing from Buddy Clinton’s tragic death?!?” Pausing for a nanosecond, my niece impassionedly plunged on. “I recall reading that two Secret Service Belgian Malinois, Hurricane and Jordan, stopped an intruder on the White House grounds this past autumn, an intruder who might have harmed President Obama or the other protectees therein! I think it is high time that inter-species consideration is adopted in this country! And, auntie, incidentally, I very much doubt that either Bo or Sunny would require an SSSA to hide in the drapes!” My niece then hurriedly admonished me that she was ending our instant phone call because she had to attend to the rather pressing matter of writing to the Director of the Secret Service as well as President Obama concerning the “woeful neglect of the safety of the President’s most loyal confidants in Washington, D.C.!”

• The First Family Detail
• Presidential Pets
• Presidential Pets
• In the President's Secret Service
• The Secret Service
• The Secrets of the FBI
• The Prince

Websites

• NYPL Great Kills Branch
• Ronald Kessler
• The United States Secret Service
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation