As well to please silence your phones. Our panelist is carolynning of the Washington Post. Were thrilled to have her here today. And i wanted to read you a very brief, bio mislenic has worked at the Washington Post since 2000. And she previously reported at the Philadelphia Inquirer the Charlotte Observer and last but not least the bryn mawr haverford by college news. As a as a former College Newspaper person myself. I wanted to pay tribute to that. But she won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize among many other accolades. For her work on misconduct inside the secret service, which will be discussing today. And in addition to this book zero fail the rise and fall of the secret service will be discussing. Today she is also written to other books a very stable genius donald j. Trumps testing of america with her colleague philip rucker. And also i alone can fix it. Donald j. Trumps catastrophic final year about the pandemic that weve been living through for the past two years. So, please give her a warm tucson welcome. Thank you. So, thank you so much for being here today your book captures the systemic Management Issues inside the secret service as well as the individual heroism of agents when lives are on the line and its such a rich topic for discussion. And i wanted to start by asking. You having been covering the secret Service Since 2012 . Did you . When did you think this would be such a rich topic of discussion for a book . Oh, well first off i want to say im so delighted. Im being questioned by a lawyer who used to be a journalist, i grew up in a family of lawyers, and im the only one that took this particularly at the time very on lucrative bath. Its turned out okay so far, but i i have a lot of respect for lawyers, and im so delighted daves my interviewer and i very grateful to you for mentioning the bryn mawr have afford news because i wouldnt have been a journalist if the editor of that paper at the time hadnt sort of grabbed me by the scuff of the knack and enlisted me to write a story about something that ill tell you more about later but really captivated me about journalism and what you can find when you start to dig and you have time to answer the question on the table. This is a funny story and im not normally viewed as very funny in my delivery. Hey answer my question right now. So the funny story is that i was writing. Like all rate reporting threads and especially investigative reporting threads this lifelong nearly lifelong obsession with the secret Service Began really by accident. I have a register of voice. Thats kind of like either. A big sister or a friendly friend and i am trustworthy but i especially am ben the beneficiary of sounding trustworthy. And so when there was this insane and at the time considered the most humiliating episode in secret Service History in 2012. Dozen agents, we find out are being flown back on ceremoniously from cartagena in colombia and i always mispronounce cartagena even though its the start of everything cartagena and my great investigative reporting partner David Nakamura broke that story in 2012 and he he and his editor called me the next morning and said we got a lot of agents. We got a call. We got a lot of people we have to call we have to find out how this happened. What the heck these agents were flown back because they were caught with their guns and their security plans in their hotel rooms drunk off their and forgive me. My mom doesnt want me to use that word and with prostitutes during a time when they were supposed to be preparing and securing basically the entire city for president obamas arrival. So what the heck happened i get a call from david and the his editor saying can you help us out because what its going to involve is getting on the phone and convincing a lot of people that dont talk to the press to tell me what happened. Um you all may be old enough to remember. Im just going to take a guess. The shampoo commercial, you know, you called you tell two friends. You tell two more friends blah. So these agents basically said this womans calling around. She seems to know what happened. And each of these two friends would essentially tell another two friends answer her questions, you know, listen to her. She sounds like she really wants to get to the bottom of it. The thing is agents. This is a really long answer. Im so sorry. Um, the thing is agents can lose their jobs for talking to the press the secret service uses that whip in their Employment Contract to block agents from talking about things the service doesnt want to talk about talk about any flattering thing. You want to talk about talk about any lovely wonderful memory of a president. Its fine, but talk about the secret service in a way. Thats unflattering. Thats revelatory that comes back and embarrasses somebody and you can lose your job. So i was lucky that they spoke to me. In this happy accident more of them just told me unbelievable things that were so much worse than what had happened in gardena. So much worse and actually chilling because to a person every senior agent that i spoke to you know, who had had some years who had a little hide was convinced that the president was going to be killed on their watch. That it was going to happen. It was a matter of time because the agency was so bleakered so broken so dysfunctional so much using duct tape to keep it together in. When i knew i had a book. Was when an agent called me and i dont mean a secret Service Agent but a book agent and she said you have a book. I dont know you but you have a book and her name was elise Cheney Cheney literary agency, and im forever indebted to her because she would not let go of me. I had no desire to write a book didnt know anything about writing books. I was 40 late 40s. Ill just say and i i always wanted to be journalists nothing else, but she would not let go and convinced me and im so glad that she was the you know, the tiger that she was. Thats a great story and this book is such a service to us all to really get behind this image. Of the secret service as just these agents and suits who are very trim and fit and very lead Protection Unit and in fact not only is that not entirely true the whole origin of the secret service is not what i would have thought he told me more about that sure. It also was a miss not mystery. It was a new piece of information to me. I had not id written a lot about the department of defense the department of justice the department forgive me the Environmental Protection agency, but i really never studied this tiny little Protection Unit that that began in 1865 in the department of treasury. Its initial assignment, and it was called the secret service because were trying to be undercover and secretive about how they did their work Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of treasury had been talking for weeks about the so damaging flood of forged currency that made up the entire or twothirds of the economy at the time and this was really harmful to fledgling United States trying to get back. And recover after the civil war they had been talking about it at a meeting interestingly enough the day that lincoln. Link hours later lincoln was shot and killed. Theyd had a treasury meeting and a Cabinet Meeting to discuss. How can we control this flood of forgeries and fraudulent dollars bills . His secretary of treasury preceded with the idea after lincoln was killed and months later created this little unit of kind of rough and tumble dastardly agents almost like revenuers if you will for the bootleggers era and what they did was what they found people. Gangs like mobster gangs who had these fake plates and they broke up these plate making operations. They tried to arrest the guys engaged and then they burned the currency that was their big job. Wow, so it sounds like there was no formal president ial Protection Agency for a long time in our history and why do you think that was the case . Love this question. This must be from a lawyer. So. You know, i didnt know this so i learned it in the research for the book, but there was intense resistance to the idea of a president ial security team. And it was part and parcel of the founding of america, which is its the peoples house. You know, we talked about the capital as the peoples house. But the first name for the white house was the peoples house. There were no fences if you can believe it around the white house people had picnics on the white house lawn and walked their dogs and and literally rode their horses across the front steps. So the idea of a palace guard was a nathama to american and to american president s who wanted to feel as though they were at least projecting the image of a man of the people the peoples representative and so security was considered just something from over with the royals in europe and not something were going to do here. Unfortunately three president s would be killed before the country and the federal government really woke up and said, okay, we cant lose any more president s this way. You know how lincoln was killed the third president ial assassination that triggered the formation of the secret service or rather. I should say the assignment of this role to the secret service was mckinley. He was at a world fair 1901 and was shot at close range by a socialist communist who was infuriated by mckinleys administration the feeling that Little People were overlooked and mckinley, you know died of his injuries weirdly many many weeks after the actual event, but that was the beginning of secret service protecting president s. Right and then you write about how we finally had a formal agency protecting the president. From the mckinley assassination up until the kennedy assassination. And what was this iteration of the secret service like this period between mckinley and kennedy exactly. Yeah. Well, i would say that it was pretty. Unrutinized lets say it that way it was essentially different patrols who want to three at a time who would be with the president when he traveled or when he was in public or in what is now so frequently called the rope line, you know, they keep a rope between people in the president the president. Shakespeoples hands as they walk by this kind of formalized way of meeting the president and letting him touch the hands of voters and stay engaged with them it was a little bit unprofessional but still a form of Security Armed guards with the president and with his family especially around the time of eisenhower and the war there were theyre forgive me. Before eisenhower there around World War Two there was a much larger interest in at least having one Security Guard along with the president s family. Usually the first lady. And of course then president kennedy takes office. Hes very resistant to having a detail around him full time. Can you tell me more about how those created challenges for the secret service protecting him . Kennedy put an incredible strain on the secret service and i begin the book describing what that was like for the agents who were traveling with him during his campaign before dallas months before dallas. They were exhausted and he was a jet setting high flying. Let me touch every voter i can kind of president which was so different and such a Culture Shock for the secret service after his predecessor who often stayed in the white house didnt travel terribly much and wasnt that interested in standing at a rope line and shaking hands all day long. Definitely wanted to be engaged but kennedy was a whole different animal he fed off as an extrovert fed off the Peoples Energy and wanted to be with them. Any famously said to his detail they call it a whip a very senior supervisor on the president s detail floyd boring. He said i wouldnt get elected dog catcher if i listen to you people and did what you wanted. Hes like i need to be with the people. Im paraphrasing that last part but the dog catcher quote is accurate. He feasted on being with people and he would. Fully almost like a runaway he would flee his protectors to get out in front of them and get closer to a scrum or a throng of people and throw himself into it and it was infuriating to the secret service. So theyre tired from the hours that hes traveling and being with people their hopscotching each other from city to city trying to keep up not catching enough sleep. Theyre exhausted by that travel that hes doing easily triple with the his predecessor had done and then theyre kind of ticked off because he wont listen to the doctor essentially. Then of course we all know now and and they knew better than than anyone. Kennedy was also foiling his protectors because he was trying to be with women who were not his wife. And trying to be with them on a daily basis so that evasion that he was engaged in was also painful for them. And i know this isnt really your question, but i just feel like its important to say this. The agents and i interviewed almost all of them. Sadly many of them have died since my interview. Interviews with them and since the book was published, but i interviewed almost every single agent on kennedys detail. Prior at the time of the assassination ones that were still alive and they were so passionate about their duty to country. Their patriotism was so invested in protecting the president and they were not judging as morality in large measures some of them were but many of them. Were infuriated because it was their job to protect what was happening on the other side of that Hotel Room Door and they couldnt screen these women that were coming in regularly at all hours of the night and and leaving it all hours of the night and they were infuriated because you were putting a barrier between them and their ability to serve their country and do their duty. That is what i felt and learned from them most poignantly. Ride, and of course, we all know the tragic event that this recklessness led to on november 22nd. 1963 and i loved in your book how you really walked through . The assassination through the perspective of the secret Service Agents how do you think having interviewed them and having talked to them . Do you think there were ways in which the secret service failed to protect president kennedy adequately . I do sadly. I mean even though i think that their sense of duty and mission was so keen and palpable. There were ways as individuals they failed, but i think the larger answer to the question is there were ways in which the agency failed them . Didnt give them the tools. To do the job in a way that would would save the president on that day. One is the director of the secret service jim rowley who weirdly used to live like a block from my where i live now went to the church at the corner of my block. You know. Sorry, i was about to go that direction. Im going to stop myself. The way the agency failed the secret service is the director had been begging begging kennedy and the administration to give him more money to hire more agents because he knew how exhausted and beat up they all were he asked for an additional i think 36 agents to try to keep their heads above water and i mean these guys and i interviewed a lot of their wives too. They were literally coming home from an assignment, you know on a nine city tour dropping their bags at their wifes. Front doorstep and i say wifes because the wife would get their clothes wash them put them back out on the doorstep and they would come back from headquarters and go out that night. So they really they were really doing triple duty. Rowley could not get the administration the Kennedy Administration to agree to give him those extra agents. There was a lack of routinized training none of them really knew. In a routine way, what should they do if someone shot at or came at at the president with a knife other than theyre good Law Enforcement training. They didnt have a lot of rootinized training in the seconds that count when a gun shot goes off and the president is standing at a podium or near his car that training wasnt there neither was there ever a consideration . Which you know shocks me after i looked at some of the internal records of the months and weeks before the assassination there. There was not an effort to try to protect the president from gunfire from a line of sight if you all line of sight is a big deal for the secret service. They try to make sure that they block with buses or walls or you know, theyve built walls to to block a line of sight from the rifle. Of a gun forgive me. Little about god end of a gun and the president s head. And so you know Lee Harvey Oswald had a clean shot. Another hundred people could have had a clean shot that day because the secret service was not working very hard to focus on that. You ask the question. So well dave about their own responsibility and the only personal responsibility. Ill lay at the feet of some of those agents was that in order to sort of let off steam at the end of the night and this was a harder drinking time in our american history. They all went out in fort worth the night before the assassination and the trip to dallas to a funny coffee slash strip strip kind of club like a beatnik club where the waitresses were underwear. They the bar tenders illegally served, you know straight liquor, you know. And put it into juice cups, and these guys were there drinking until to four and five oclock in the morning and as earl warren the head of the Warren Commission said in the hearings after the assassination looking into the causes, you know, im sorry direct rowley you cannot tell me that a man whos been up till two four five in the morning whether he was drunk or not is his able to react to protect the president the next morning and and that just is a fact and just true. Right, very very unfortunate. I also know very little about guns. So to join hop onto that train as well the end of a gun. Someones gonna like go care all. No, we all understood. I i also have to ask be