Ann McFeatters: Secret Service needs to be revitalized
Bear with me while I get personal.
I had a desk in the press room at the White House for two decades. I was as open-mouthed as Congress at the news a man with a knife scaled the fence last month and ran up the lawn and through the front door, the State Hall and the East Room before being tackled by an off-duty officer.
Like most who have covered the White House and traveled with the president, I admired the Secret Service professionals. Some were arrogant; all were diligent in screening people entering the White House and Executive Office Building. These men and women risk their lives; we owe them.
The White House, burned by the British in 1814, has been vulnerable to serious attacks a dozen times. In 1994, a man trying to kill President Clinton fired from Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House; a bullet ripped through a window near my desk. That same year a man crashed a Cessna into the White House.
But in the past five years, the White House fence has been scaled 16 times; six times just this year. The Washington Post’s disclosure that in 2011 seven bullets were fired into the second floor where the Obama family lives and the Secret Service did not find those bullets for four days – the housekeeping staff found broken glass – is appalling.
At a congressional hearing, where Republicans and Democrats alike throbbed with outrage at an institution in serious trouble and denial, Secret Service director Julia Pierson’s zombie-like refusal to be forthcoming about the failures of her agency was infuriating.
The stereotypical bureaucrat, she tried to stonewall, promising more “reviews.” Message: We can’t tell you the full truth but trust me.
But that trust was gone. Also on her watch as director or previously as chief of staff of the agency: a phony translator permitted near the president in South Africa; Secret Service agents soliciting prostitutes in Colombia; drunk agents on protective duty in Miami and Amsterdam; uninvited people crashing a state dinner; an armed rent-a-cop with a criminal record riding the same elevator with the president in Atlanta.
The Secret Service boasted in a press release it used “tremendous restraint” in handling Omar Gonzalez, the intruder stopped outside the Green Room. What if he’d been a terrorist? What if he had a gun or a bomb? What if he had come upon one of the Obamas’ daughters? What if the president and his Cabinet had been in the East Room? Every American should be outraged.
The secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs resigned upon disclosure that veterans were/are waiting months for medical appointments; Pierson had no choice but to clear out her desk.
What else should be done?
When the Oklahoma federal building was bombed, Clinton closed Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicular traffic. Pedestrians may stand at the fence photographing the People’s House, but tourists can no longer drive by it.
After the September intruder was apprehended, the government’s first instinct was to throw up metal barriers between tourists and the White House fence. There are calls to further close off the White House compound although thousands of visitors tour the White House every year without problems because of careful scrutiny and metal detectors.
The mansion, the president, his family and all who work there must be safe. But that can be done without cutting off the People’s House from the people. The Secret Service needs better training, discipline, morale and leadership.
If the Secret Service is reinvigorated, more guards are posted and proper procedures are followed (agents didn’t even have authority to lock the front door remotely until after Gonzalez pushed in), threats can be contained. But politicians should not decide how to safeguard the president; that must be left to the professionals, absent Pierson.
We don’t close our borders because of one Ebola case. We don’t need more barriers between us and our government.