It took 3 assassinations before Congress tasked the Secret Service with protecting presidents

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — When there were rumors of a plot against the life of Abraham Lincoln before his 1861 inauguration, there was no official protection for the president-elect.

Southern states were seceding from the Union in protest of Lincoln’s election, and the rumored plot out of Baltimore led Lincoln, at the urging of the private detective Allan Pinkerton, to sneak into Washington, DC, disguised on a late-night train.

When the ruse was discovered later, Lincoln was mocked by his opponents. A detailed and entertaining version of that story makes up a portion of the recent book, “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War,” by Erik Larson. The details of Lincoln’s disguised trip into the capital alongside Pinkerton are well documented, although the threat of the Baltimore plot is the subject of dispute.

Pinkerton, an adept self-promoter, was later engaged by Union Gen. George McClellan to create a “secret service” of spies to deliver information on Confederate troops during the war, according to the Library of Congress. Pinkerton’s intelligence was unreliable, and he returned to his private company, which still exists, after McClellan was relieved of his command. A “scoundrel” by the name of Lafayette Baker became the nation’s top spymaster during the war.

During his presidency, Lincoln eschewed bodyguards despite threats. In 1864, a permanent detail of the local Washington, DC, police force was created, although the officers selected were far from elite, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The night Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre the following year, his lone guard was supposed to be the policeman John Frederick Parker. But Parker was at a saloon next door when John Wilkes Booth, likely coming from the very same saloon, snuck up behind the president and shot him in the head.

Baker was tasked with hunting down Booth, and his memoir was published in 1867 with the title, “History of the United States Secret Service.”

But incredibly, it was on the day Lincoln was shot that the president had signed legislation officially creating what is today the US Secret Service. At the time, it had nothing to do with protecting presidents. The agency was commissioned within the Treasury Department, and the Secret Service was entirely focused on counterfeit money, a major problem of the day.

The Secret Service didn’t start protecting presidents until 1894, and only part time, after agents probing a group of gamblers discovered an assassination plot aimed at then-President Grover Cleveland.

Two more presidents — James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901 — would be killed by an assassin’s bullet before Congress officially tasked the Secret Service with protecting US presidents full time.

McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, was the first president to get round-the-clock protection, but only two agents were assigned full time to the detail.

Four years after he left the White House, Roosevelt was running again for president in 1912 when he was shot on the way to a campaign speech. He survived and gave the speech.

Threatening presidents was not made a crime until 1917, the same year Congress approved Secret Service protection for the immediate family of a president.

Presidential and vice presidential candidates and nominees would not get Secret Service protection until after the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, who was killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after he won the California Democratic presidential primary.

The Secret Service remained a part of the Treasury Department until 2003, when a massive government reorganization after the 9/11 terror attacks moved the Secret Service to the Department of Homeland Security. But the Secret Service is still tasked with fighting financial crimes.

What was once just two full-time agents assigned to protect Roosevelt in 1902 has now grown to a force of thousands. The entire Secret Service employs nearly 8,000 people for its protective and investigative missions, and it secures thousands of events each year. In fiscal year 2023, it guarded 33 different “protectees.”

But it seems likely that, after two apparent assassination attempts against Trump in the span of two months, the Secret Service could be due for changes.

Former presidents are guaranteed lifetime Secret Service protection, but Trump’s reemergence as the Republican presidential nominee has created new obstacles for his official bodyguards, not the least of which has been providing protection for a man who faced a criminal trial in New York City. Trump’s looming sentencing, which has been postponed until after Election Day could, at least in theory, create the new challenge of protecting a president sentenced to some sort of confinement.

The shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania just over two months ago, when Trump was struck in the ear during a speech and then whisked away by agents, has already changed the protocol for speeches: CNN’s Stephen Collinson notes that both Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump now address crowds from behind bulletproof screens.

The apparent assassination attempt at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, could further alter how agents protect candidates, walling them off from the world even more. But there is some good news in the fact that an agent spotted the would-be assassin, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, several holes and 500 yards – multiple football fields – ahead of Trump on the course.

In terms of walling politicians off from the people they represent, Secret Service agents closed a park, for instance, next to the Alexandria, Virginia, home of Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate – angering neighbors and causing congestion in the tightly knit neighborhood.

Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has promised state authorities will conduct their own investigation of this new incident since he argued federal authorities are also attempting to prosecute Trump both for mishandling classified documents and for trying to overturn the 2020 election results. Plus, a congressional inquiry into the first Trump assassination attempt will surely expand to consider this new incident.

The now-former Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned not long after the first attempt on Trump’s life, which could complicate calls for accountability after this second incident.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.