Assaults on the Presidency are uniquely suited to directing our thoughts into the conspiratorial thickets. Politics has always involved the formation and manipulation of factions, and it is tempting to conclude that all actions in that sphere, even the darkest tragedies, are the product of deliberate and intricate, if secret, planning. All of this points to why, for some Americans, it’s almost easier to believe that the recent serial failures of the Secret Service—which led, on Wednesday, to the resignation of its director, Julia Pierson—are the product of some veiled collusion. It seems inconceivable that the most technologically sophisticated power in the world was incapable of tackling an intruder running across the White House lawn, like a punt returner headed for the end zone. Worse, amid the rash of hair-trigger law-enforcement shootings in the news, is that the Secret Service’s initial statement about the incident fell just shy of self-congratulation—they said that “the officers showed tremendous restraint and discipline in dealing with this subject”—when an aggressive response would have been reasonable, if not outright necessary. Extreme restraint in the face of actual impending danger is indistinguishable from passivity.
Earlier this month, as the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, Barack Obama’s detail allowed an armed man with a history of violence into an elevator with the President—and didn’t realize it until the man later handed his gun to his supervisor. Better that this was the result of cold malice than of abject incompetence, a certain line of thinking goes, because a conspiracy is, by definition, a limited affair. (Hillary Clinton and Joseph McCarthy had it wrong with their talk of conspiracies that were “vast” and “immense”—past a handful people, a conspiracy is demoted to a scheme or maybe a mob. By the time it can be aptly described as “immense,” it’s virtually a ballot referendum.) Incompetence, however, knows no bounds; neither does negligence.
These incidents have pushed to the fore a common, unspoken fear for the President’s safety that has abided the Obama years. Early in his ascent to the stratosphere of political possibility, Obama was commonly compared to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.—the suggestion being that his election would, after a long winter of cynicism, reintroduce idealism to American life. In polite dialogue, one mentioned that Kennedy and King have something more than idealism in common: an ugly legacy of assassination. Occasionally, the unpleasantness surfaced, as when Hillary Clinton ineptly mentioned Robert F. Kennedy as a rationale for her decision to remain in the Presidential race through June, 2008, despite being behind: “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”
At this juncture, it’s also easy to forget that, early in his first Presidential campaign, candidate Obama’s popularity with white voters outstripped his standing among black ones. There were many reasons cited for this: his lack of name recognition, the sheer number of black leaders who’d already endorsed Hillary Clinton, the canard that African-Americans somehow found his “blackness” credentials to be suspect. But the least openly discussed element of this reticence was simple fear. Just ahead of the 2008 South Carolina primary, black voters told me that they considered voting for Clinton as a favor to Michelle Obama. When one woman said that she wouldn’t vote for Obama because “he has two daughters, and he needs to be around to help raise them,” she was not referring to the demands of the Presidency cutting into his quality time with his kids. Congressman John Lewis, whose skull was fractured by police officers during a march on Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, in 1965, explained it succinctly when I spoke to him in 2008: “Those of us who lived through Martin Luther King’s assassination have never gotten over it.”
These murmurs were so consistent that Steve Kroft asked Michelle Obama about them directly, during an interview on “60 Minutes” in early 2007. “This is a hard question to ask,” Kroft said. “But, a number of years ago, Colin Powell was thinking about running for President, and his wife, Alma, really did not want him to run. She was worried about some crazy person with a gun.” Michelle replied that the dangers of the Presidency were not novel. “I don’t lose sleep about it,” she said. “Because the realities are, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station”—certainly the first time that this particular demographic truth has been enlisted as a reason to be optimistic about a black man’s prospects.
We’ve become accustomed to the sight of a black President governing through these dangers—ever-present, contextual, and undiminished—in the way that sirens become ambient sound in New York City. This is one of the less frequently noted accomplishments of his Presidency. In 2008, Obama projected calm amid political turbulence. As President, this demeanor has been part of the reason that such fears have receded to the extent that they have. Yet a population that lived through the September 11th attacks can scarcely ever confuse remote likelihoods with complete impossibilities. Dictatorships are measured by the basest actions of the tyrants who control them, but the metric of democracy is the actions of its citizenship. The bipartisan outrage that has emerged this week is not a sign of a political thaw; it’s an indicator that neither party cares to see America reduced by the unquantifiable sum that Dealey Plaza or Ford’s Theatre diminished it.
The Secret Service that was antsy about the prospect of a newly inaugurated Obama walking along Pennsylvania Avenue in January, 2009, is, as Vox reported, handling three times the number of death threats that attended other Presidencies. It is doing so on a severely limited budget. Speaking before a House inquiry into the security lapses, Pierson remarked that the budget sequester has left the Service nearly five hundred and fifty people short of their optimum number of personnel. This at a time when the factions we need to be most concerned with are driven not only by the President’s identity but by American foreign policy and the dictates of the interminable war on terror. What signal does Secret Service ineptitude send to foreign adversaries? Last weekend, the President spoke of how the American intelligence community had underestimated the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham’s ambitions. No one vaguely familiar with the assassination of William McKinley or with anarchist “propaganda of the deed” killings of heads of state can take comfort in the idea that a loosely organized band united by ideological zealotry is incapable of wreaking havoc.
To the conspiracist, the feverish intent of secret cabals animates every facet of daily life. The realist knows that a single individual enabled by complacency or negligence can alter the path of history. The danger of the Secret Service’s failures is not in the narrowly averted disasters; it’s in the capacity of those failures to generate even more dangers on their own.
