Let’s hope Secret Service snafus don’t spark even more attackers — or maybe I’m being paranoid.
There’s a lot of paranoia going around these days, as the Secret Service slips from its former position of glory to its new status of being unfavorably compared to the Keystone Kops.
Paranoids do not allow themselves to believe in coincidence or simple ineptitude as they see plots behind every catastrophe. In the case of the men and women assigned to protect the nation’s first African-American president and his family, the paranoia runs particularly deep in black communities.
I’ve heard it, and so have black members of Congress including Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat and ranking member of House Oversight Committee, which oversees the Secret Service. Cummings’ declaration that the agency’s director Julia Pierson had to go sealed a rare moment of bipartisanship in today’s Congress. Pierson resigned.
As someone who has worked in or near the White House for a couple of decades, I, too, have a hard time believing the level of incompetence displayed by such episodes as that of the fence jumper Omar Gonzalez. The mentally ill former sniper climbed a very high fence, darted across the North Lawn, entered the oddly unlocked front door, ran around the first floor and headed toward the stairs to the second floor, where the presidential living quarters are located — before he was tackled by a Secret Service agent — who happened, as it turned out, to be off-duty.
Even “missile dog,” the legendary pooch that is trained to tackle intruders on the lawn, was held back for the lamest of excuses: officers feared the dog might attack the wrong person. One wonders whether the dog had the same trainers as the agents who neglected to lock the front door.
This episode turned out to be only the latest in a string of scandalous security breaches. One man fired a weapon at the White House, for example, only to have the gunshots initially downplayed as an automobile backfiring. Hey, there is a difference.
I’d feel more reassured by Pierson’s resignation if I didn’t also know that she was the woman who was enlisted back in March of last year to clean up after earlier snafus. Those fiascos included an unauthorized Secret Service agent party in Colombia with prostitutes. Maybe Pierson’s replacement will get the job right — or maybe the service’s problems run deeper.
Meanwhile, the slip-ups and snafus touched particularly sensitive nerves in African-American communities, as I recently learned during phone interviews with call-in programs on black-oriented radio stations.
Asked about the possibility of an internal plot to kill Obama, I answered sarcastically that if there were such a plot the conspirators surely would have been more competent than the clown show we have witnessed so far.
But neither sarcasm nor an absence of evidence can spoil an attractive conspiracy theory. Suspicions of a plot against Obama are “widespread in black circles,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, a black Democrat like Cummings, told the New York Times.
Donald W. Tucker, one of the first black members of the Secret Service, who retired from the agency in 1990 and wrote a book about his experiences, told the Times that he also has regularly heard such worries. Yet he also said he felt there was no good reason to think the agency had not protected Obama vigorously.
I agree. Sheer coincidence and incompetence do happen, even in supposedly elite agencies.
Unfortunately, there’s always some germ of truth — or something that sounds like it — at the core of conspiracy theories. The rumor of a Secret Service plot or negligence toward Obama, for example, is fed by such actual conspiracies as the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s secret efforts to topple Martin Luther King Jr., among other black freedom movement leaders.
But as the great paranoid-literature novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote in “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” I think the right question to ask in the Secret Service snafus is why so many of their details were kept secret, even from the president, until the agency couldn’t sit on them any longer.
Sure, they’re supposed to be a “secret” service, but not from the president they’re assigned to protect.
Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
