In a press release issued September 30, 2014, and then again in a second press release issued October 1, 2014, after the resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson had been accepted, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, announced that he intends to introduce legislation to appoint a blue-ribbon commission or a panel of experts (depending on which press release the reader believes) to conduct a top-to-bottom examination of the US Secret Service.

And yesterday Homeland Security Secretary Jae Johnson announced that he, too, would convene a panel of experts to review the Secret Service.

Regardless of who convenes and conducts a review of the Secret Service, OpenCdA agrees that such an examination is needed.  In fact it’s years overdue.

However, we also believe that it needs to include a critical examination at the Secret Service’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.  There have been problems brewing with the Secret Service for years.  Yet  in December 2013, ABC News reported that a long-awaited report by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security “did not find any evidence that [Secret Service] leadership has fostered an environment that tolerates inappropriate behavior.”  It should make people wonder how competently Jae Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, monitors his subordinate agencies — or if he does at all — until something bad happens.

We hope that Representative McCaul is serious about wanting to correct the institutional and operational problems in the Secret Service and that he isn’t  just pandering for publicity.  Likewise, we hope that the blue-ribbon commission or panel of experts is given all the authority it needs to critically look at the agency and to make solid recommendations for corrections and updates.  We hope that the Commission or panel will review all the lessons once taught by the Warren Commission Report and the highly classified reports of some of its subcommittees but apparently forgotten with the passage of time.

We expect that the Commission or panel will focus on the Secret Service’s protective mission.  If Commission or panel members are ill-prepared, narrow-minded, or just plain lazy, they will quickly succumb to gunshot mentality.  In its simplest form, gunshot mentality misleads the public to believe that the major protective responsibility of the Secret Service is to protect the President from being killed, usually by a gunshot.  That perception is too limiting.  Dangerously so.

In this writer’s view, the Secret Service’s major protective responsibility is to provide the President with an environment in which he can safely and securely perform his duties.  That environment is wherever in the world or sky the President happens to be.  Although that responsibility includes trying to keep the President alive and able to continue to fulfill his duties, it goes far beyond that.   Providing the President with that secure environment in which he is able to safely conduct the duties of his office is a duty owed by every Secret Service employee to every other citizen of the United States.

The untimely or even expected death of the President of the United States is emotionally upsetting but not a grave threat to the national security.  The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified in February 1967 provides succession rules relating to vacancies and disabilities of the office of the President and of the Vice President.  The Constitution provides for the orderly and lawful transfer of duty and authority if the President dies or is incapacitated.

But what if the President’s environment is compromised?  Such a compromise may not in any way jeopardize the sitting President’s personal health or safety, but it may very well put at grave risk the national security during the terms of not only the sitting President but under the administrations of presidents yet to come. Whereas the death or incapacity of the President will be recognized fairly quickly, a serious compromise to the President’s environment could conceivably go undetected or unconfirmed for years.  And once that compromise has been revealed, it raises questions about the validity and quality of decisions made by the President and his staff in that environment.  As the Warren Commission correctly recognized about fifty years ago, protecting the President and therefore the nation from those eventualities is the responsibility of the US Secret Service as well, and it goes far beyond “taking a bullet for the President.”

OpenCdA believes that any responsible review of the actions and duties of the US Secret Service must once again consider the depth and breadth of what the agency’s duties really are, just as the Warren Commission did.   It is those duties that should set the standards for the recruitment and retention of every US Secret Service employee.