It was a grey, drizzly Monday on March 30, 1981, when President Reagan emerged from the Washington Hilton hotel, heading back to his presidential limousine parked a few yards away.
His inauguration had been only a few weeks before and he’d just finished speaking at a lunch of US labor union leaders.
Along with the rest of the White House press corps I was about 20 feet away, roped off from the President. Suddenly, just as one of our number shouted a question for him, shots rang out.
In a split second, a burly Secret Service agent brusquely bundled Reagan into the limo, another pushed his colleague hard to ensure both he and the President were flat on the back seat.
The limo was surrounded by agents, guns drawn, the would-be assassin wrestled to the ground by the public as well as law enforcement. Reagan’s vehicle sped off.
Within four minutes it was at George Washington Hospital, even though, not initially realizing the President had been hit (a bullet had entered his rib cage), the Secret Service had at first started out for the White House.
Reagan was close to death on arrival. But he survived, thanks in no small part to the speedy response of the Secret Service, which thwarted the shooter.
Now consider what happened when Donald Trump was shot on Saturday night.
The initial response was by the book. Brave agents piled on him to protect him from further bullets. They kept him down until they were told the shooter had been killed.
But they had no idea if others shooters were involved and, as they escorted him off the podium, they left him badly exposed, partly because some of the agents were not tall enough to give him proper cover.
If there had been a second shooter they would have had a clear line of sight as Trump fist-pumped the air.
There was even more chaos by the time they reached Trump’s SUV. Far from the efficient, speedy exit all those years ago outside the Washington Hilton, it took too long to get him in the vehicle and even longer for it to depart.
Agents were darting about, some running in circles, clearly not sure what to do. One, overweight and looking panicked, pointed her gun all over the place. Another had trouble holstering her pistol. A third found time to put on her sunglasses and straighten her jacket.
Perhaps it was just a coincidence – but when Trump entered the Republican National Convention hall in Milwaukee on Monday night, his security detail was made up almost exclusively of tall, chunky men.
The Secret Service endlessly game-plans and practises evacuations. ‘Get him and go’ is the simple guidance. The Secret Service likes to regard itself as the global gold standard for the protection of public figures. Not after Saturday night.
But what happened after Trump was shot is the least of its problems.
How the shooter ever managed to get any shots off in the first place has the makings of the biggest crisis of modern times for the Secret Service.
Security experts are still baffled that a roof top overlooking the presidential podium, just over a football-field away and with an elevated, unobstructed view of Trump, could have been left unguarded so that the shooter could make it on to the roof and then, unhindered, position himself for his assassination attempt.
The Secret Service has yet to offer a credible explanation for this. Instead its director, Kimberly Cheatle, incredibly appeared to tell ACB News on Tuesday that health and safety protocol was to blame.
‘That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,’ she said.
Cheatle and her acolytes have also been busy throwing local law enforcement under the bus.
The warehouse on top of which the shooter clambered (we still don’t know exactly how) was outside the Secret Service’s perimeter of responsibility, she claims. It was the job of local police to secure it — and it’s true that local law enforcement has some questions to answer.
It’s been revealed that a local police counter-sniper team was stationed inside the warehouse. They were using it as a ‘watch post’ to scan for threats.
Pity nobody thought of having a look at the roof of the building they were occupying since its location and view overlooking the rally made it the most obvious threat. Perhaps the Keystone Cops were on duty at the weekend.
Local police also failed to react to people on the ground around the warehouse shouting that there was somebody, possibly with a rifle, on the roof, a few minutes before he started firing. Several videos provide convincing evidence to confirm this — and of the police’s lackadaisical response.
‘Look, they’re all pointing,’ one man is heard saying as he pans his smart phone from the stage to the roof of the warehouse, where a figure is seen crawling. ‘Yeah someone’s on top of the roof — look!’
The police don’t seem to react, though there are reports that one local cop climbed a ladder leaning against the warehouse wall (used by the shooter?). He saw the would-be assassin when his head reached roof level — and quickly ducked back down the ladder when the shooter trained his AR-15 on him, before he then turned back unimpeded to take his shots at Trump.
Another report extraordinarily claims that local police noticed the shooter on the roof 26 minutes before he opened fire, and even took a picture of him.
Clearly, the police incompetence on depressing display during the Uvalde school massacre shooting in Texas two years ago was not a one-off.
But the Secret Service cannot be allowed to pile the blame on a police force in rural Pennsylvania with no expertise or experience in protecting high-profile targets.
It is the job of the Secret Service to devise and give final approval for the security blueprint covering events like Saturday’s rally. It is the responsibility of the Secret Service to ensure all vulnerable points are covered, inside and outside their specific perimeter, even when local police provide the manpower.
Above all, it was incumbent on the Secret Service to ensure that such an obvious security weakness as the warehouse was properly policed. One drone with infrared sensors would quickly have spotted the shooter, probably before he even made it to the roof. If that drone had been equipped with offensive capabilities, the shooter could have been taken out long before he ever managed to pull his trigger.
But we understand no drones were deployed. Why not?
It would seem the Secret Service under Director Cheatle has had other priorities. A former Secret Service agent told me privately that she quit because field agents were understaffed (working 60 consecutive days with no time off).
Money has instead been diverted to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). Investment in new technology, including state-of-the-art drones, was also sacrificed at the altar of DEI.
Director Cheatle was appointed two years ago by President Biden with the blessing (perhaps even active support) of his wife Jill.
Cheatle had been on the Biden family’s security detail when Joe Biden was Vice President. Jill Biden is obsessed with DEI, like most leftwing pseudo-academics. Cheatle talks more about reaching 30 percent female agents by 2030 than she does about protecting those under her agency’s tender care. Her ambition is all over the Secret Service website.
When I was a White House correspondent in the 1980s, the Secret Service was part of the US Treasury Department, a hard taskmaster.
Now it is part of Homeland Security, whose boss, the hapless Alejandro Mayorkas, is also ‘passionate’ about DEI. He also assures us the Southern border with Mexico is secure.
The standards and governance of the Secret Service are clearly less rigorous than they once were. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at the weekend has made that painfully obvious for all to see.
No doubt its shortcomings will be revealed in agonizing detail by the numerous congressional committees about to investigate it. I’d be surprised if Cheatle survives the scrutiny.
She could always return to be head of ‘global security’ at PepsiCo, from whence she came. They’re big on DEI there too — but the consequences are less profound for American democracy.