Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service
by Carol Leonnig
View on GoodreadsCarol Leonnig's institutional history of the US Secret Service from JFK through Obama-Trump-Biden — focused on the agency's chronic underfunding, cultural problems, and recurring failures of its core mission.
Core ideas
- The agency's culture — drinking on assignment, sexual misconduct, fraternization scandals (Cartagena, the White House fence-jumper) — is presented as a long-running institutional pathology, not as isolated incidents.
- The funding-mission mismatch is structural: Congress assigns growing responsibilities (cyber, financial crimes, expanded protective details) without proportional funding, and the protection mission absorbs the cost.
- The detailed reconstruction of the 2011 White House shooting incident — when shots hit the residence and the agency took four days to recognize what had happened — is the book's most disturbing case study.
Published2021
Pages560
ISBN9780399589010
ReadAug 2024
