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By Root 1395 0

already been doing for months. A year later, Parr was assigned to guard Vice President Hubert Humphrey. During Richard Nixon’s presidency, Parr was promoted to deputy in charge of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s contingent of agents; he rode with the disgraced vice president after Agnew resigned and when Agnew traveled to Baltimore’s federal courthouse to plead no contest to charges of federal tax evasion. In 1979, Parr was named head of Carter’s protective detail, a job he kept until Reagan was inaugurated. He now worked at the pinnacle of an active agent’s career in an organization that had rapidly expanded and gradually adapted to confront a burgeoning array of threats.

During Parr’s nearly two decades in the Secret Service, the agency had grown more than 400 percent: in March 1981, it fielded 1,544 agents and had an annual budget of $175 million. Its mandate had expanded significantly as well. In the wake of Senator Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, agents were assigned to protect presidential candidates. Three years later, they also became responsible for guarding foreign heads of state and visiting dignitaries. During the 1980 presidential campaign, agents protected seven candidates in addition to President Carter; they attended more than seven thousand rallies, fund-raisers, and other events. The service’s caseload of financial investigations had also grown: by 1981, field agents were looking into more than 100,000 counterfeiting and Treasury check fraud cases a year.

But one fundamental aspect of the agency’s culture had been much slower to change. Even in the mid-1970s, the service put agents to work immediately upon hiring them; only later were they provided a few weeks of training. Despite three fairly recent assassinations—John Kennedy’s, Robert Kennedy’s, and Martin Luther King’s—agents were still not receiving rigorous refresher courses, and too often their skills eroded. This relaxed attitude toward training was dangerous: few jobs in the world require as much preparation for the unknown as that of a Secret Service agent. Only constant drilling can enable agents to react instantly in the unlikely event of a real threat.

Better training might have prevented some of the terrible tragedies that haunted the agency. For instance, the driver of President Kennedy’s limousine didn’t recognize the sound of gunfire after Oswald’s first shot. When Kennedy was hit by the second bullet, the driver slowed down as he glanced over his shoulder to see what was happening behind him. A few seconds later, with the agent having taken no evasive action and the limousine still lumbering straight down the street, the third, fatal bullet struck Kennedy in the head. Nearly a decade later, George Wallace was shaking hands at a rope line during a campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland, when he was shot by a gunman standing in the crowd. The agents had allowed Wallace to walk up the rope line and then back down it, giving the would-be assassin time to steel his nerves and take careful aim. Wallace, hit four times, fell to the ground; meanwhile, one agent was struck in the neck and another dove at the gunman. A third agent, startled by the gunfire, hesitated momentarily before dropping to check on Wallace’s vital signs; it was the governor’s wife, not an agent, who covered her husband’s bleeding body. Although Wallace survived, the chaotic scramble to protect him and provide first aid was an embarrassment.

That shooting, as well as the growing threat of terrorism and the rising number of political killings around the world, forced the service to take action. The agency began by revamping its woefully inadequate first-aid training. Agents were required to take and pass “Ten Minute Medicine,” a course designed to provide them with the skills needed to keep a wounded person alive for ten minutes, usually about the time needed to reach a hospital. Among other things, agents were taught how to assess internal injuries, how to treat a sucking chest wound with plastic wrap, and how to perform an emergency tracheotomy with a razor blade and