ment of a patriotic duty. And as police work
goes, the pay's not bad. But there's squalor in Service work, too.
You may get spat upon by protesters howling abuse--and if they get
violent, if they get too close, sometimes you have to knock one of them
down--discreetly.

The real squalor in Service work is drudgery such as "the quarterlies,"
traipsing out four times a year, year in, year out, to interview the
various pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and asylums, who
have seen fit to threaten the President's life. And then there's the
grinding stress of searching all those faces in the endless bustling
crowds, looking for hatred, looking for psychosis, looking for the
tight, nervous face of an Arthur Bremer, a Squeaky Fromme, a Lee Harvey
Oswald. It's watching all those grasping, waving hands for sudden
movements, while your ears strain at your radio headphone for the
long-rehearsed cry of "Gun!"

It's poring, in grinding detail, over the biographies of every rotten
loser who ever shot at a President. It's the unsung work of the
Protective Research Section, who study scrawled, anonymous death
threats with all the meticulous tools of anti-forgery techniques.

And it's maintaining the hefty computerized files on anyone who ever
threatened the President's life. Civil libertarians have become
increasingly concerned at the Government's use of computer files to
track American citizens--but the Secret Service file of potential
Presidential assassins, which has upward of twenty thousand names,
rarely causes a peep of protest. If you EVER state that you intend to
kill the President, the Secret Service will want to know and record who
you are, where you are, what you are, and what you're up to. If you're
a serious threat--if you're officially considered "of protective
interest"--then the Secret Service may well keep tabs on you for the
rest of your natural life.

Protecting the President has first call on all the Service's resources.
But there's a lot more to the Service's traditions and history than
standing guard outside the Oval Office.

The Secret Service is the nation's oldest general federal
law-enforcement agency. Compared to the Secret Service, the FBI are
new-hires and the CIA are temps. The Secret Service was founded 'way
back in 1865, at the suggestion of Hugh McCulloch, Abraham Lincoln's
Secretary of the Treasury. McCulloch wanted a specialized Treasury
police to combat counterfeiting. Abraham