Books in Brief: Protecting the President

Protecting the President: The Inside Story of a Secret Service Agent, by Dennis V. N. McCarthy with Philip W. Smith (Morrow, 221 pp., $15.95)

During the Civil War, a prison superintendent named William Patrick Wood began compiling a scrapbook of things he wanted to recollect. He became the first Chief of the Secret Service, and that volume, though it never saw print, set the precedent for what has become a sub-genre of such memoirs. Mr. McCarthy’s little book is the latest addition thereto. He spent twenty years in the Service (1964 to 1984), five of them in the glamor post of the White House Detail. He was the first agent to hurl himself upon John Hinckley Jr. on March 30, 1981. His story of those decades is no exposé but a prosaic narrative that will be mandatory reading for all buffs of the genre. There is much on the difficulties of protecting a world figure (every year 14,000 threats against the President are received) and a description of the effect of the job on an agent’s personal life (Mr. McCarthy has gone through two divorces). “I was like a spring coiled for years,” says this Medal of Valor winner, “waiting to be released” upon any oncoming threat. Back in the Civil War, Chief Wood had only counterfeiters to worry about. In 1951 the mission of protecting the President was formally added. In recalling his participation in both fields of activity, Mr. McCarthy “sifted through memories from over half the countries of the world and from every state.” He’d do it all again.

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Curtis Carroll Davis

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Protecting the President: The Inside Story of a Secret Service Agent, by Dennis V. N. McCarthy with Philip W. Smith (Morrow, 221 pp., $15.95)

During the Civil War, a prison superintendent named William Patrick Wood began compiling a scrapbook of things he wanted to recollect. He became the first Chief of the Secret Service, and that volume, though it never saw print, set the precedent for what has become a sub-genre of such memoirs. Mr. McCarthy’s little book is the latest addition thereto. He spent twenty years in the Service (1964 to 1984), five of them in the glamor post of the White House Detail. He was the first agent to hurl himself upon John Hinckley Jr. on March 30, 1981. His story of those decades is no exposé but a prosaic narrative that will be mandatory reading for all buffs of the genre. There is much on the difficulties of protecting a world figure (every year 14,000 threats against the President are received) and a description of the effect of the job on an agent’s personal life (Mr. McCarthy has gone through two divorces). “I was like a spring coiled for years,” says this Medal of Valor winner, “waiting to be released” upon any oncoming threat. Back in the Civil War, Chief Wood had only counterfeiters to worry about. In 1951 the mission of protecting the President was formally added. In recalling his participation in both fields of activity, Mr. McCarthy “sifted through memories from over half the countries of the world and from every state.” He’d do it all again.