Historian William Seale has described presidential protection as a learning process, with presidents and their families and the Secret Service sometimes straining to adjust to one another.



Although from the beginning guards were posted at the White House gates and front doors and the White House grounds were patrolled by a day guard and a night watchmen, it was not until 1842 that the first permanent security force for the White House was established—an auxiliary guard of a captain and three other men. The proposal to create the force had met opposition in Congress; Sen. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky warned “it might be metamorphosed into a political guard for the executive … it would not be entirely safe to organize such a corps. It was a little sort of stand guard, which might eventually become a formidable army.”1



Crittenden’s fears went unrealized, and in 1853 Franklin Pierce became the first president to have a full-time bodyguard, and also introduced the two-level security arrangement that characterizes presidential protection today. A guarded outer perimeter securing the Executive Mansion itself, and an inner perimeter—the bodyguard to protect the person of the president.



During the Civil War there were heightened security fears in Washington that Confederates just across the Potomac in Virginia could easily slip across and attack President Abraham Lincoln at the White House. Metropolitan Police guarded the Executive Mansion but Lincoln did not want the house to take on the characteristics of an armed camp. Guards inside the Mansion (the doormen) dressed in civilian clothes and concealed their firearms. Uniformed, armed sentries were posted at the gates to the grounds and at the doors to the Executive Mansion itself.



During the Theodore Roosevelt administration (1901-1909), the Secret Service assumed full-time responsibility for protecting the President. President Roosevelt was guarded by at least two Secret Service men. Roosevelt chafed under the safeguard. “He did not like restraint,” one observer recalled. “Always free and active in his manner of life, he found the vigilance of the secret service men irksome and their constant presence irritating.” To frustration of his Secret Service detail, Roosevelt would sometimes secretly slip off the White House grounds and go for an invigorating hike or horseback ride in Rock Creek Park.2

His successor, William Howard Taft, followed the same mischievous tradition. At 4:30 on Christmas Eve afternoon 1911, the president and first lady secretly left the White House on foot in a rainstorm to call on friends as a surprise. When the Secret Service discovered their absence, there was widespread panic. Chief John Wilkie and his men scurried all over town searching for them. Two hours after their departure a soaked and dripping first couple returned to the White House, smiling broadly.3

