Kimberly Cheatle, the Director of the Secret Service, was forced to resign. She held the office of Director for less than two years and was only the second woman to hold that post during the more than 150 years since the creation of the Secret Service. Members of Congress demanded that Ms. Cheatle resign even before she failed to answer many of the questions from Congressmen and Congresswomen at the first House Oversight Committee hearing addressing the security failure at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. As surprising as her failure to answer the questions posed to her was, even more surprising was the nature of many of the questions asked.
The committee members insisted that the now former-director provide them with a complete listing of all “personnel” at the rally site in Pennsylvania. They also demanded all audio and video recordings made at the site and any memoranda generated in connection with security activities and preparations. Fulfilling the demands from this committee would obviously have seriously compromised both the effectiveness of future security measures and the safety of Secret Service personnel and their families. In this age of “doxxing,” the names, home addresses, phone numbers, family members, social security numbers, and a host of other sensitive information concerning these members of the Secret Service would have been posted on the Internet before that first day’s hearing was adjourned. This Oversight committee obviously did not concern itself with the safety and effectiveness of Secret Service field agents and operations.
That members of Congress and their staffs would prevent the disclosure or dissemination of this sensitive information is absurd. That members of the public acquiring this information would not take it upon themselves to target Secret Service personnel and operations is equally absurd. It is called the “Secret” service for a reason. Its operations and operatives are supposed to be confidential, and when it fails to provide the security demanded of it, the people hired to provide this service are expected to make the necessary changes. This is the justification for forcing out a Director when there is a failure, but it presumes that the Director’s incompetence was the cause of the failure.
Kimberly Cheatle took “full responsibility” for the security failure in Pennsylvania, even though she was in no way actually responsible for the failure of the Secret Service agents and local law enforcement personnel at the rally site. Her forced resignation was meant to send a message, not to rectify a problem. The message was that the person at the top of the operation will be sacrificed, even if the fault lay with dozens of subordinates who got careless.
Despite the inevitability of Ms. Cheatle’s resignation, the treatment of prior Secret Service Directors involved in similar failures suggests this was a special circumstance. The Directors responsible when John F. Kennedy was murdered and when assassination attempts were made against Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford were not forced out. In each of these cases, the Directors of the Secret Service were not even subpoenaed (as was Ms. Cheatle) to provide testimony to a Congressional committee within days of the incidents.
Members of the Oversight Committee from both political parties investigating the Butler Pennsylvania assassination attempt addressed Ms. Cheatle with contempt and condescension. They provided her no opportunity to explain why fulfilling their requests for information would compromise the safety of the men and women working in the Secret Service. The committee members acted as if their function was to assign blame quickly, rather than appropriately.
The interrogation of Ms. Cheatle was not informative, but it did suggest that committee members wanted their outrage captured in time for the evening news and that information gathering was not a high priority in this investigation. Ms. Cheatle was portrayed as incompetent and unqualified for the position she held. The two female Secret Service agents evident in the videos of Mr. Trump just after he was shot faced similar criticism. Various ‘talking heads’ insisted that they were “too short” to effectively protect Mr. Trump. Some even mocked the clumsiness of one of the female agents as she tried to reholster her weapon. The obvious agitation of other agents and the confused response as the shooter sent eight rounds toward his target were not objects of criticism or derision.
All of the agents at the scene displayed courage under fire, and, yes, all of us get clumsy when our adrenaline surges. Some members of the committee insinuated that the increase in the number of women in the Secret Service was compromising its effectiveness. Allusions to ‘diversity, equity, inclusion [DEI]’ objectives were made by some of the committee members, in effect blaming the security failure on the alleged incompetence on female agents and administrators.
Perhaps the treatment of the Director and the criticism of the female agents were not intended to send the message that women should not be entrusted with protecting Presidents and Presidential candidates, but that was one of the implicit messages conveyed to the public. It is a bias built into the discussions of an individual’s ‘qualifications’ for all sorts of positions in our society. The prevailing notion is that someone six feet tall is more qualified to take a bullet for a Presidential candidate than someone who is only 5 feet 6 inches tall. It assumes that a male Director of the Secret Service would be more willing to satisfy Congressional demands for disclosing sensitive information to an Oversight committee than was this female Director. The deep-seated prejudices revealed in reaction to the violence in Butler, Pennsylvania, are archaic, nonsensical, and counterproductive to efforts intended to preserve and protect our democracy.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
