Our greatest president, who presided over the end of slavery (one of America's most notable features to that point), and thus helped to reshape America's economy and its constitutional order, was murdered by a pro-slavery white supremacist. Our greatest civil rights leader of the twentieth century was murdered while in Memphis, TN to protest with striking black garbage workers. Arguably the second most prominent African American activist of the early 1960s was also assassinated. Our first African American president, Barack Obama, has received three times as many death threats as previous presidents. Assassinations are a huge part of America's civil rights history. Which is simply to say that they are a major part of America's history, period, even without considering our additional record of presidential assassinations.
In this historical context, in the last several weeks we have learned the following: In 2011, a man opened fire from his car by the South Lawn of the White House and hit the upstairs family residence at least 7 times without the Secret Service even realizing what was happening. One of these bullets "smashed a window on the second floor, just steps from the first family’s formal living room," while another "lodged in a window frame." Astonishingly, Secret Service agents only realized the White House had been hit four days later when a "housekeeper noticed broken glass and a chunk of cement on the floor." Last month, when Obama was visiting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Sept 16, a contractor carrying a gun and with "three convictions for assault and battery" was allowed, in violation of Secret Service rules, to get into an elevator with Obama. He was detained by agents only after he acted oddly and refused to stop videotaping the president with his cell phone. Then, only a few days later on Sept 19, a man carrying a knife jumped over the White House's north fence. He ran right through the unlocked front door and got all the way into the East Room. He was eventually tackled in the doorway into the Green Room by an off duty Secret Service Agent who just happened to be there by luck. This intruder had "800 rounds of ammunition, two hatchets, and a machete" in his car and a history of run-ins with police and the Secret Service.
Given the Secret Service's previous reputation for professionalism, competence, and over-caution, it's hard to know what to make of the recent string of major security lapses. David Weigel speaks for many DC residents (myself included) when he marvels that "If you live in DC and are occasionally inconvenienced by ginormous Secret Service perimeters, this scandal is extra baffling." These mistakes have been so huge and frankly bizarre that people naturally turn to humor. And there have been a lot of jokes made about this. In response to Julia Pierson resigning as Secret Service director, the Huffington Post's Politics Newsletter quipped that "The head of the Secret Service is leaving the White House, but the door is always open for her... and anyone, really."
I have no problem with some joking about this or almost any political topic. But it is important to remember that this is also a very serious matter, for President Obama himself obviously, but also for the long scope of American history. We shouldn't forget how grave this danger is.
Jonathan Capehart rightly calls these incidents "heart-stopping." We should keep in our mind that, for all the jokes, if somehow President Obama were assassinated, especially if it is by a white supremacist and/or because of incompetent security, it would be one of the worst events in American history. It would change not just our current political climate, but how historians write about the entire scope of American history.
On Tuesday, Ta-Nehisi Coates mentioned what an Obama assassination would mean to African Americans' trust in the United States as a country. Capehart tweeted indignantly (and justifiably) "It is unacceptable that Obama and his family have to live with the Secret Service’s broken culture."
On top of his achievements in office, as the first black president, President Obama will clearly have a prominent place in the African American history that we teach our children for generations to come. Do we want to have to explain to our children, for decades and centuries into the future, why he was allowed to be murdered through incompetent security, on top of all the other assassinations that are already ensconced in America's civil rights history curriculum?
In the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb reminds us that assassination has been a gravely serious danger from the moment that Obama started running for president:
...it’s also easy to forget that, early in his first Presidential campaign, candidate Obama’s popularity with white voters outstripped his standing among black ones. ...[T]he least openly discussed element of this reticence was simple fear. Just ahead of the 2008 South Carolina primary, black voters told me that they considered voting for Clinton as a favor to Michelle Obama. When one woman said that she wouldn't vote for Obama because “he has two daughters, and he needs to be around to help raise them,” she was not referring to the demands of the Presidency cutting into his quality time with his kids. Congressman John Lewis, whose skull was fractured by police officers during a march on Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, in 1965, explained it succinctly when I spoke to him in 2008: “Those of us who lived through Martin Luther King’s assassination have never gotten over it.”
None of us wants to live in a country that built much of its early wealth through slavery and allowed both the president who helped end slavery and its only African American president to be murdered by white supremacists. Whatever our partisanship, that's not a history we want to explain to future generations.
Some joking is fine. But we also need to get serious about fixing the Secret Service as soon as possible.
(The Mischiefs Of Faction)
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