Encore: Presidential Assassinations | Protecting POTUS (NEW) | 1

American History Tellers

Wondery

Society & Culture, Kids & Family, History, Education For Kids

4.7 • 18.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The job of guarding the President’s life belongs to the men and women of the United States Secret Service. There have been many highs and lows in the agency’s more than 150-year history – most poignantly the assassination of JFK in 1963. On today’s show Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig joins host Lindsay Graham to discuss the agency’s response to assassination attempts over the years, and her book Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service.

Order your copy of the new American History Tellers book, The Hidden History of the White House, for behind-the-scenes stories of some of the most dramatic events in American history—set right inside the house where it happened.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wunderry Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American history tellers early and
0:05.1	ad free right now. Join Wundery Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's June 18th, 1964 in Washington, D.C.
0:25.0	You're the head of the Secret Service, and today you're testifying before the Warren Commission,
0:30.0	the panel created by President Linden Johnson to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
0:35.5	The agency you've served for 27 years has been criticized for not doing enough to protect President Kennedy that awful day in Dallas.
0:43.5	You're hoping to use today's testimony to lobby for much-needed improvements to the service
0:48.0	so you can rebuild the public's trust and your agent's morale.
0:52.0	But after an hour of questioning,
0:54.0	it seems the commission is mostly interested
0:56.2	in your agent's drinking the night before Kennedy's murder.
0:59.5	The lead investigator, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren,
1:03.3	glowers at you through his wire rim glasses.
1:06.5	Now, do you really expect us to believe that these men,
1:09.3	drinking and beat-neck joints into the early morning hours,
1:12.4	were as alert the next day as they should be when charged with the tremendous responsibility
1:16.8	of protecting the president?
1:18.3	I do not condone the drinking, sir.
1:20.3	But I think these men responded as well as anyone could under the circumstances.
1:24.0	Don't you think they would have been a bit sharper that afternoon?
1:27.0	Had they not been drinking the night before?
1:28.0	Sir, I do not believe their reaction time was the deciding factor.
1:32.0	They could not have done anything differently to prevent
	...

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