They are a familiar sight around a president — fit, intense men and women, wearing dark suits and earphones, scanning the crowd. The Secret Service has become a vital part of presidential lore, and events throughout the twentieth century have illustrated the growing complexity of their work.

The United States Secret Service is part of the federal government’s Treasury Department. It was established at the end of the Civil War to deter counterfeiters, when it was estimated that up to half the currency in circulation was fake. Not until the 1901 assassination of William McKinley was the agency assigned the task of presidential protection. The death of John F. Kennedy in 1963 resulted in an extensive revamping and expansion of the agency. Today, besides guarding the president and his family, the Secret Service also stands watch over presidential candidates, former chief executives, vice presidents and other high government officials, foreign dignitaries visiting the United States, as well as a deceased president’s widow and children. Such protective services, however, comprise only a fraction of Secret Service responsibilities. Offices around the country combat counterfeiters emboldened by new copying, scanning and printing technologies; they try to stem fraud involving the Internet, credit cards and cellular telephones; agents perform "threat assessment" of individuals who may pose a danger to public officials; they also do background investigations for financial crime matters.

Yet it is in protecting the President of the United States, of course, that Secret Service agents are best known for. When a president appears in public, agents near him give troublemakers second thoughts, and plain-clothes operatives sprinkled throughout the crowd watch for problems. Secret Service details work these appearances with the drilled precision of an NFL offense. In an emergency like an assassination attempt, agents must overcome their natural survival instincts and shield the president with their own body. It is strenuous, hazardous duty, and the selection process for Secret Service personnel is an extremely demanding one. Applicants often come from law enforcement or military backgrounds. Highly stringent tests of ability and background (experienced police officers often flunk out) pick only the best of the best.

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT spoke with several former and current Secret Service agents about their work. HAMILTON BROWN was on the protective details for presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Today, he resides in Virginia and heads the agency’s alumni association, which has a membership of over one thousand. Among Special Agent MALCOLM LANDRY’s postings have been protecting Richard Nixon in his post-White House years. A twenty-five-year veteran of the Service, he is currently based in Los Angeles, where he recruits candidates for the agency from the region. FRANK O’DONNELL is Special Agent In Charge of the Los Angeles office; he helped protect Vice President George Bush from 1981 to 1985 and former president Ronald Reagan from 1990 until 1996. GAYLE MOORE is also stationed in Los Angeles at the present; she served on the protective teams for Gerald Ford in the 1980s and for President Clinton from 1994 until 1997.

This interview was moderated by Dan Sanders.

HAMILTON BROWN: The fact that I was a schoolteacher, and was due to make $2600 a year for teaching school, and the Secret Service was going to pay me $5500.

HAMILTON BROWN: In 1960.

MALCOLM LANDRY: One of the things I tell young men and women considering this for a career is, this job affords one a variety of work and a lot of independence. That’s what I think a lot of us get a charge out of.

GAYLE MOORE: I decided in high school that law enforcement was an exciting arena for women. In the late sixties, early seventies, women were just being allowed to become police officers and carry firearms. I progressed from being a police officer to a state trooper to the federal level.

HAMILTON BROWN: I didn’t know anything at all about the Secret Service when I came in, but you learn pretty quick. I came in with an open mind and kept an open mind.

GAYLE MOORE: The first women were hired in 1970. I started federally in 1979, with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I transferred over to the Service in 1982.

FRANK O’DONNELL: Typically, we take people who are at least twenty-five, people who have done a few years of police work, or in some computer field. We take teachers, any number of other people.

HAMILTON BROWN: No, that’s not a requirement with us.

MALCOLM LANDRY: Really, there’s three requirements — you must be at least twenty-one and not yet thirty-seven, no extensive use of illegal drugs in your background, and have a four-year college degree. It’s really about the focus an individual has — you can’t teach it. Local law enforcement experience is invaluable — police work, probation officer, things like that.

MALCOLM LANDRY: The sequence goes this way: complete an application, we review it. Then we’re gonna put the computer on you, run you from here to there, see what kicks up. If we like what we see we’ll invite you in for an initial interview. If that goes well you’re asked to sign waiver forms for polygraph and drug tests, if that should come up down the line. If the interview comes up above average, you take the Treasury Enforcement Agent Exam. If you pass it, 70 or above, you’re invited in for another review and a ‘panel.’ That’s another interview, with three agents. If two of them rate you as above average or better, then all the paperwork is sent to Headquarters. Usually, they go along with our recommendations. There’s a polygraph, and a physical.

FRANK O’DONNELL: The process is nine months to a year. I’ve been on the job over twenty-three years, and I remember vividly, it took about eleven months.

GAYLE MOORE: Your first year is in a probationary status, and most of that time is spent going to school. Initially, all of our agents go to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which is located in Georgia. They attend an eight-week-long Criminal Investigators School. Then, after you graduate from FLETC, special agent trainees are sent to the Secret Service Training School, which is located in Beltsville, Maryland. There they receive another twelve weeks of specialized Secret Service training.

GAYLE MOORE: Certainly, we capitalize on driving, especially protective vehicles in motorcade situations, that kind of thing. But a lot of the emphasis is put on the different jurisdictions we’re responsible for. In the financial crimes arena, our agents have to become experts on counterfeit currency. They need to learn about credit card fraud, and different financial-institution fraud schemes that are going on. All of those things that are unique to the mission of the Secret Service.

GAYLE MOORE: Correct. Then, after all of the formal schooling, it really takes an agent three or four years of on the job experience to really begin feel comfortable and truly competent with all the things we do.

HAMILTON BROWN: In those days, it wasn’t a question of being selected. If there was an opening on a presidential detail, and you were young and single, that’s where you went. I was on them from 1962 to 1970. Today, an agent will put in five or six years at field offices around the country, then as part of their career development be assigned to the presidential protective division, or the vice-presidential protective division, or the foreign dignitary division.

MALCOLM LANDRY: That stint, on a permanent protection assignment, lasts two to five years. Then you rotate back out to the field.

HAMILTON BROWN: If you’re, say, just a grunt, not a Shift Supervisor or anything, just a grunt, you show up to work, and there’s various posts around the White House that have to be manned by our agents. Uniformed Division officers also man posts. So you go to one post, and you’re usually there for a certain period of time, then you rotate to another one. It’s sort of around-the-horn like that until the end of your shift.

HAMILTON BROWN: If the president’s traveling and you’re part of the working shift, it varies greatly, because if he’s going out, say, to Los Angeles, the Rose Bowl, you’re working the follow-up cars, you’re in very close proximity to the president during that time. Now, if he goes to the Century Plaza Hotel or wherever he’s staying, he is back in his house, so to speak, and again you have the post rotation around the rooms that he’s in.

MALCOLM LANDRY: We’ll send agents from here in Los Angeles, and other offices, to support the regular protection detail when the president travels.

FRANK O’DONNELL: A lot of it depends on the age of the protectee. President Reagan, who didn’t even run until he was sixty-nine years old, you know, was not as active. Whereas President Clinton, young guy, extremely active, travels a lot more.

FRANK O’DONNELL: He can’t hold a candle to President Clinton, though. He’s broken just about every travel record.

HAMILTON BROWN: They’re all different. Different personalities, different makeup, different politics, everything. You learn pretty quickly that you don’t get caught up in the president’s life. You’re there for a specific purpose, you’re not there to play politics, you’re not there to have a personality conflict, or to have a personal relationship with the president. You’re there to protect his life, and that’s the one function that you have.

FRANK O’DONNELL: You do have a bond with these protectees, you’re with them day in, day out, you get to be like family, in a lot of respects.

FRANK O’DONNELL: There is that objectivity, do your job, be aloof. On the other hand you’re there with them, and it can take on a different life as well.

FRANK O’DONNELL: Yes, there is.

FRANK O’DONNELL: I just know that some other agents had a lot of heartburn with what they said.

HAMILTON BROWN: Quite a bit. I don’t know what the divorce rate is with the agents, but I would suspect it would be like it is in most police agencies, on the high scale. Most wives can adapt to the fact that their husbands are not there. And now, you know, we have a lot of women in the Secret Service, and their husbands, I imagine, have to adapt too. It’s not nice to have your spouse gone a pretty big percentage of the time, especially in a campaign year.

MALCOLM LANDRY: I’ve been married thirty years. Back in Agent Brown’s day, they had, what, 300 agents?

HAMILTON BROWN: We were spread a little thin. There really wasn’t an increase in our numbers until after the Kennedy assassination in 1963.

MALCOLM LANDRY: They do a rotational thing now so agents don’t get beat up as much. A lot of them start liking that travel and start volunteering for it all the time.

GAYLE MOORE: This is not a nine to five job. I think that’s one of the reasons why it may not be as attractive to women as other federal law enforcement agencies. We work shift work, we travel all the time. The hours are long and intensive. Our job is totally dictated, at least from the protection side of the house, by the schedules of the people that we protect. This is a killer, labor-intensive job. And it’s not a real family-friendly job, which is why we’re very careful in recruiting applicants and hiring people, so that everyone in their lives knows what they’re getting involved in. And the fact that they’re gonna miss holidays and birthdays and anniversaries, that they’re gonna be transferred, that there’s gonna be twenty-one-day rotations without a day off, away from home, during the campaign season. It’s not an easy career.

GAYLE MOORE: That’s true, really. There were only ten of us when I came over from ATF. And now there are, I believe, about 260 of us, which out of 2000 isn’t a lot, but to us it’s incredible. We’ve grown a lot.

MALCOLM LANDRY: Oh, big time, let me give you an example. The Democratic National Convention that’s going to be in Los Angeles? We started working on that a year ago -- two years before the event. We already have on reservation a thousand rooms for the agents who’ll be flying in. It’s kind of like a Broadway show, you rehearse and rehearse, then you bring it to Broadway.

HAMILTON BROWN: The Secret Service today has a separate division for campaigns, and we plan these things out from one campaign to the next. That’s a seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hour job, and you just keep on top of it.

HAMILTON BROWN: Well, most presidents and vice presidents do impromptu things all the time. So this is really no surprise to the agents. I would doubt very seriously if they were upset, because this stuff does happen. What you do is, you go into the crowd with your protectee, and you start looking for people that don’t belong there. Hopefully in a crowd like that, everybody went through a magnetometer, and their bags were checked in a fluoroscope, so you feel pretty confident there’s no weapons in the room. But when something like this happens, you look at people’s faces to see if they’re, you know, goofy. Then you start looking at hands. Because faces don’t kill anybody — hands do.

HAMILTON BROWN: Well, like I said, when that happened there were only about 300 of us. Congress realized we had a small agency and we needed to be upgraded — in manpower, equipment, communications, and all the facets that go with protection. In 1965 we added about another 400 people, which more than doubled our size. I think the total makeup of the agent category in the Secret Service is around 2100. We had to grow up, and we did.

HAMILTON BROWN: No. At the time, I was in Hyannisport, with the president’s father.

HAMILTON BROWN: I know Clint very well. Yes, he did take it very harshly. And it took him a long time to get over it. As a matter of fact, he told us once that he went back to Dallas. Back in the Seventies I believe it was, maybe the Eighties. And he walked the route of the motorcade and Dealey Plaza. And it was only then that he accepted the fact that this would have happened whether he was there or not. It took a very long time for that to sink in. But yes, that was a very emotional time for all of us, especially Clint.

FRANK O’DONNELL: That was just a different time. Not as many agents, an open limousine... we learn by the crises we live through. You’ll never see an open limousine again, as a result of that. After Reagan got shot, all of a sudden we can use magnetometers everywhere. Every time there’s an incident, we get some of the security we’ve always wanted. Four years ago, we had two incidents at the White House in a month’s time. An airplane crashed into the south side of the mansion, and a month later a guy shot up the front of the White House with an AK-47. For years, we’ve wanted to shut down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. And until there’s an incident, it doesn’t happen.

HAMILTON BROWN: They’re eligible to retire after twenty-five years.

MALCOLM LANDRY: Right now, you have to retire thirty days after your fifty-seventh birthday. Mandatory.

HAMILTON BROWN: Some stay in the government, they’re a prime commodity, with their training and expertise. Some go into private industry as directors of security for corporations, and are very successful.

MALCOLM LANDRY: The guy who’s head of security for the new Cleveland Browns, he’s a former agent. I could keep naming ‘em, in government and civilian agencies. That movie "To Live and Die in L.A." was written by a former agent, and he’s written about eight books now.

FRANK O’DONNELL: Maybe on an isolated basis, but as a general rule, no.

HAMILTON BROWN: Like I said, we don’t get any warm-and-fuzzies with most presidents. I know some of our people have stayed in touch with former presidents, they’ve gotten very close to them. Like Jerry Parr, who saved Mr. Reagan’s life, Tim McCarthy, who got shot in the Reagan assassination attempt. Yeah, they stay in touch, I think, and rightfully so. I mean, our guys have put their lives on the line for these people.

HAMILTON BROWN: The people. The people that you’re agents with, that you work with on a daily basis, you never forget ‘em. The people you deal with, from presidents down to the people you arrest on the street.

MALCOLM LANDRY: I have a couple of philosophies on that. When I recruit I tell people, "You’ll make a decent living, you won’t get rich. If you want to get rich, play the lottery." The payoff is, again, you’re afforded a lot of independence. See, you could work on a counterfeit case for six weeks, by the time you go to trial you’re burnt out. And then they’ll have a trip coming up — "Hey, the president’s going to Paris next week, would you like to take that trip?" You go there for a week, you come back rejuvenated.