secret service

by Allison Churchill, Geoffrey Ingersoll, and Robert Johnson They're the guys in suits surrounding the President of the United States, ready to take a bullet to protect the leader of the free world But that wasn't always their main role. President Abraham Lincoln created the United States Secret Service (USSS) to deal with the mad influx of counterfeit money after the Civil War. A move ironically made just hours before he was assassinated April 14,1865. Four months later the Service was fully operational. In the 2004 run up to the presidential election George W. Bush spoke at Louisiana State University (LSU), where ...

The Secret Service conjures up images of Clint Eastwood in “In the Line of Fire.” You think of clean cut, unsmiling men with conservative suits, earpieces and hidden weapons that flank the president wherever he goes. These are men and women who, as we’ve seen, will take a bullet for the people they protect. See Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt as an agent moves toward the gunman, making himself a figurative meat shield. That’s guts. That’s brave. That might even be crazy. Created in 1865 by Abraham Lincoln to combat the deluge of counterfeit money, the Secret Service was given the ...