1st female chief of US Secret Service

The 1993 film “In the Line of Fire” is one of the most famous movies about the U.S. Secret Service. Frank, a former presidential guard played by actor Clint Eastwood, is a drunk who is haunted by his failure to protect President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. Frank one day overhears a plot to kill the president and decide to return to work. At the end of the movie, he saves the chief executive by throwing himself in front of him and regains his honor.

The Secret Service of the U.S. was established under the Treasury Department to crack down on counterfeiting in 1865 toward the end of the Civil War. Swindlers or moonshine smugglers, including the mob or white supremacists such as the KKK, greatly feared the Secret Service. This tradition continues today as the service targets financial crimes or terrorist activities. Protecting the president was added as a duty after the assassination of former President William McKinley in 1901. The Secret Service is now the world’s best presidential protective operation with 7,000 employees and an annual budget of 1.6 billion U.S. dollars. Though the agents can work up to 20 hours a day, Americans admire them and call their jobs “God given.” Among more than 10,000 people who apply to join the service, just the top 1 percent makes it, far lower than Harvard University’s acceptance rate of 5.9 percent. The starting salary is between 43,964 dollars and 74,891 dollars per year, and the retirement age is 57. Women comprise 10 percent of staff.

Secret Service agents, however, have proven to be human. In 2009, an uninvited couple entered a party at the White House, bringing utter humiliation to presidential security. Arrived in Colombia ahead of President Barack Obama, nine agents had sex with prostitutes and were later fired last year. More recently, the Beast, the high-tech presidential limousine, broke down and stopped in Tel Aviv, Israel, embarrassing the Secret Service, which has been praised as the world`s best. Frequent accidents and mistakes have tainted the status of the service. With being relocated from the Treasury Department to the Homeland Security Department after the 2001 terrorist attacks, problems in the recruiting system are said to be causes of lax discipline among agents.

On Tuesday, President Obama appointed Julia Pierson as the first woman to head the Secret Service. As the conservative agency, which is 138 years old, admitted its first woman 42 years ago, the appointment is a shock. So how will Pierson reorganize the scandal-ridden Secret Service? Will Korea that elected a female president before the U.S. follow the lead of the U.S. and appoint a women to head its presidential security? This year marks the 50th anniversary of Korea’s Presidential Security Office.

Editorial Writer Park Yong (parky@donga.com)