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Incompetence That Shaped History

Khalid Elhassan March 9, 2020 33 min

Nineteenth century Washington Metropolitan Police Force officers. Washington Metropolitan Police

36. Abraham Lincoln’s Inept Bodyguard

For much of America’s history, seeing to the safety of the country’s chief executives was very much an ad hoc affair. The Secret Service, created in 1865 to fight currency counterfeiting, was not tasked with protecting US presidents until 1902, after the McKinley assassination.

Before that, security for US presidents was astonishingly lax. For example, on the night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, April 14^th, 1865, only one man had been assigned to protect him: an inept and unreliable cop named John Frederick Parker.

Also Read: The Anarchist that Killed President William McKinley Changed the Presidency Forever.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.