7. For the Longest, America Had a Lax Attitude Towards Presidential Security
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War owes much to the fact that he had been assigned the most incompetent bodyguard to have ever been tasked with the protection of an American president. For much of America’s history, presidential protection was an ad hoc affair. The Secret Service, created in 1865 to catch currency counterfeiters, did not become presidential bodyguards until 1902, after the assassination of President William McKinley. Before that, security for US presidents was quite lax. For example, on the night that Lincoln was assassinated, April 14th, 1865, only one man had been assigned to protect him: an inept and unreliable cop named John Frederick Parker.
At the time, people were pretty blasé about presidential security. This, despite earlier close calls, such as an 1835 attempt to assassinate President Andrew Jackson, was foiled only because both of the would-be assassin’s pistols misfired. The lax attitude to presidential security in the nineteenth century was nearly universal. Abraham Lincoln was himself quite cavalier about his personal safety, despite numerous threats and copious hate mail. In 1861, a plot was uncovered that sought to murder the then-recently-elected President Lincoln in Baltimore, on his way to take office in Washington, DC. In 1864, as Lincoln rode at night unguarded, an unknown sniper fired a rifle shot that missed his head by inches and pierced his hat.
