So Long, Secret Service

President Barack Obama and the First Family may have vacated the Island late last week, but the last of his Secret Service personnel and tactical teams and vehicles only recently left our shores.

The behind-the-scenes operations nab fewer headlines than the president’s golf games and dinner dates. But the Secret Service men and women comprise a palpable presence on the Island. The official looking men and women rent Islander’s homes, camp out in Island quarters and frequent local shops during their stay. They’re the hard-to-miss underpinnings of presidential visits—and they’ve been coming to our vaulted shores for decades with little fanfare.

Lady Bird Johnson, widow of our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had the first seasonal detail on the island. She spent many quiet, post–White House summers on Martha's Vineyard, throughout the1990s and almost up until her death at 94, in 2007.  Her small but efficient Secret Service team was discreetly beside her all the while, and almost certainly saved her life when she had her stoke here, in 2002.

It was in 1965, during her husband's presidency, that Congress authorized protection of former presidents and their spouses during their lifetime and minor children until they reached the age of 16.

That edict stayed in place until 1994, when the President William Jefferson Clinton administration initiated a law that stating that presidents elected after January 1, 1997 will receive Secret Service protection for only the first 10 years after leaving office. Anyone elected before that date, such as Clinton, would continue to receive lifetime protection. George W. Bush is the first former president to receive that abbreviated service.

It was the Clintons who first introduced many islanders to the Secret ways. The first real visibility of the agency came with the first Clinton family visit in 1993. There was much carping and complaining then that his Vineyard vacations cost the taxpayers too much, until the facts began to leak out that presidential protection was a 24/7 detail and the Secret Service went everywhere, from Chicago to Cairo, with the Firsts.

The Secret Service then, as with today, more than 100 agents strong, stay and stayed at the Wesley House and in rental houses, for nominal sums, reported to be between $200 and $300 per agent, per night. Their government vehicles are either brought from the Capital or from assorted New England sites.

The origins of the Secret Service

The United States Secret Service was originally created on July 5, 1865, in Washington, D.C., through the Treasury Department, primarily to battle the production and distribution of counterfeit currency. Two decades later, the agency began informal part-time protection of President Grover Cleveland, its introduction to such tasks.

However, executive security was relatively unstructured until the assassination of President William McKinley, at the hands of anarchist Leon Frank Czolgosz in 1901 in Buffalo, NY. The assailant shot President McKinley on  on September 6, 1901 and became an assassin eight days later when the president died of complications from his bullet wound . Congress requested Secret Service begin to afford presidential protection that year.

The following year, with Theodore Roosevelt at the national helm, the Secret Service assumed full-time responsibility for protection of the president, with a brace of bodyguards. Congress passed the Sundry Civil Expenses Act for 1907, which provided funds for presidential protection by the Secret Service.

The agency was quietly alert but virtually unchallenged until the first day of November 1950, when a pair of Puerto Rican nationals made an attempt on the life of President Harry S. Truman. Thus, in 1951, Congress authorized permanent Secret Service protection of the president, his immediate family, the president-elect, and the vice-president, if he wishes.

In 1963, the world's thoughts on presidential protection changed.  John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Five years later, when his brother Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Congress authorized protection of major presidential and vice-presidential candidates and even nominees.

The weight of our nation's executive safety rode on the shoulders of the U.S. Secret Service, but its duties were about to unnaturally expand. While executive security was always foremost as a priority, in 1984, the agency was whipped into a new form of national guardianship. The electronic crime bomb went off and the Secret Service was sent to put out the fire. Congress enacted legislation to make the fraudulent use of credit and debit cards a federal violation. The law also authorized the Secret Service to investigate violations relating to: "credit and debit card fraud, federal-interest computer fraud, and fraudulent identification documents."

The new role continued burgeoning into 2001, with the onset of the Patriot Act. The Secret Service launched a massive assault on crimes regarding computer, identity theft, "energizing the nationwide electronic crimes task forces to assist the law enforcement, private sector and academia in detecting and suppressing computer-based crime."

That burgeoning continued into the following year: 2002 brought another huge development to the agency. The Department of Homeland Security was established. Part of that transition was to  transfer the United States Secret Service from the Department of the Treasury to Homeland Security, effective March 1, 2003.

The Secret Service was introduced to presidential candidate from Illinois,  Senator Barack Obama, in May of 2007. His rival, presidential candidate and then–New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton already received protection, due to her status as a former first lady.

The Obama family and the Clintons remain safe under the protective frond of the Secret Service while at their homes and away, including for the past three years, on trips to Martha's Vineyard.