Zero Fall: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, by Carol Leonnig, 2021, Kindle Edition, Random House 

This book is pretty good as it gives a lot of detail about the problems within the Secret Service over the years. It tracks various failures of the Secret Service to protect the President and his family and what the agency supposedly learned from each of these incidents.

Whil the book is easy to read and well researched, I think it suffers in that it is a very long book, almost 500 pages. When I finally got through reading it, I thought I was glad to be done with it.

What did I take away from this book? I, unfortunately, came away with a sense that the Secret Service as an organization is really in bad shape. There have been numerous efforts by numerous directors to put in place various reforms. Despite these efforts, today’s Secret Service isn’t being run any better than it has in the past. This sad state of affairs is due to poor management, in-bred culture, ineffective recruiting, and chronic underfunding. Prospects for improvement are dim.

So, in spite of the book’s being a pretty good book, it portrays a sad picture and suggests that it isn’t going to get any better in the near future.