Secret Service director resigns after Trump attack. It’s unprecedented, historians say

Kimberly Cheatle, the now-former director of the U.S. Secret Service, has resigned from her post, following the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump.

She is the first director in the agency’s history to leave office in the immediate aftermath of an assassination attempt on an incoming or current president or major presidential candidate, according to historians.

Cheatle’s resignation comes the day after she testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability about the Secret Service’s protection of Trump, who was grazed by a bullet at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13.

After the hearing, Republican Rep. James Comer and Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin — the chair and ranking member of the committee — published a letter calling on Cheatle to step down.

The letter cited Cheatle’s “failure to protect former President Donald Trump from an assassination attempt” and her inability “to provide answers to basic questions regarding that stunning operational failure.”

“I take full responsibility for the security lapse,” Cheatle — who was sworn into office in 2022 — wrote to her colleagues on July 23, according to the Associated Press.

“In light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that I have made the difficult decision to step down as your director,” she wrote.

A break with precedent

Despite multiple assassination attempts on presidents, presidents-elect and presidential candidates throughout history, Cheatle is the only Secret Service director to resign in the wake of one, according to historians.

The Secret Service, which was created in 1865 to combat counterfeiting, began protecting the president in 1901, following the assassination of President William McKinley.

Since then — in spite of eight direct assaults on presidents, including one which proved deadly — “no director has lost his or her job as the result of an assassination attempt on a president,” Taylor Stoermer, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, told McClatchy News.

For example, after the killing of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, then-Secret Service Director James Rowley remained at his post for ten more years.

And after the March 30, 1981, assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, then-Secret Service director H. Stuart Knight stayed in office for eight more months.

And the attack on Reagan, which left him hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the chest, was not the first attempt on a president’s life during Knight’s tenure, Stoermer said.

“He had been Secret Service director since Nixon and made it through the two assassination attempts on Ford in 1975, in California (one gun misfired, the other, only 17 days later, barely missed Ford, but both were fired point-blank),” Stoermer said.

The agency also began guarding presidents-elect in 1908 and major presidential candidates in 1968, after the killing of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. But since these expansions in the organization’s mandate, there had been no direct assaults on incoming presidents or major candidates until this year’s attempted assassination, according to a 2009 Congressional Research Service report.

Cheatle’s resignation, when compared to the continuity of past directors after similar attacks, is illustrative of the current atmosphere of politics, Thomas Balcerski, a historian at Eastern Connecticut State University, told McClatchy News.

“We are in an age of hostile, oppositional politics...” Balcerski said. “There is no room for recovery from failure in today’s political environment — only retribution.”

Her exit also comes 10 years after Julia Pierson, the first female director of the agency, resigned after multiple security breaches at the White House.

Pierson stepped down “after only months for a few embarrassing lapses that didn’t actually result in any threat,” Stoermer said, adding “It’s interesting that makes the only two female directors as sort of victims of security lapses on their watch.”

This story was originally published July 23, 2024 at 1:09 PM with the headline "Secret Service director resigns after Trump attack. It’s unprecedented, historians say."