President Obama is accompanied by members of his Secret Service detail as he walks from the Marine One helicopter as he arrives at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to visit with wounded military personnel in Bethesda, Md., March 5. (Charles Dharapak/AP)
Obama appoints first female director of Secret Service. Why Julia Pierson? (+video)
President Obama announced his appointment of the first female director of the US Secret Service on Tuesday, a milestone for the agency tasked with protecting political leaders and investigating currency fraud.
Law enforcement experts and political officials say that Ms. Pierson’s appointment comes at a crucial time in the agency’s history as it continues to recover from a scandal in April 2012, when agents in Colombia were disciplined for soliciting prostitutes. Pierson’s main tasks include reforming a male-dominated culture within the agency and reestablishing its credibility.
“During the Colombia prostitution scandal, the Secret Service lost the trust of many Americans, and failed to live up to the high expectations placed on it," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) of Iowa told Reuters on Tuesday. “Ms. Pierson has a lot of work ahead of her to create a culture that respects the important job the agency is tasked with. I hope she succeeds in restoring lost credibility in the Secret Service.”
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Barbara Riggs, a mentor to Pierson and the agency’s first female deputy director, said that the scandal was not representative of the level of professionalism at the Secret Service and that Pierson will play a role in restoring its public image.
“She has a challenge in front of her because unfortunately in the public eye that’s what’s branding the Secret Service,” Riggs told The New York Times. “She has a challenge to move the agency beyond that.”
Pierson joined the Secret Service in 1983, working in the Miami and Orlando, Fla., field offices. She served as special agent in charge of the office of protective services from 2000 to 2001. She was on presidential protective detail on 9/11 in charge of making sure former President Clinton and President George W. Bush were accounted for, not knowing if there would be more attacks. From 2006 to 2008, she was the assistant director of Human Resources and Training, during which she oversaw the agency’s technology upgrade.
She became the chief of staff in 2008, the same year she received the Presidential Meritorious Award for superior performance in management throughout her career.
In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine in 2007, Pierson said she knew she wanted a career in law enforcement, starting with the Orlando Police Department while still in college. The Secret Service gave her the chance be an investigator and also travel, but it also has its challenges.
“We're a small agency with a large mission. Our size gives us the ability to have more personal knowledge of each other as employees,” she said in the interview. “Some people call it a cult, other people call it a family, but I do think it's unique.”
Pierson joins two other female directors of law enforcement agencies: Michele Leonhart is administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Stacia Hylton is director of the US Marshals Service. Both were appointed in 2010.
“It’s about time the Secret Service finally did get a female director,” especially since it started accepting female agents in 1975, said Ron Kessler, author of "In the President’s Secret Service," in an interview with ABC News.
The agency currently has 3,200 special agents, 1,300 uniformed division officers, and more than 2,000 other technical, professional, and administrative support personnel, according to the Secret Service website. Women are estimated to make up between 10 and 20 percent of the force.
Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, said in a statement that she is “proud of the historic decision” by Obama to appoint the agency's first female director. Pierson, she said, is “exceptionally well-qualified, and well-equipped” to lead the agency after 30 years of Secret Service experience.
“I am confident that Julia's background and capabilities will enable her to effectively lead the Secret Service as it continues to protect the safety of our First Families, our nation’s leaders, and the public at large,” Secretary Napolitano said.
Sen. Tom Carper (D) of Delaware, chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, echoed that sentiment and called Pierson’s appointment “welcome news and a proud milestone.”
“Ms. Pierson’s vast experience has prepared her to lead this agency with its critical protective, investigative and cybersecurity missions.... I look forward to working with Ms. Pierson as she helps usher in a new chapter for the U.S. Secret Service,” Senator Carper said in a statement.
Julia Pierson, the highest-ranking female agent in the Secret Service, will replace outgoing director Mark Sullivan who announced his retirement in February.
Mr. Obama cited Pierson’s “exemplary career” and said her experience with the agency will guide her through its current challenges.
“Over her 30 years of experience with the Secret Service, Julia has consistently exemplified the spirit and dedication the men and women of the service demonstrate every day,” Obama said in a statement. He added, “Julia is eminently qualified to lead the agency that not only safeguards Americans at major events and secures our financial system, but also protects our leaders and our first families, including my own.”
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Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (with flowers) and her husband, Mark Kelly, as well as other shooting victims of the Tucson mass shooting and family members, earlier this March return to the site of the shooting that left her critically wounded in Tucson, Ariz. (Ross D. Franklin/AP/File)
Mark Kelly, husband of Gabby Giffords, tussles with gun store, sea lion
Mark Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her partner in launching a gun control group, has had a busy couple of days.
On Monday, the owner of the Diamondback Police Supply gun store in Tucson, Ariz., said he was canceling Mr. Kelly’s purchase of an assault-style rifle. Earlier this month, Kelly wrote on Facebook that he purchased the weapon to make the point that gun control laws were too lenient, The Hill newspaper reported.
“Scary to think of people buying guns like these without a background check at a gun show or the Internet. We really need to close the gun show and private seller loop hole,” Kelly wrote.
Kelly’s wife was among 13 people wounded in a January 2011 shooting in a Tuscon supermarket parking lot that left six dead.
When he and his wife started their gun control organization, Americans for Responsible Solutions, they wrote an opinion article for USA Today saying, “Americans for Responsible Solutions, which we are launching today, will invite people from around the country to join a national conversation about gun violence prevention, will raise the funds necessary to balance the influence of the gun lobby, and will line up squarely behind leaders who will stand up for what's right.”
According to the Arizona Daily Star, Diamondback owner Doug MacKinlay posted a notice on his Facebook page Monday saying he had canceled the gun purchase March 21 and sent a full refund to Kelly before he could take possession of the rifle.
The Hill quotes a post from Mr. MacKinlay's Facebook page explaining that, “While I support and respect Mark Kelly’s 2nd Amendment rights to purchase, possess, and use firearms in a safe and responsible manner, his recent statements to the media made it clear that his intent in purchasing the Sig Sauer M400 5.56mm rifle from us was for reasons other then [sic] for his personal use.”
MacKinlay continued: "In light of this fact, I determined that it was in my company’s best interest to terminate this transaction prior to his returning to my store to complete the Federal From [sic] 4473 and NICS background check required of Mr. Kelly before he could take possession this firearm."
Kelly is a retired astronaut and US Navy captain with 6,000 flight hours in more than 50 different aircraft and more than 50 days in space. According to his biography on the Americans for Responsible Solutions website, Kelly is the son of two police officers. He graduated from the United States Merchant Marine Academy and has a masters degree from the US Naval Postgraduate School.
The Associated Press reports that on Saturday Kelly and his wife were in Laguna Beach, Calif., vacationing and visiting Kelly’s daughter from a previous marriage. GlobalPost has YouTube video of Kelly helping his distraught daughter pull her large dog away from a baby sea lion that the dog had attacked. The AP quotes Los Angeles police as telling the Los Angeles Times that the attack happened near an exclusive resort.
Kelly eventually succeeded in freeing the sea lion but the animal later died. A spokesperson for Americans for Responsible Solutions told the AP that Kelly crated the dog and then reported the incident to police. Police said the dog broke from its leash and that no laws were broken.
New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis reads about the Pulitzer prizes while at the Boston bureau of The Associated Press in 1963. The two-time Pulitzer winner, whose New York Times column championed liberal causes for three decades, died Monday. (AP/File)
Anthony Lewis dies: Pioneering journalist gave legal writing a storyline
Anthony Lewis, a former New York Times columnist, died Monday, leaving behind a legacy of transforming American legal journalism.
His reporting on the US Supreme Court, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize in 1963, heralded a new approach to legal journalism: writing compelling stories that dug into the social impact of the court’s decisions.
“He brought context to the law,” Ronald K.L. Collins, a University of Washington scholar who produced a bibliography of Mr. Lewis’s work, told The New York Times. “He had an incredible talent in making the law not only intelligible but also in making it compelling.”
Fellow journalists shared their appreciation for Lewis on Monday, highlighting his legal expertise, his liberal values, and his passion for the role that journalists play in maintaining democracy.
Lewis began covering the US Supreme Court and Department of Justice for The New York Times in 1955 as a member of the Washington bureau. He came to the Times after working for the Washington Daily News, where he won his first Pulitzer Prize for a critical series on a Navy employee, Abraham Chasanow, who was unjustly fired for being a security risk. The New York Times Washington bureau chief, James Reston, sent Lewis to Harvard Law School in 1956 and 1957 on a Neiman Fellowship to study law with particular emphasis on the court, according to The New York Times.
Lewis then spent nine years reporting on the Supreme Court, which at the time was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
“You cannot talk about the legacy of the Warren court and not talk about Tony Lewis,” Mr. Collins told The New York Times. “He was just part and parcel of it. He was part of ushering in that constitutional revolution in civil rights and civil liberties from Brown v. Board of Education to Miranda v. Arizona.”
In the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg argued that Lewis should have been the court’s 10th justice.
“Tony Lewis knew more about the Constitution and the laws, their history and meaning, than the vast majority of Supreme Court Justices, let alone lawyers,” Mr. Hertzberg writes.
Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate, said she grew up reading Lewis’s New York Times columns, which ran from 1969 to 2001. In courses she teaches at Yale Law School, she assigns his book “Make No Law,” which chronicles the 1964 Supreme Court ruling on New York v. Sullivan that rewrote US libel law.
“I teach Lewis for legal substance as much as for context and style: His rendering of the Supreme Court’s momentous opinion is clearer than the opinion itself,” Ms. Bazelon writes. “He was a master elucidator: the writer who translated the Warren court for the public, and in that role, magnified its impact.”
She wonders what Lewis would have thought of the Supreme Court arguments on gay marriage, which are taking place Tuesday and Wednesday.
“If those of us who write about the cases manage to describe them clearly and sharply, we’ll owe Lewis for setting the standard,” Bazelon writes.
In The Nation, historian Rick Perlstein said Lewis was unflinching in his reporting of “uncomfortable truths” and his definition of patriotism was “holding leaders accountable for their sins.”
Mr. Perlstein found in his research of Lewis’s reporting during the 1960s and ‘70s that Lewis had a “consistent astringent vision and moral courage when it came to executive power and the national security state – a willingness to record the ugliest things the American state was up to, and to unflinchingly interpret them not as the exceptions of a nation that is fundamentally innocent but as part of a pattern of power-drunk arrogance.”
Boston Herald opinion editor Rachelle Cohen said she keeps a copy of Lewis’s last book, “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment,” as a reminder of journalism’s rocky past and Lewis’s focus on the role of press freedom.
She highlights a favorite passage from the book’s introduction: “The meaning of the First Amendment has been, and will be, shaped by each American generation: by judges, political leaders, citizens. There will always be authorities who try to make their own lives more comfortable by suppressing critical comment.... But I am convinced that the fundamental American commitment to free speech, disturbing speech, is no longer in doubt.”
President Obama pauses during his speech at the Jerusalem Convention Center in Jerusalem, Israel, Thursday. The president’s speech last week in Israel revealed that his daughters are a key reason he holds Monday's Passover seder at the White House. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Why Obama, a Christian, hosts a Passover seder each year at White House
For the fifth time since he moved into the White House, President Obama will host a Passover seder Monday evening, a ritual that is celebrated by Jewish families throughout the world and that the president, a Protestant Christian, says speaks personally to him.
The gathering of about 20 people in the elegant family dining room on the first floor of the White House is expected to include first lady Michelle Obama as well as presidential daughters Malia and Sasha.
Mr. Obama is believed to be the first president to host seder dinners at the White House. America has not had a Jewish president.
During his speech to an audience of young people at the Jerusalem International Convention Center last Thursday, the president spoke at length about what the celebration of the Jews' escape from slavery in Egypt means to him. “It’s a story of centuries of slavery, and years of wandering in the desert; a story of perseverance amidst persecution, and faith in God and the Torah. It’s a story about finding freedom in your own land,” Obama said. “It’s a story that’s inspired communities across the globe, including me and my fellow Americans."
The president told his audience of young Israelis that the Passover story has a special resonance to him, as an African-American whose early years were not rooted in any one place. “To African Americans, the story of the Exodus was perhaps the central story, the most powerful image about emerging from the grip of bondage to reach for liberty and human dignity – a tale that was carried from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement into today,” he said. “For me, personally, growing up in far-flung parts of the world and without firm roots, the story spoke to a yearning within every human being for a home."
The seder tradition began in 2008 when candidate Obama unexpectedly joined a seder arranged by three young Jewish aides in the basement of a Sheraton hotel in Harrisburg, Pa., during some of the darkest days of his campaign. The organizers included Eric Lesser, who worked on trip logistics; campaign videographer Arun Chaudhary; and Herbie Ziskend, who did campaign advance work. All have since left the Obama team but are expected to attend Monday night’s dinner.
After the pledge that ends the traditional seder, “next year in Jerusalem,” candidate Obama raised his glass and declared, “Next year in the White House,”recounts the Jewish Daily Forward. At the time, he was still engaged in a ferocious primary battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Those who have attended the White House seders say they blend traditional and new aspects. On an untraditional note, the event includes the reading of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. More traditionally, Malia and Sasha in the past have taken on the traditional duties of Jewish children, asking four questions about the evening’s purpose and searching for a piece of matzoh that has been hidden at the White House.
The president’s speech last week in Israel revealed that his daughters are a key reason he holds the seders at the White House. “I did so because I wanted my daughters to experience the Haggadah, and the story at the center of Passover that makes this time of year so powerful," he said.
Like the Obamas and their daughters, not all attendees at the seder will be Jewish. For example, Jen Psaki’s first seder was the dinner in Harrisburg while she was serving as the Obama campaign’s traveling press secretary. She has since been pictured at White House seders. Ms. Psaki, now the State Department spokesman, learned the Exodus story at Catholic school.
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