Women, y’all should know, have been protecting America’s presidents since 1861.
Yes, the guns, the earpieces, the stealth, the shades, even the mad, heroic drive to the hospital that helped save President Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981 and a middle-of-the-night ploy to save President Abraham Lincoln in 1861 have all been done by women.
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And it stings those veterans — women who swore to take a bullet for a leader — to hear the critics who want to play the sexism blame game after bullets whizzed past former president Donald Trump on Saturday and female agents dove in to protect him.
“It’s ridiculous. Why are we having this conversation now?” said Melanie Burkholder, 52, who is fed up and incredulous at the skepticism over women in the Secret Service.
Burkholder climbed the rope and rang the bell in agent training while men couldn’t make it.
They watched in awe as she did 20 pull-ups without breaking a sweat.
She won awards for her shooting skills and got details guarding presidents “from Carter to Bush 43” with her 5-foot-7, relentlessly trained body.
But here we are.
I don’t want to give too much ink to the chauvinists — men and women — on social media. But it’s a gut-punch. An example:
“Having a small person as body cover for a large man is like an undersized Speedo at the beach — doesn’t cover the subject,” Elon Musk posted on his social media platform X. (And no, I won’t link to Musk’s bathing suit photos here that may explain his familiarity with the dilemma he posits.)
“I stood eye-to-eye with several other male counterparts, and I’m five-seven,” Burkholder said. “So I find it almost hysterical that this is even a conversation, especially since the Secret Service has had female agents since 1971, the year of my birth.”
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Because it’s not all about height and frame.
Women have to pass all the same physical tests as the men — strength, endurance, marksmanship.
Cheryl Tyler, the first Black female agent to land a presidential detail, was so good at her job guarding President George H.W. Bush that she went on to become a trainer for other agents during her 15 years with the Secret Service.
“The women train the same way the men do,” said Tyler, who worked for the Secret Service for 15 years after joining in 1984. She was a little girl in the Midwest, told by her career counselor to go into a trade, not college, when she decided she wanted to become a Secret Service agent.
“They become proficient in all the weapons that we need to know how to handle. They can take them apart, put them back together in a timely manner,” said Tyler, who now runs her own security firm and wrote a book about her experience as a trail blazer in one of America’s most storied police agencies. “They know the rounds. They know their guns, they know what they’re supposed to do.”
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The edited videos getting the most vitriolic comments online home in on a female agent who missed her holster for a split second.
But what about the part where the blond agent with her hair in a chignon is helping carry Trump down the stairs, when she put her body over him and he popped up over her for his photo op, Tyler pointed out.
As the investigation into Saturday’s assassination attempt unfolds, the breakdown is focusing on the advance team, the local police and the reason for the shooter’s access to the rooftop overlooking Trump’s rally, the former agents I spoke with said.
The way the female agents at his side responded is not in question.
It’s only a question for folks who aren’t used to seeing women in this job.
“Maybe this is naive, but I did not know there was a single woman in the secret service, let alone this many??” Mary Clare Amselem, a stay-at-home mom who used to work at the Heritage Foundation wondered in a post on X. “Let’s be a serious country. Having female secret service agents is completely insane.”
Okay, sister, let me tell you about Mary Ann Gordon.
In 1981, Special Agent Gordon was a member of Reagan’s detail, the first woman assigned this job. She wasn’t by his side the day he was shot outside the Washington Hilton, but she led the advance team’s transportation plan.
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“Preparing for her assignment, Gordon drove all the possible motorcade routes to the Hilton, the White House, and even to George Washington University Hospital to ensure the streets were clear and free of any obstacles,” the Secret Service wrote, in a tribute to her part that day. “This also allowed her to familiarize herself with the different routes.”
When Gordon heard the shots fired, she abandoned the police cruiser and the motorcade plan and dove into the spare limo, diverting the presidential limo to the fastest route, getting the president to the hospital in just three minutes.
Let’s take it back even further.
In 1861, a widow named Kate Warne was working with Allan Pinkerton as America’s first female private eye. I wrote about her most famous assignment in Baltimore, hobnobbing at galas among Southern secessionists, learning of a plot to kidnap and kill President Abraham Lincoln during a carriage transfer across the city to board his train to D.C.
Warne went undercover as the sister of a really tall and ill man, displacing Lincoln’s usual bodyguard (whose answer to the plot was simply to arm Lincoln) and outmaneuvering the would-be kidnappers as she guided a shawl-draped Lincoln to his sleeping berth.
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“I believe it has not hitherto been one of the prerequisites of the presidency to acquire in full bloom so charming and accomplished a female relation,” Lincoln told her, as they got on the train together.
Her description of the president-elect in her report was not so generous:
“Mr. Lincoln is very homely, and so very tall that he could not lay straight in his berth,” she wrote.
He arrived at the Capitol safely, four years before he signed a bill creating the Secret Service. He signed the bill the day he was shot.
Lincoln’s bodyguard for the night, a D.C. police officer with a spotty record named John Frederick Parker, left the presidential box to join the audience so he could see the play. At intermission, he left the theater to go have drinks at the Star Saloon next door.
The main presidential bodyguard not on duty that night, William H. Crook, flayed Parker in his memoir.
“Parker’s absence had much to do with the success of [John Wilkes] Booth’s purpose,” Crook wrote. “Parker knew that he had failed in duty. He looked like a convicted criminal the next day.”
What would’ve happened if they had a seasoned, female detective like Warne on the job that night?
