Review: Secret Service Files: Protecting the President

Saving the President's Life Should Be More Exciting Than This
TVFirstLook

Former Secret Service agent Robert Rodriguez

There are moments in Secret Service Files: Protecting the President (Nat Geo Channel, 8pm) that are tense, gripping and thrilling as Secret Service agents tell the story behind grainy camera footage of them saving the president's life.

They are making life-or-death decisions in a split second as madmen - sometimes, thousands of madmen - want nothing more than to kill the president of the United States.

And, yet, those moments are rare in Protecting the President, a special split up into four real-life international crises.

Protecting the President begins with the dullest segment of the bunch.

President Bill Clinton, who appears in Protecting the President, was en route to Cincinnati when Air Force One abruptly turned around for Morocco. The country's king had died and the world's leaders convened in Morocco to pay their respects.

Through a crowd of two million people, President Clinton walked for two miles from the king's palace to his burial site.

While the event was surely dangerous - the president had little protection against such a large crowd - hearing about it from Secret Service agents doesn't convey that danger.

In another segment - slightly more exciting - President Clinton in 2000 visits Pakistan. He's there to encourage peace and democracy after a political coup. Pakistan is Al Qaeda territory.

"Once we decided to go after Osama Bin Laden, whenever I was in a country where a terrorist might penetrate, I was in greater danger," says President Clinton.

Far more intense in Protecting the President is a 2005 incident when President George W. Bush was to speak in front of a huge, friendly crowd in Tbilisi in the country of Georgia. A deranged loner attempted to kill the president with a hand grenade. It's truly exciting to watch the Secret Service agents at work.

Equally exciting, in 1992, President George H. W. Bush was in Panama. Just outside the venue where he was to speak were increasingly angry anti-American Panamanians. They were rioting.

As the rioters neared President Bush, grainy camera footage shows the Secret Service pulling out guns and pulling up in military vehicles to yank the president away just as he is visibly feeling the effects of tear gas the rioters have thrown at him.

It's a scary moment that's well told and makes you appreciate the danger U.S. presidents are often in and the risks that Secret Service agents quietly go about taking.