Secret Service and the Presidents, SOME HISTORY. Can you imagine if President Trump had TANKS around the White House like the Secret Service wanted. I laughed when I read what the Secret Service wanted to do with the White House around WWII, when Franklin Roosevelt was President. If President Trump did what the Secret Service wanted back then, the Deep State would go nuts, but it WOULD BE SO FUNNY.  "President Franklin Roosevelt objected to security plans by the SECRET SERVICE and the MILITARY to COVER the White House SKYLIGHTS, PAINT the White House in CAMOUFLAGE, PLACE MACHINE GUN TURRETS on the roof, or to build barricades or station a GROUP OF TANKS around the MANSION, feeling that the public would be ALARMED unnecessarily. The first lady shared some of the president’s irritation with the safety measures. “Mrs. Roosevelt is very much annoyed today with Secret Service …” her personal secretary Malvina “Tommy” Thompson noted nine days after Pearl Harbor, “because they insisted she could not have 350 foreign students in the White House for tea. … In exasperation, Mrs. Roosevelt asked if they were going to take down the Washington monument because an enemy could measure the distance between it and the White House.” Historian William Seale has described presidential protection as a learning process, with presidents and their families and the Secret Service sometimes straining to adjust to one another. Although from the beginning guards were posted at the White House gates and front doors and the White House grounds were patrolled by a day guard and a night watchmen, it was not until 1842 that the first permanent security force for the White House was established—an auxiliary guard of a captain and three other men. The proposal to create the force had met opposition in Congress; Sen. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky warned “it might be metamorphosed into a political guard for the executive … it would not be entirely safe to organize such a corps. It was a little sort of stand guard, which might eventually become a formidable army.” Crittenden’s fears went unrealized, and in 1853 Franklin Pierce became the first president to have a full-time bodyguard, and also introduced the two-level security arrangement that characterizes presidential protection today. A guarded outer perimeter securing the Executive Mansion itself, and an inner perimeter—the bodyguard to protect the person of the president. During the Civil War there were heightened security fears in Washington that Confederates just across the Potomac in Virginia could easily slip across and attack President Abraham Lincoln at the White House. Metropolitan Police guarded the Executive Mansion but Lincoln did not want the house to take on the characteristics of an armed camp. Guards inside the Mansion (the doormen) dressed in civilian clothes and concealed their firearms. Uniformed, armed sentries were posted at the gates to the grounds and at the doors to the Executive Mansion itself. Since World War II the degree of Secret Service protection for the president and family has increased significantly, and the relationship can be, as President Truman’s daughter wrote in 1972, “often hectic, but never unfriendly.” The Secret Service agents guarding her and her parents, she concluded, were “probably the finest, most dedicated group … I have ever met.” https://www.whitehousehistory.org/secret-service-and-the-presidents