Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Standing Next to History: An Agent’s Life Inside the Secret Service | 2005 | Joseph Petro | Buy |
Standing Next to History gives readers an inside account of what it means to spend a career protecting the President of the United States. Joseph Petro joined the Secret Service after graduating from college and worked his way up through various assignments before serving on the presidential detail. The book covers the daily discipline required of agents, the way protective details are planned and executed, and the unwritten rules that govern conduct inside one of the government’s most closed institutions.
Petro writes with authority on the operational side of the work: advance work for foreign trips, the logistics of public appearances, and the constant assessment of threat. He also writes honestly about the human relationships that form when you spend long hours in close quarters with political figures and fellow agents. The book fills a gap in the literature on American political security, offering a ground-level view of an institution that rarely speaks publicly about how it operates.