The US Secret Service was born in 1865, in the wake of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but its story begins in earnest in 1963, with the death of John F. Kennedy. Shocked into reform by their failure to protect the president on that fateful day, the agency was rapidly transformed into a proud, elite unit that would finally redeem themselves in 1981 by valiantly thwarting an assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan. Zero Fail, a history of the agency, “is a devastating catalog of jaw-dropping incompetence and ham-fisted mismanagement,” said Chris Whipple in a review for The New York Times. Author Carol Leonnig has been covering the Secret Service for The Washington Post for most of the last decade, bringing to light the gaffes and scandals that plague the agency today. Leonnig, an investigative journalist, was part of a team of national security reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014 for reporting that revealed the National Security Agency’s expanded spying on Americans.