BROOKE: This time the Secret Service is in the woodshed, after a man with a knife jumped the White House fence and made it all the way to the East Room. That followed an incident at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, when a man with a criminal record and a gun joined the President in an elevator. Congress withered Secret Service Chief Pierson with a rare bipartisan blast.

MALE POLITICIAN: I wish to God that you protected the White House like you’re protecting your reputation here today. An internal investigation is not sufficient. I repeat, is not sufficient.

Let me be frank. I believe you have done a disservice to the President of the United States.

BROOKE: The Secret Service did that?

CLIP: Protect the man,  protect the symbol, protect the office, this is the mandate of the US Secret Service.

CHRIS CILLIZZA: The secret service hasn’t always been a perfect institution, but this I think has really shaken people.

BROOKE: Chris Cillizza writes the Washington Post’s Political Blog, The Fix. He says that the outrage over this story is about more than a fence jumper or even a gun-toting elevator rider.

CILLIZZA: ...when what you think of as infallible is shown to be quite fallible, very human, I think it does lend to a pretty basic question which is, if the President of the United States can’t be adequately protected, what does that mean for me.

BROOKE: Or for David Letterman.

LETTERMAN: “Well, I’ll tell you whats frightening because as a kid you believe that certain things are unassailable and at the top of the list would be protection for the president. And now to learn that its like Costco security guards” I mean It’s a real eye-opener because what have we left to believe in unqualified.

BROOKE: Certainly, the Secret Service is not unassailable. It was created, by Abraham Lincoln on the day he died, to track down counterfeiters in the wake of the Civil War. It didn’t get into Presidential protection until after President McKinley was shot. Since then we’ve had President killed, two shot, and several intruded upon...

PETER BAKER: FDR was watching a movie one night and the lights come up and there's a stranger standing next to him in his house.

BROOKE: Peter Baker is the New York Times White House Correspondent.

BAKER: Teddy Roosevelt is told someone has come to see him, has an appointment with Mr. John Smith, and agrees to see him, and quickly realizes he doesn't know this guy and he's kind of a problem and tells this usher, "Take this crank out of here."...And he did have a gun in the back pocket. ...Truman was living across the street from the White House at Blair House, because the main White House was being renovated and that's when these Puerto Rican terrorists burst through the doors and tried to kill him. And there was a gunfight and one of them died and one of the Secret Service officers died….In recent years … you had a man who thought he was the Messiah who crashed his Chevy Impala through the gate, made it all the up way up to the North Portico. You had-
BROOKE: That is the car I think the Messiah would drive.
BAKER: Exactly. A modest Messiah. You had a guy an army private who stole an army helicopter at Fort Meade, flew it on to the lawn of the White House, you had a guy who had a Cessna, and he crashed it into the White House…

BROOKE: But Hollywood tells a different story, depicting the FBI, CIA, NSA, and certainly the Secret Service as pretty much invincible, for better or for worse, but supremely competent…

CILLIZZA:  You take the NSA, you take the FBI, you take the CIA, and you take the Secret Service all sort of these pillars of what we believe to be hyper-competence in our society, and they have all at one level or another in recent years, some of that hyper competence has been called into question.

BROOKE: Chris Cillizza

CILLIZA: What do we as a culture now make of it. What TV and movies make of it will in some ways determine...in 10 years if we have this conversation -- do we have a different image of the caretaker class than we did today.

BROOKE: By caretakers, Cilllizza doesn’t mean the secret service agents assigned to the retired First Lady buying peas in the movie Guarding Tess, but he could have.

Shopkeeper: There on special today 2 for 59  

Secret Service Officer 1: There on special 2 for 59.

Secret Service Officer 2: Copy that, it's 2 for 59.

First Lady: But I only want one

Secret Service Officer 2: Roger that doug but she only want one...

Secret Service Officer 1: How much for just 1?

Shopkeeper: The same, it's a 2-for-1 thing.

Secret Service 1: Bobby, it's a 2-for-1 thing so I suggest you go ahead and get both.

Secret Service 2: Copy that Doug but I believe we’ve lost interest in peas repeat  lost interest in peas

BROOKE: Dan Emmitt has served three presidents as Secret Service protection. I asked him what his favorite Hollywood depiction is.

EMMITT:  It would be Clint Eastwood's movie. In The Line of Fire.

BROOKE: Why?

EMMITT: Because he was miserable {laughs} when he was working a lot of the time. He was sick, he was not feeling well.

MOVIE CLIP: Eastwood: “This guy’s gonna make a try, and I’ve got to come back Sid.”

MALE VOICE: “Frank, at your age?”

ANNOUNCER...Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States...

MALKOVICH: “Do you really have the guts to take a bullet, Frank?”

EMMITT:  There is no such thing as a sick day on the President's detail. You're expected to be there because you have a shift thats counting on you... So, that's very authentic, that's very true.

BROOKE: but I think the image is closer to that impassive, almost inhumanly strong individual who is trained to serve as a, literally, as a human shield. What do you think the current news cycle is doing to that image?

EMMITT: It's not doing it any good, I could tell you that. One of the Secret Service's biggest assets has always been its mystique. So, the more you're in the media in a negative fashion, of course the worse it becomes. Our enemies look at that and they go, "Well, these guys aren't Supermen, they're just like everybody else maybe." They make mistakes they have human frailties and perhaps we can capitalize on that. So its not good for the mission

EASTWOOD: “What do you see in the dark, and the demons come?

MALKOVICH “I see you standing over the grave of another dead President.”

EASTWOOD: “That’s not gonna  happen.”

BROOKE: There are always fence jumpers at the White House, you can’t have a walled fortress in the middle of the capital of  the world’s paramount democracy. But one got inside the White House. That’s frightening on its face, but it also evokes in this dreary news season a feeling widely shared that, as Yeats once wrote, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. The President himself noted in a July fundraiser no less, that quote “part of the people’s concern is just the sense that around the world the old order isn’t holding.” Chris Cillizza:

CILLIZZA: I think the hardest thing for him and for any politician, for all of us, is we don't have a new set of sort of foundational principles, of institutions that we can, we feel like we can rely on, and I think there is a worry that we may never, and that's sort of the most deep seated, but potentially the most unnerving anxiety.

BROOKE: In the meantime, there is a temporary remedy. One employed with a practiced flourish by Glenn Beck after Secret Service Agents on an official trip to Columbia were caught wrangling with prostitutes over money.  

BECK:Sorry don’t believe it. Someone is either intentionally making them look incompetent or they’re being set up. Foreign or domestic. Ooh. Wait a minute. Foreign…

BROOKE: He blames Putin. Something we can all rely on. Send in the...hmm…Marines?