magine a highly revered law enforcement agency charged with protecting the nation’s number one terrorist target being saddled with budget reductions that result in inadequate staffing, inferior weaponry and practically non-existent in-service training. Then impose an illegal overtime cap on an overworked staff while management fudges crime stats to look good. Sound familiar? The NYPD? No, it’s the United States Secret Service.

Like the NYPD, the Secret Service has been memorialized around the world in movies and other media. Its officers are recognized as the best at what they do. So it’s shocking to discover that they’re living largely on their reputation and that, in truth, they’re under-trained, under-funded, overworked and generally outgunned by the bad guys. But boy, do they look sharp.

A new book called “In the President’s Secret Service” by Ronald Kessler affords a look behind the façade and image of the Secret Service into the high-pressure world of the men and women charged with protecting presidents, vice-presidents, visiting heads of state and other key national figures. The hundred or so agents, past and present, who were interviewed for this book are quick to share the frustrating inside truth, while recognizing that they have to keep up the image for the benefit of their mission. But the most frightening revelation is that the service’s management routinely cuts corners for fiscal or political expediency, effectively putting America’s leaders at great risk.

And that’s precisely why agents with tremendous pride in their jobs and concern for the safety of those they protect agreed to speak out.

The book reads like a cross between New York Post gossip pages and a consultant’s report on agency mismanagement. Readers get an intimate look at every president since JFK through the eyes of those who protected them. The book peels away the image those presidents project and provides us with a “fly-on-the-wall” view of the free world’s leaders when they’re out of the glare of lights and cameras. Some, we learn, are all image with no real substance and others remain the same in the media spotlight or relaxing in the White House’s living quarters.

We see how some presidents treat their protectors with dignity and respect while others treat their Secret Service agents like bellhops and chauffeurs. “In the President’s Secret Service” doesn’t ignore the hypocrisy of leaders who preached the importance of family values but did not embody those values themselves.

The book contains some great historical nuggets: Towards the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln reluctantly agreed to use four Washington, D.C., police officers as bodyguards. One of them, John W. Parker, who was assigned to protect the president at Ford’s Theatre, had wandered from his post to watch the show and then went to a nearby saloon for a drink.

His absence allowed John Wilkes Booth to sneak up behind the president in his viewing box and fire a shot into the back of Lincoln’s head. Had Parker been doing his job, history might have been very different.

While the Secret Service was founded in 1865 to suppress widespread counterfeiting, it wasn’t until after McKinley’s assassination in 1901 that it assumed full-time responsibility for protecting the president. In 1908, McKinley’s successor Teddy Roosevelt transferred Secret Service agents to the Department of Justice, forming what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Secret Service’s role was expanded to include protecting the president’s immediate family, the president-elect and the vice president in 1951. In 1965, Congress made it a federal crime to assassinate a president and extended protection to former presidents and their spouses for their lifetime and for their children until age sixteen. Following Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Congress authorized Secret Service protection for major presidential candidates.

Clearly this book was written to call attention to the mismanagement of the Secret Service before the bosses’ incompetence results in the death of another president.