Throughout the last century, ex-agents have recounted backstage White House doings, tattling on presidents from Wilson to Reagan. Among these memoirs are Edmund Starling's Starling of the White House, U.E. Baughman's Secret Service Chief, Rufus W. Youngblood's Twenty Years in the Secret Service, Marty Venker's Confessions of an Ex-Secret Service Agent, and Dennis McCarthy's Protecting the President. Hersh's sources were hardly the first agents to break their silence, though most of the disclosures in these books, it turns out, are rather prosaic.

Other sources that provide useful information about the Secret Service's history include Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones' American Espionage: From Secret Service to CIA (1977), Philip H. Melanson's The Politics of Protection: The U.S. Secret Service in the Terrorist Age (1984), and Curtis Carroll Davis' "The Craftiest of Men: William P. Wood and the Establishment of the United States Secret Service," Maryland Historical Magazine, Summer 1988.