The Secret Service has a drinking problem. It’s much worse than any other cultural deficit the elite agency has. It’s more widespread than sexism, certainly, and the other isms that have been attached to the agency since the prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia. It’s something that every journalist who covers the White House kind of knows, intuitively, if they’ve ever traveled with the president. Pick your favorite White House correspondent and ask him or her whether agents on President George W. Bush’s detail created problems at the Wild West saloon in Waco. One former White House scribe told me that although reporters regularly witnessed agents drinking heavily before shifts, “we just assumed they could control themselves. After all, they were the ones who were the most responsible of all of us.”

For the most part, the agents are fine the next day. The job is stressful. But looking back at a string of incidents, many of them not well-publicized, over-consumption of alcohol is the common denominator. Sometimes, agents drinking alone make bad choices. But often, agents drinking with each other don’t have the foresight, or the ability, frankly, to tell their colleagues to stop drinking without losing face. In the Netherlands, not only was a member of the Counter-Assault Team drunk, he was falling-down drunk. He was sleeping on the floor of a hallway drunk. And several of his team members were drunk, too. And no one thought to say, at some point during the evening, “Hey guys, maybe we should call it a night. You know, the reputation of the Service and all. Let’s all go home and sleep.” No one, apparently, had the capacity to be that necessary buzzkill. The lack of internal governors on behavior is one thing. The lack of peer pressure NOT to overdrink is THE problem that the Service will try to find a way to rectify.