The Secret Service

In Andy Warhol’s diary, The Secret Service is encountered not through an account of its organization or methods, but in brief, concrete scenes around Miz Lillian Carter: agents fill a hotel room because Jimmy Carter is nearby, and appear across the block outside Warhol’s office the next day. Their presence turns an ordinary celebrity visit into an occasion shaped by political security—and, in Warhol’s telling, by the uncertain workings of a jammed tape recorder.

At Miz Lillian Carter’s Birthday Visit

At a birthday gathering for Miz Lillian Carter at United Nations Plaza, Warhol describes a crowded scene of press, guests, relatives, balloons, and a car that drew people’s attention as it carried the party away. He was recording the occasion, including the singing of “Happy Birthday,” when his tape jammed. He changed tapes; the replacement jammed too. From that sequence, he concluded that the problem was not the tape and suspected that a Secret Service agent had caused it. The diary reports Warhol’s conclusion, not independent confirmation that an agent interfered with the recorder.

The security presence was also visible inside the hotel. Warhol notes that many Secret Service personnel were in the room because Jimmy Carter was staying next door or only a few doors away. The entry places the agents within the immediate setting of the gathering, where their presence stood alongside the press attention and the movement of guests, without describing their procedures or identifying individual agents.

Presence Around Warhol’s Office

The following day, Warhol found Secret Service personnel “everywhere, all over the block” when he arrived at the office. He handed them copies of Interview, as he did with other people he encountered in his daily rounds. The diary records the gesture but does not state whom the agents were protecting or explain the precise reason for their deployment. In the surrounding account, Warhol recalls that he had invited a young visitor associated with Mondale, but he does not explicitly connect that invitation to the agents’ presence.

How the Diary Presents the Agency

Across these scenes, The Secret Service is registered through its visibility and its proximity to public figures: personnel in a hotel room near Jimmy Carter, and a security presence extending along the block outside Warhol’s workplace. The account’s focus remains personal and immediate. The agents enter the diary as part of the texture of a crowded political-social occasion, while the tape-recorder episode shows how Warhol’s narration can move from a practical mishap to a suspicion about who caused it. The entry preserves that suspicion as his interpretation rather than establishing it as fact.