Golf: The presidential pastime that's a nightmare for the Secret Service

Before President William Howard Taft ever stepped on a golf course as commander-in-chief, he was cautioned by his predecessor to avoid the sport altogether. 

"I have received hundreds of letters protesting it," then-President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Taft, who was his secretary of war. Roosevelt warned that photo-ops of political leaders' leisure-time activities could damage their public image. "Photographs of me on horseback, yes. Tennis, no," he wrote. "And golf is fatal."

Roosevelt was speaking figuratively, but the U.S. Secret Service views presidential golfing as a literal physical threat. While former President Donald Trump was on the fairway of the fifth hole at Trump International Golf Club last Sunday in West Palm Beach last Sunday, an advance agent spotted the barrel of a rifle jutting through barbed wire fencing along the tree line bordering the sixth-hole putting green. The gunman was apprehended, and the FBI is still investigating the apparent attempt on Trump's life — the second in about two months.