Joseph Petro Books in Order

If you want the main Joseph Petro book: Standing Next to History
If you're most interested in Reagan-era White House history: Standing Next to History
If you want an insider's view of the Secret Service: Standing Next to History

Joseph Petro was born in 1944 and grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Long before he wrote about the Secret Service, he was known there for football, and that hometown beginning helps explain the practical tone readers find in his work. He does not write like a celebrity insider. He writes like someone who spent years learning that preparation matters.

Before the White House, there was football, college, and the Navy.

He attended Temple University, where he played football and earned a bachelor's degree in pre-law in 1966. Instead of building a life around sports, he chose military service and went through Officer Candidate School with the U.S. Navy. He later served as a lieutenant in the River Patrol Forces, working the canals and rivers near the Vietnamese-Cambodian border during the Vietnam War. That part of his life gave him the kind of calm, structured approach that would stay with him for the rest of his career.

In 1971, Petro joined the United States Secret Service. Over the next 23 years he worked across investigations, intelligence, training, internal affairs, public affairs, and senior management. He also served as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, advising on financial crime enforcement policy and working with the Justice Department, Congress, and other federal agencies. He was not a one-track career officer. By the time he reached the agency's top ranks, he understood both the public face of protection and the quieter systems that keep a president moving safely from place to place.

That broader view is a big part of what makes his writing useful.

Petro spent eleven of his Secret Service years assigned to presidents and vice presidents, and four of those years placed him at Ronald Reagan's side. He also protected figures including Gerald Ford, Dan Quayle, and Pope John Paul II, and later supervised protective divisions as well as the Washington Field Office. His career put him close to moments that now sit in history books, including Reagan's meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev and the huge security effort around the pope's 1987 visit to the United States. He saw history up close, but his instinct was always to focus on the work, not the spotlight.

After leaving the Secret Service in 1993, Petro moved into corporate security, first with Travelers Group and then for many years with Citigroup. Later, he served as chief security officer at Time Warner and retired in 2018. He is a Temple graduate, and he was also a Fellow at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

When he finally put his experiences on the page, he did it in the same straightforward spirit. His memoir, Standing Next to History, written with old college friend Jeffrey Robinson, is the book readers most associate with his name. What many people like about it is that it does not lean on scandal or gossip. Instead, it shows the mechanics of protection, the pressure of planning, and the strange human details that come with guarding powerful people on both ordinary days and historic ones. In retirement, Petro has continued to speak and write about security and presidential protection, and that steady, matter-of-fact voice is still his calling card.