In the West Wing of the White House sits the office of the press secretary to the president of the United States of America. In that office is a wardrobe. In the wardrobe is a flak jacket. And in the flak jacket is a bundle of notes, tied up in ribbon, containing snippets of advice passed down from each of the office’s inhabitants to his or her successors.

Gerald Ford's spokesman Ron Nessen, who had been a war correspondent in Vietnam, started the tradition. He left the flak jacket behind when he was clearing out his office to make way for Jimmy Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell, in January 1977. One of the few initiates to this custom, Jake Siewert, who was Bill Clinton's last press secretary and more recently worked as a counsellor to US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, has recently been linked to another job in which body armour could usefully be employed.