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COMING BACK FROM the ranch one day, President Reagan chatted with his agents about how tough it was being president, always surrounded by security.
“I would love to be able to walk into a store like any person, just go down a magazine rack and browse through the magazines like I used to. Walk here, walk there,” Reagan said.
His agents suggested he go into a store spontaneously to lessen the risk. While he was in the store, they would block the entrance.
“Valentine’s Day was coming up, and he said he wanted to go to a card store in Washington and get a card for Nancy,” says former agent Dennis Chomicki. “So we pull up in a small motorcade, the president gets out of the car and goes into the store. He was just browsing around, having a great time.”
Meanwhile, a man was looking at cards.
“Reagan picks a card up, and he looks over to this guy and shows it to him and he says, ‘Hey do you think Nancy would like this?’” Chomicki says.
At first, the customer said, “Oh, yeah, your wife would like that.”
Then he looked up.
“Oh, my God, the president!” he said.
Not long after that, Reagan would be reminded of why presidents need protection. At two thirty-five P.M. on March 30, 1981, John W. Hinckley Jr., twenty-five, fired a .22 Röhm RG-14 revolver at Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel after giving a speech.
Members of the public had been allowed to greet Reagan as he left the hotel. Magnetometers were then used at stationary locations such as the White House but not when the president traveled outside the White House. As a result, no one had been screened. By inserting himself into that crowd, which included the press, Hinckley managed to get within twenty feet of the president.
Instinctively, Agent Timothy McCarthy hurled himself in front of Reagan and took a bullet in the right chest. It passed through his right lung and lacerated his liver. While Secret Service agents and Uniformed Division officers have been wounded or killed during protection duty, McCarthy is the only agent to have actually taken a bullet for the president by stepping into the line of fire. In a second and a half, Hinckley fired six rounds. Besides McCarthy, Metropolitan Police Officer Thomas Delahanty and Press Secretary Jim Brady were wounded. Brady suffered extensive brain damage.
Agent Dennis McCarthy—no relation to Timothy—would be the first to pounce on Hinckley. At first, McCarthy thought he was hearing firecrackers go off.
“After the second shot, I knew it was a gun,” McCarthy says. “At that point, I had a feeling of panic. I knew I had to stop it.”
By the third shot, McCarthy spotted a pair of hands gripping a pistol in between the television cameras just eight feet away. McCarthy lunged for the gun and hurled himself on Hinckley as he was still firing.
“As I was going through the air, I remember the desperate feeling: ‘I’ve got to get to him! I’ve got to get to him! I’ve got to stop him!’” McCarthy says.
Crouched in a combat position, Hinckley collapsed as McCarthy landed on his back. While the assailant offered no resistance, McCarthy remembers hearing the fast click, click, click as Hinckley continued squeezing the trigger, even after the .22 caliber revolver’s six shots had been expended. McCarthy had always wondered how he would react when gunfire actually started. Now he knew.
Like McCarthy, President Reagan at first thought he was hearing the sound of firecrackers.
“I was almost to the car when I heard what sounded like two or three firecrackers over to my left—just a small fluttering sound, pop, pop, pop,” Reagan said later. “I turned and said, ‘What the hell’s that?’ Just then, Jerry Parr, the head of our Secret Service unit, grabbed me by the waist and literally hurled me into the back of the limousine. I landed on my face atop the armrest across the backseat, and Jerry jumped on top of me.”
“I remember three quick shots and four more,” Parr tells me. “With Agent Ray Shaddick, I pushed the president down behind another agent who was holding the car door open. Agent McCarthy got hold of Hinckley by leaping through the air. I got the president in the car, and the other agent slammed the door, and we drove off.”
The limo began speeding toward the White House.
“I checked him over and found no blood,” Parr says. “After fifteen or twenty seconds, we were under Dupont Circle moving fast. President Reagan had a napkin from the speech and dabbed his mouth with it. He said, ‘I think I cut the inside of my mouth.’”
Parr noticed that the blood was bright red and frothy. Knowing that to be a danger sign, he ordered the driver to head toward George Washington University Hospital. It was the hospital that had been preselected in the event medical assistance was needed.
It turned out that the president may have been within minutes of death when he arrived at the hospital. Going straight there probably saved his life.
Reagan remembered how, as they neared the hospital, he suddenly found he could barely breathe. “No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get enough air,” he said. “I was frightened and started to panic a little. I just was not able to inhale enough air.”
In fact, Parr says, “I didn’t know he was shot until we got to the hospital. He collapsed as we walked in.”
As he was placed on a gurney Reagan felt excruciating pain near his ribs.
“What worried me most was that I still could not get enough air, even after the doctors placed a breathing tube in my throat,” Reagan said. “Every time I tried to inhale, I seemed to get less air. I remember looking up from the gurney, trying to focus my eyes on the square ceiling tiles, and praying. Then I guess I passed out for a few minutes.”
When Reagan regained consciousness, he became aware of someone holding his hand.
“It was a soft, feminine hand,” he said. “I felt it come up and touch mine and then hold on tight to it. It gave me a wonderful feeling. Even now I find it difficult to explain how reassuring, how wonderful, it felt. It must have been the hand of a nurse kneeling very close to the gurney, but I couldn’t see her. I started asking, ‘Who’s holding my hand? Who’s holding my hand?’”
At one point, Reagan opened his eyes to see his wife, Nancy.
“Honey, I forgot to duck,” he joked.
As luck would have it, that afternoon most of the doctors who practiced at the hospital were attending a meeting only an elevator ride away from the emergency room.
“Within a few minutes after I arrived, the room was full of specialists in virtually every medical field,” Reagan said. “When one of the doctors said they were going to operate on me, I said, ‘I hope you’re a Republican.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Today Mr. President, we’re all Republicans.’ I also remember saying, after one of the nurses asked me how I felt, ‘All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.’” It was the epitaph of fellow actor W. C. Fields.
Surgeons found a bullet that had punctured and collapsed a lung. It was lodged an inch from Reagan’s heart. If he had been wearing a bulletproof vest, the bullet likely would not have penetrated Reagan’s body.
“On several previous occasions when I’d been out in public as president, the Secret Service had made me wear a bulletproof vest under my suit,” Reagan explained later. “That day, even though I was going to speak to some die-hard Democrats who didn’t think much of my economic recovery program, no one had thought my iron underwear would be necessary because my only exposure was to be a thirty-foot walk to the car.”
“Some of my colleagues have said, ‘Well, I would have taken him to the White House because it’s the safest place,’” Parr says. “You take a chance when you take the president to the hospital. If he’s not hurt, then you frighten the nation. But in this case, we were right. And there was a trauma team there that gets a lot of gunshot wounds.”
For Parr, it was a decision he had never wanted to make. He joined the Secret Service in 1962, a year before John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
“We never forgot it,” Parr says. “We never wanted it to happen on our watch. Unfortunately, it almost happened on mine.”
“The agents who got him [Reagan] out of there did everything right,” says former agent William Albracht, who, as a senior instructor at the training center, taught new agents about lessons learned from previous assassination attempts. “The other agents went to the assassin and helped subdue him.”
In retrospect, he says, “Maybe they should have jumped in the follow-up [car] and gone with the protectee instead of staying there and trying to subdue Hinckley Because you have police there to do that job. All agents are always thinking diversion: Is this the primary attack, or are the bad guys trying to get us to commit all our assets and then hit us on the withdrawal? So whether more agents should have gone with Reagan is twenty-twenty hindsight. We teach agents to go with the protectee to make sure there is a successful escape.”
At the hospital, the FBI confiscated Reagan’s authentication card for launching nuclear weapons, saying that all of Reagan’s effects were needed as evidence. Because no guidelines had been worked out for a situation where a president undergoes emergency surgery, it was not clear who could launch a nuclear strike.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution allows the vice president to act for the president only if the president has declared in writing to the Senate and the House that he is disabled and cannot discharge his duties. If the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet agree that the president is unable to discharge his duties, they may make the vice president the acting president. But that would require time.
Vice President George H. W. Bush could have taken it upon himself to launch a strike by communicating with the defense secretary over a secure line. But it was questionable whether he had the legal authority to do so. When Bush became president, his administration drafted a highly detailed, classified plan for immediate transfer of power in the case of serious presidential illness.
Before he shot Reagan, Hinckley had been obsessed with movie star Jodie Foster after seeing her in Taxi Driver. In the 1976 film, a disturbed man plots to assassinate a presidential candidate. The main character, played by Robert DeNiro, was based on Arthur Bremer, who shot Governor George Wallace. After viewing the movie many times, Hinckley began stalking Foster. Just before his attack on Reagan, he wrote to her, “You’ll be proud of me, Jodie. Millions of Americans will love me—us.”
On October 9, 1980, about six months before his assault on Reagan, Hinckley had been arrested as he attempted to board a plane at the Nashville, Tennessee, airport while carrying three pistols. President Carter was in Nashville at the time. Reagan, then running for the presidency, had just canceled a trip to Nashville.
As a result of the Reagan incident, the Secret Service began using magnetometers to screen crowds at events. “We started to look at acceptable standoff distances to keep crowds away,” says Danny Spriggs, who took Hinckley into custody at the shooting and became a deputy director of the Secret Service. “The distances would vary with the environment.”
The Secret Service also learned to segregate the press from onlookers and keep better tabs on them to make sure no one infiltrates the press contingent, pretending to be a reporter. An agent is assigned to watch the press, and members of the press themselves report those who try to infiltrate.
Similarly, the Secret Service learned lessons from the John F. Kennedy assassination. It doubled its complement of agents, computerized and increased its intelligence data, increased the number of agents assigned to advance and intelligence work, created counter-sniper teams, expanded its training functions, and improved liaison with other law enforcement and federal agencies.
“Before the Kennedy assassination, training often consisted of agents telling war stories,” says Taylor Rudd, an agent assigned to revamp training. “Many agents on duty had never had any training.”
Now the Secret Service shares intelligence and techniques with a range of foreign security services. After the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Secret Service and Israel’s Shin Bet spent a week together comparing notes.
“The Rabin assassination was much like the Hinckley attempt on Reagan,” says former agent Dowling, who was in charge of foreign liaison when the meetings with Shin Bet took place. “It happened at a motorcade departure site.”
Shin Bet officials laid bare their own shortcomings.
“It was a very emotional, sad thing for them to do,” Dowling says. “This particular guy loitered for some time around the motorcade, and he should have been noticed. And we kind of experienced something similar with Hinckley. We had somebody who was clearly stalking the president, somebody who had stalked presidents before. It’s not because this guy thinks Reagan’s a bad guy, or he thinks Jimmy Carter’s a bad guy. It’s the office that interests them. It’s the authority.”
About a year after the Reagan assassination attempt, the Secret Service’s Washington field office began receiving calls from a man threatening to kill Reagan. The man would say, “I’m going to shoot him.” Then he would hang up.
Agent Dennis Chomicki was assigned to protective intelligence and was aware that the calls were coming in because he’d been reading what the Secret Service calls “squeal sheets,” which recount incidents over the previous twenty-four hours. One morning, Chomicki was reading about the caller when someone called the main line of the field office, which at the time was at Nineteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Since Chomicki was one of the first agents in that morning, he picked up the call.
“Hi, it’s me again,” the caller said. “You know me.”
“No, I don’t know you,” Chomicki responded.
“Well, I’m the guy that’s going to kill the president,” the man said.
“Look, do me a favor,” Chomicki said. “I’m standing here on a wall phone because I just opened up the door. Why don’t you call back on my desk so I can sit and talk with you?”
The man agreed, and Chomicki gave him his direct dial number.
Back then, the Secret Service had an arrangement with what is now Verizon that the phone company would immediately trace calls even from unlisted numbers when an agent called a telephone company supervisor. Chomicki called a supervisor and gave him the number at his desk so that all incoming calls would be traced. He was sure the man would not be stupid enough to call the number.
“I walked over to my desk, and sure enough, he called back,” Chomicki says. “So we started talking, and I was able to record that conversation.”
The man said he had a rifle with a scope.
“I’m going to aim in, squeeze the trigger off, and blow his head apart like a pumpkin,” the man said.
“Hey, this is pretty serious stuff. Why don’t we meet?” Chomicki said.
“What do you think, I’m crazy?” the caller said, and hung up.
The phone company called and said the man had called from a pay phone on New York Avenue. With the location of the pay phone in his pocket, Chomicki dashed out the door. Just then, another agent was walking in.
“Bob, come on, we got to go,” Chomicki said. “I’ll tell you all about it on the way down.”
They ran to the Secret Service garage and jumped into their respective Secret Service cars. They drove to New York Avenue and Eleventh Street, where the Greyhound bus terminal was located at the time.
“We were looking around, and we didn’t see anybody,” Chomicki says. “There was a coffee-to-go truck sitting nearby. We went up and asked the guy, ‘Did you see anybody on the phone a short while ago?’”
“Yeah, about quarter to eight there was a guy,” the man said.
He gave the man’s estimated height and weight and described him as wearing blue pants and a blue shirt. The time cited by the coffee man coincided with the call Chomicki had received at the field office. Chomicki asked the coffee man why he had noticed the individual using the public pay phone.
“Usually I show up on the corner at eight,” the man explained. “I just happened to get here early today, and my customers don’t expect me here until eight, so business was slow. I was just sitting here staring at the phone booth and saw this guy on the phone, and I just happened to remember what he looked like.”
The agents jumped into their cars. Chomicki drove east on New York Avenue; the other agent drove west. Just then, Chomicki spotted a man who matched the description given to him by the coffee man. He was using a pay phone on the outer wall of the bus terminal building.
Chomicki made a U-turn and parked his car across the street. He walked up behind the man and heard him talking in a Midwestern accent. It was the voice of the man who had called him at the field office.
“I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and I pushed him between the phone and the side panel, and I grabbed the phone,” Chomicki says.
“This is agent Chomicki of the Secret Service,” he said into the receiver. “To whom am I speaking?”
“Wow! How’d you get him?” a voice on the other end of the line said. It was another agent back at the field office. He said the man had just called, threatening to kill Reagan.
The suspect claimed he was just trying to call a taxi. As he tried to get away, Chomicki dragged him to his car, placed him against the trunk, and handcuffed him. After he was given a psychiatric examination, a judge committed him to a mental institution.
Secret Service agents often deal with what is called White House–itis, a malady of arrogance that grips some White House aides. Near the end of Reagan’s term, that affliction almost got one of his aides shot. Agent Glenn Smith was guarding Reagan at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. Smith heard a man shout, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Smith took out his .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum and placed his finger on the trigger. Just then, a man came bolting through a door with a New York City police officer in hot pursuit.
The man turned out to be a White House staffer who was so full of himself that when a Secret Service agent asked him to identify himself at an inner checkpoint, he refused. When the agent tried to block his way, he pushed the agent away. The police officer then chased after him.
“If I had gotten a clear shot at the man, I would have shot him,” Smith says.
As with all presidents, some people totally lost it when meeting Reagan. One woman in a crowd threw her baby into the air. Agent Glenn Smith had to catch the little girl. An eighty-year-old woman held on to Reagan’s hand so tightly that Smith had to pry it loose. Hoping to get an autograph, a sheriff approached Air Force One at high speed in his cruiser with lights flashing. The sheriff brought his car to a halt just in time.
“In a few more seconds, we would have opened fire on the car,” Smith says.
While in office, Reagan never showed the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, which ultimately led to his death. “We had a hundred twenty agents on his detail, and he seemed to remember everyone’s name,” Smith says.
But in March 1993, a year before he announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s, former president Reagan honored Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney at his library and invited him to his ranch. As Mulroney was leaving, the prime minister asked Agent Chomicki, “Do you notice something with the president?”
Chomicki said he did but did not know what the problem was.
“He would just stop midsentence and forget what he was saying,” Chomicki recalls. “Then he would just start a whole new story.”
After Reagan had been out of office for three years, he was to speak at an event in Akron, Ohio. In contrast to the retinue he’d had as president, Reagan traveled with just one staffer and his Secret Service contingent. The agent in charge of the former president’s protective detail came into the command post and said to agent Dowling, “You know, the president’s been sitting in his room alone all morning. And he’d really like for some folks to talk to. Would you guys mind if he came over and sat in the command post and just chatted with you guys for a while?”
“That’d be terrific. Bring him over,” Dowling said.
For two hours, Reagan chatted with the agents, telling stories and jokes.
“He told us he and Mikhail Gorbachev had private conversations,” Dowling says. “They agreed that their talks were not about today and are not about us. They’re about our grandchildren and the life that they’re going to live.”