PARK CENTRAL HOTEL
WASHINGTON, DC
MARCH 30, 1981
9:00 A.M.
John Hinckley is hungry. He turns off The Today Show in his AAA-approved budget hotel room and steps out onto the corner of Eighteenth and G Street. The sky is overcast. A light rain settles on Hinckley’s well-worn beige jacket as he strolls three blocks to the K Street McDonald’s. He did not sleep well last night, troubled by how to play out his Jodie Foster obsession once and for all. Money is also on his mind. Once again, Hinckley is almost broke. After spending $47 on his room last night, and then spending a dollar for breakfast, he has less than $130 to his name. This is barely enough for a ticket back home to Denver, but John Hinckley does not care. He will never return to that home again.
On his way to breakfast, Hinckley turns into the local Crown Books. He browses, looking for literature about his two favorite topics: the Beatles and political assassination.
But little interests Hinckley this morning. He leaves the bookstore, crosses the street to McDonald’s, orders an Egg McMuffin, and sits down in a booth to plan his day. Unlike most Washington tourists, Hinckley does not envisage hours of sightseeing. Instead, he will either take the train to New Haven and shoot himself dead in front of Jodie Foster, or he will murder Ted Kennedy, if only to add his name to the notorious list of assassins who have stalked and killed a member of that political dynasty.
If that target is not available, he might enter the U.S. Senate chamber and try to kill as many lawmakers as possible. And there is one other scenario in Hinckley’s mind: assassinating President Ronald Reagan.
No matter which of the four schemes he chooses, Hinckley has the means to pull it off. Nestled within his large suitcase back at the Park Central Hotel are his snub-nosed pistol and forty-three lethal bullets.
Hinckley sits alone in the McDonald’s for an hour. He cannot make up his mind. Shortly before eleven he walks back to the Park Central, stopping along the way to buy a copy of the Washington Star.
* * *
At the same moment, two blocks away in the White House, President Ronald Reagan is just concluding a ceremonial fourteen-minute meeting in the Cabinet Room with a group of Hispanic leaders. It has been a long morning, beginning with a breakfast for his political appointees in the Blue Room at 8:34, then a fifteen-minute session with his top advisers. Four more meetings round out the morning, each with a cast of dignitaries and administration officials. Among them is a relatively new face: James Brady. As Reagan’s recently hired press secretary, Brady has the job of dealing with the media, using wit and intelligence to get the president’s message to the public.
The husky Brady, a political veteran from Illinois, is forty years old. Nancy Reagan initially opposed him for the high-profile position, thinking him too old and too heavy. But Brady’s sense of humor and his candor impressed the president and have made him popular with the Washington press corps.
Brady is hoping to tighten his bond with Ronald Reagan in the coming months by spending time with him. This afternoon, Reagan is due to give a short speech at the Washington Hilton, but Brady is unsure if he will attend. The president will not be taking questions from the press, and Brady’s time might be better spent at the White House.
As James Brady deliberates, Ronald Reagan spends thirty minutes alone in the Oval Office, tinkering with his upcoming speech. The audience will be liberal union members who oppose his politics, but Reagan is confident he can win them over with his Irish charm.
Finally, at 11:24 a.m., Ronald Reagan slips out of the Oval Office and walks along the Colonnade, next to the Rose Garden, then takes the elevator upstairs to his private residence. There, he changes into a new blue suit before sitting down to a lunch of soup and fruit. Nancy Reagan is attending a luncheon in Georgetown, so the president dines with an old friend from California, the openly gay interior decorator Ted Graber.
* * *
As the president eats lunch, John Hinckley is taking a shower. He is deep in thought as the water beats down on him. An item on page A-4 in the Washington Star has caught his eye. Under the heading “President’s Schedule,” the piece mentions that Ronald Reagan will be giving a speech at the Washington Hilton this afternoon. This presents Hinckley with a dilemma: should he murder the president or kill himself in front of Jodie Foster? He has already decided against murdering Ted Kennedy or shooting up the Senate Chamber. Now, with his options down to just two, Hinckley soaks under the shower spray, trying to make up his mind.
“It was in the shower,” he will later explain, “that I debated whether to detour to the Hilton or go up to New Haven. I was thinking, should I go over to the Hilton with my little pistol and see how close I could … well, see what the scene was like.”
Hinckley rinses off the soap and turns off the water.
His mind is made up. He is going to the Hilton.
He towels off and gets dressed in a pair of simple trousers, a shirt, and ankle-high boots. His wallet contains $129 in cash along with two library cards, a Texas driver’s license, a chess club membership, and folded magazine photos of Jodie Foster. There is no guarantee he will fire his gun this afternoon, but if he does get close enough to squeeze off a round, John Hinckley wants Jodie Foster to know he is doing it for her. He sits down at a small wooden desk and composes a letter to his beloved: “Dear Jodie,” he writes. “There is a definite possibility I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. This is why I am writing you this letter now.
As you well know by now I love you very much. Over the past seven months I’ve left you dozens of poems, letters and love messages in the faint hope that you could develop an interest in me. Although we talked on the phone a couple of times, I never had the nerve to simply approach you and introduce myself. Besides my shyness, I honestly did not wish to bother you with my constant presence. I know the many messages left at your door and in your mailbox were a nuisance, but I felt that it was the most painless way for me to express my love for you.
I feel very good about the fact that you at least know my name and how I feel about you. And by hanging around your dormitory, I’ve come to realize that I’m the topic of more than a little conversation, however full of ridicule it may be. At least you know that I’ll always love you.
Jodie, I would abandon the idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you, whether it be in total obscurity or whatever.
I will admit to you that the reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you. I’ve got to do something now to make you understand, in no uncertain terms, that I’m doing all of this for your sake!
By sacrificing my freedom and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me. This letter is being written only an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel. Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance, with this historical deed, to gain your respect and love.
I love you forever—John Hinckley.
He adds the time, 12:45 p.m., to his signature and then places the letter in an envelope. This will be left behind in his suitcase for investigators should he succeed in murdering the president.
John Hinckley stands and removes the Saturday Night Special from his suitcase, along with boxes of ammunition. Several types of bullets soon litter his bedspread. Hinckley has the choice of normal, round-nosed bullets or six rounds of an especially brutal bullet designed to blow a hole in the target by exploding on impact, spewing hot shrapnel.
Appropriately, these bullets are known as “Devastators.”
He chooses them.
Armed and dangerous, Hinckley then takes a cab for the short ride to the Washington Hilton. He is nervous and has to urinate, so he asks the driver to stop at the Holiday Inn across the street. Hinckley uses the restroom and then hurries back to the entrance of the Hilton. A small crowd of seven journalists and a dozen eager spectators await Ronald Reagan’s arrival. A padded black rope has been hung across the sidewalk by hotel security to keep the crowd a safe distance from the president.
Pistol snug in his jacket pocket, John Hinckley joins the crowd.
The time is 1:46 p.m.
* * *
At almost the exact same time, Ronald Reagan and his fifteen-vehicle motorcade depart the White House for the Hilton. Reagan’s 1972 Lincoln Continental, with its backward-opening “suicide doors,” is nicknamed Stagecoach. The president, whose Secret Service code name is Rawhide, a reference to the Westerns he loves, rides in the backseat with Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan.
Trailing behind are several limousines carrying members of the White House staff; the president’s personal physician, Dr. Daniel Ruge; and a bevy of Secret Service agents. It is a 1.3-mile drive to the Hilton.
Press secretary James Brady is also in the caravan. At the last moment he decided to make the trip in order to hear what Reagan will say.
At 1:51 p.m., the presidential motorcade arrives at the Hilton.
* * *
John Hinckley stands in the crowd of spectators behind the security rope, watching the motorcade approach. The main entrance of the Hilton is behind him. The president will not enter through this door. Instead, he will use the canopy-covered VIP entrance just forty feet away.
The assassin feels an unlikely burst of excitement at the prospect of seeing Reagan in person. Hinckley pats the pistol in his right pocket.1 Ample time at the rifle range has prepared him for what is to come. He knows the .22-caliber Rohm must be fired at close range for peak accuracy, and the spot where he now stands is well within the pistol’s optimal range of ninety feet.
Hinckley surveys the scene, seeing ABC newsman Sam Donaldson, among others. More than two dozen Secret Service agents stand ready to protect the president. Hotel security and Washington police also crowd around the Hilton, including two police officers facing the crowd on the other side of the security rope. Hinckley notices that there are some Secret Service agents on nearby rooftops.
Suddenly, President Reagan’s limousine glides past the security rope and comes to a halt just outside the VIP entrance. An agent steps out the front passenger door and hustles to open Reagan’s door on the right rear side of the vehicle. Quickly, the president emerges into the afternoon drizzle, taking a moment to wave to the crowd.
DC police officers Herbert Granger and Thomas Delahanty are working the security rope and should be facing toward the crowd, looking for signs of trouble. Instead, they crane their necks to the left to see the president.
This is the perfect time for John Hinckley to shoot.
But he does not. Hesitating, he responds to the president’s wave with a wave of his own. It is not an assassin’s kiss but rather the goofball motion of a confused man.
“He was looking right at me and I waved back,” Hinckley will recall. “I was kind of startled.”
In the blink of an eye, Reagan is inside the building.
* * *
The time is 2:02 p.m. The president is introduced by Robert A. Georgine, the forty-eight-year-old head of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department. Reagan bounds onto the stage to the strains of “Hail to the Chief” and then launches into his speech. As always, the nearsighted Reagan has removed one contact lens, which will allow him to read the printed text with one eye while scanning the crowd with the other.
Ronald Reagan enjoys public speaking. It comes easily to him. He begins his speech, as usual, with a joke.
* * *
John Hinckley hears laughter coming from the ballroom. He has left the security rope to step inside the Hilton and wander around the lobby. “Should I? Should I?” he asks himself repeatedly, feeling the heft of the Saturday Night Special in his pocket. He is having second thoughts about killing Ronald Reagan. If he were to leave right now and go back to his hotel room, nobody would be the wiser. He could burn his letter to Jodie Foster and slide the .22-caliber back into his luggage. Rather than die in a hail of Secret Service bullets or spend the rest of his life in prison, John Hinckley could simply walk away. “I just wasn’t that desperate. I just wasn’t that desperate to act,” he will later state. “Also, it was raining. And I wasn’t going to stand around in the rain.”
Hinckley makes up his mind: he will go back to the spectator area and wait. If Reagan does not appear in ten minutes, Hinckley tells himself, he will leave.
The time is 2:19 p.m. Ronald Reagan has five minutes left in his speech.
* * *
Meanwhile, less than two miles away, Nancy Reagan is lunching at the Georgetown home of Michael Ainslie. The president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation is hosting the First Lady and the wives of several Cabinet members after a brief morning tour of the Phillips Collection museum of art.
But at 2:20 p.m., Nancy Reagan suddenly tells Secret Service agent George Opfer she is not feeling well. It’s nothing specific, just a general feeling of anxiety. The worried First Lady says her good-byes and is driven back to the White House.
* * *
John Hinckley is back in the spectator area outside the Hilton. He works his way to the very front of the crowd, so that the black rope presses against his belly and his right shoulder is against the hotel’s façade. Three Washington police officers stand on the other side of the rope, facing him. Hinckley later remembers that they, as well as Secret Service agents, turned away from the crowd when President Reagan appeared.
The would-be assassin notices immediately that the Secret Service has moved Ronald Reagan’s limousine to facilitate an easier departure from the hotel. Rather than being parked just outside the VIP entrance, it is now standing so close to the security rope that the right rear bumper almost touches the spectator area. Ronald Reagan will enter the Lincoln not forty feet but just ten feet away from where John Hinckley now stands.
All at once, Hinckley is jostled. Newsmen are pushing to get a better position in order to ask Reagan questions. Hinckley is outraged, shouting to the other spectators that the media should not be allowed to push their way to the front of the crowd. But then it becomes clear to him that the press is providing a vital distraction.
Everyone is paying attention to the media.
No one is paying attention to John Hinckley.
* * *
Ronald Reagan finishes his speech at 2:24 p.m. The applause is polite, which disappoints him, for it is not the robust ovation he was hoping to hear. “Speech not riotously received,” he will later write in his diary. “Still it was successful.”
As part of his daily routine, Reagan places a checkmark next to each item on his agenda once it is concluded. The speech to the Building and Construction Trades Department having just earned its checkmark, the president leaves the stage and immediately follows his Secret Service escort to the car. Press secretary James Brady stands just inside the VIP door with Michael Deaver as Reagan approaches. A wave of Secret Service agents rushes past Brady, taking up their positions near the limousine. Agent Tim McCarthy is tasked with opening the right rear door for Reagan.
James Brady steps out of the VIP entrance before his boss, walking next to Deputy Chief of Staff Deaver. The president has chosen not to take questions, so Brady will now speak with the reporters himself. “Deal with them,” Deaver says tersely as he heads toward the car that will ferry him back to the White House.
James Brady steps closer to the crowd, as Ronald Reagan walks out the hotel door. Secret Service agent Jerry Parr follows one step behind. It is his job to protect the president, so he now moves slightly to Reagan’s left, placing his body between him and the crowd of spectators. If something were to happen within the first few steps outside the VIP door, Parr would immediately force Reagan back inside the safety of the hotel.
The first fifteen feet to the presidential limousine pass without incident. Parr is no longer thinking about pulling Reagan back. Now he is focused on moving the president forward into the car.
Agent McCarthy opens the right rear door of the limo. Like Press Secretary James Brady, McCarthy attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In a light blue suit, the former college football player is just shy of thirty-two. Brady stands ten feet from him, walking quickly to the security rope to meet with the press. McCarthy stands ready to close the door behind Reagan, unsure if the president will linger to wave to the crowd before getting inside the car.
The time is 2:27 p.m.
* * *
John Hinckley sees Ronald Reagan clearly. He also sees the small crowd of agents—“body men,” in Secret Service parlance—accompanying the president. Hinckley notices James Brady moving toward the rope line. Things are happening very quickly.
The president raises his right arm and waves to the crowd. A woman calls out from the spectator area as if she knows him. A friendly Reagan motions in her direction. Normally the president wears a bulletproof vest when appearing in public, but the walk from the door to the car is so short that the Secret Service did not think he needed it today.
John Hinckley braces his right arm against the rough stone wall, dropping his hand into his pocket. Quickly, he pulls the gun out.
Later Hinckley testifies that his head tells him, “Put the gun away.”
But he does not.
Tomorrow, the worldwide media will take one look at this loner and describe him as a deranged gunman, as if he has no idea what he is doing. But John Warnock Hinckley is a cold-blooded killer, a man who has trained himself in the art of murder.
Just as he has done so many times at the firing range, Hinckley grasps the butt of the pistol with two hands for maximum stability. He bends his knees and drops into a shooter’s crouch, then extends both arms and pulls the trigger.
The first bullet hits James Brady square in the head, just above the left eye. He falls face-first to the sidewalk, his blood dripping through a sidewalk grate.
The second shot strikes Washington Metro police officer Thomas K. Delahanty in the neck, ricocheting off his spine and lodging against the spinal column. He falls to the ground in agony, screaming.
The third shot goes wild, hitting no one.
The fourth shot strikes Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy in the torso. He, too, falls to the sidewalk, seriously wounded, a bullet lodged in his liver.
The fifth shot bounces off the limousine.
The sixth also hits the Lincoln, but ricochets—piercing Ronald Reagan’s body under his left arm. The bullet enters his lung, coming to rest just one inch from his heart.
The president of the United States staggers.
* * *
It takes just 1.7 seconds for Hinckley to fire all six Devastators.
The assassin is immediately punched in the head by a nearby spectator, then gang-tackled by the crowd. Hinckley is buried beneath several hundred pounds of angry citizens as Secret Service agents try to take him alive. Ironically, their job is to now protect Hinckley with the same vigor they devote to protecting the president.
John Hinckley Jr. being tackled by Secret Service agents and other onlookers after his attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, March 30, 1981
As Hinckley is subdued, three men are fighting for their lives.
One of them is Ronald Wilson Reagan.
* * *
At the sound of the first bullet, agent Jerry Parr grabs Reagan by the waist, shoving him hard into the back of the limo. The two men land in a heap, with Parr on top. As Reagan’s face hits the armrest dividing the backseat, an intense wave of pain shoots through his body.
“Jerry,” he cries. “Get off. I think you broke one of my ribs.” The president is angry, believing Parr was unnecessarily rough.
Parr is not interested in delicacy. He needs to get the president to safety immediately. Long ago, as a boy, it was the 1939 Ronald Reagan movie Code of the Secret Service that inspired Parr to become an agent. Now, through a brutal coincidence, Jerry Parr has become the most important person in Reagan’s life. “White House,” he barks at Agent Drew Unrue, who sits at the wheel. “Let’s get out of here! Haul ass!”
Parr climbs off the president. Neither man knows that Ronald Reagan has been shot. But as Reagan tries to sit up, he is “almost paralyzed by pain.” He coughs hard, sending a stream of bright red blood onto his hand.
“You not only broke a rib,” he tells Parr as the presidential limousine races to the safety of the White House, “I think the rib punctured my lung.”
“Were you hit?” asks a concerned Parr.
“No, I don’t think so.”
Parr runs his hands over the president’s shoulders, chest, and head. He sees no sign of blood. Reagan can barely sit up, his face ashen. He begins pressing his left arm against his chest as if having a heart attack. Reagan tastes blood and tells Parr that he might have also cut his mouth. The agent looks closely, seeing that the bright red blood on Reagan’s lips contains numerous air bubbles, which is the sign of a lung injury.
“I think we should go to the hospital,” Parr tells Reagan.
“Okay,” Reagan answers, still believing that Parr broke his rib.
* * *
At the same time, in the third-floor White House solarium, Secret Service agent Opfer calmly enters the room and interrupts Nancy Reagan’s conversation with the White House’s chief usher. “There was a shooting,” Opfer informs the First Lady. “The president is going to the hospital.”
Immediately distraught, Nancy Reagan is led out of the White House. Her Secret Service code name is Rainbow, in reference to the many colors of her fiery personality. But there is no evidence of that on display right now. She is quiet and terrified. A car is brought around, and Nancy’s frustration intensifies as the two-limousine motorcade gets caught in Washington gridlock on its ten-block journey. “I’m going to get out and walk,” she yells. “I need to walk. I have to get there.”
Traffic begins to flow, and fifteen minutes after leaving the White House, Nancy Reagan’s limousine pulls up to the George Washington University Hospital. As soon as the vehicle stops at the emergency entrance of the gray cinder-block building, she sprints toward the emergency room. Waiting at the door is Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver.
“He’s been hit,” Deaver tells her.
“But they told me he wasn’t hit,” replies a shocked Nancy Reagan. “I want to see my husband,” she pleads.
* * *
It takes Ronald Reagan’s limousine four minutes to get to the hospital. He walks through the front door under his own power, then passes out and collapses hard to the floor. He is immediately transported to the emergency room. “I feel so bad,” Ronald Reagan tells the paramedic, who quickly begins cutting the clothes off the president’s body. “I feel really awful. I can’t breathe.”
This is the first indication that something is very wrong with Ronald Reagan. At first, doctors believe Reagan may die. Now an attempt to take his blood pressure has not yielded a systolic reading, meaning that his heart is barely pumping.
All around Reagan, the emergency room is a frantic scene of doctors, nurses, and well-armed Secret Service agents. Dr. Joseph Giordano, a surgeon who heads the hospital’s trauma team, is inserting a clear plastic chest tube into Reagan, hoping to drain the blood from his chest cavity. “This better go well,” Giordano tells himself as he slices open the president’s skin.
“He was seriously injured,” Giordano will later remember. “He was close to dying.”
Ronald Reagan is a seventy-year-old man who has just suffered a devastating trauma. Not only was he shot, but he was thrown bodily into a car, and his head slammed hard into an armrest. His body may not have the ability to endure much more.
Reagan is conscious throughout the trauma procedure. Once he is stabilized, the next step will be surgery to remove the bullet. Spotting Jerry Parr just before being wheeled to the operating room, Reagan shows the first signs that he might make it: “I hope they’re all Republicans,” he tells the Secret Service agent who saved his life less than thirty minutes ago.
“Mr. President,” Dr. Giordano, a lifelong Democrat, tells Reagan, “today we are all Republicans.”
* * *
A pained but lucid Ronald Reagan is being prepped for surgery. Lying on the gurney, he looks up to find Nancy Reagan gazing down at him. She is unsteady. Blood loss has made her husband’s skin the palest white she has ever seen. A nurse removes the president’s oxygen mask from his mouth. “Honey,” he tells her, hoping that a joke will erase the fear from her face, “I forgot to duck.”
Nancy fights tears as she bends down to kiss him. “Please don’t try to talk,” she whispers.
Later, Nancy will remember this moment with sadness and fear. “I saw him lying naked, with strangers looking down at his naked body and watching the life ebb from him, and as a doctor’s daughter I knew that he was dying,” she will recount to her friends.
But Ronald Reagan is experiencing another reaction. He will later write of the joy this moment gives him. “Seeing Nancy in the hospital gave me an enormous lift. As long as I live, I will never forget the thought that rushed into my head as I looked up into her face. Later, I wrote it down in my diary: ‘I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there … [O]f all the ways God had blessed me, giving her to me was the greatest—beyond anything I can ever hope to deserve.”
Reagan is wheeled into surgery. Nancy clings to the bed’s handrail the whole while, walking with the team of doctors and the now surgically gowned Secret Service agents who will accompany her husband into Operating Room Two.
“Who’s minding the store?” Reagan asks Ed Meese as the gurney passes the White House counselor.
At the double doors leading into the surgery center, Nancy is told she cannot accompany her husband any farther.
The time is 3:24 p.m.
All she can do is wait.2
* * *
At 4:00 p.m., Ronald Reagan lies unconscious on the operating table. A rib spreader pulls his fifth and sixth ribs apart, allowing Dr. Ben Aaron to see clearly inside Reagan’s chest. The seventh rib is indeed fractured, thanks to the bullet glancing off it. More troublesome is the blood filling the chest cavity. The president has lost half his total blood supply. Tubes running into Reagan’s body fill him with new blood, antibiotics, and hydration fluid.
Dr. Aaron’s goal is to remove the bullet from Reagan’s body, but there is a big problem. While he can trace its path through the half-inch-wide hole it has left in the tissue and lung, he cannot find the location of the .22-caliber round.
Using his fingers, Aaron reaches inside the president’s body and feels for the bullet, delicately working around Reagan’s slowly beating heart as he does so. “I might call it quits,” the surgeon says, frustrated he can find no sign of the bullet.
* * *
Frustration also reigns one mile away, at the White House.
“Who is running the government in the absence of President Reagan?” a journalist asks Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes on live television.
All across America, millions are glued to their TV sets as regular programming has been interrupted. A somber America awaits news about the severely wounded Ronald Reagan.
But if viewers are looking for reassurance, Speakes’s words do not provide it.
“I cannot answer that question at this time,” he responds.
One floor below where the press conference is taking place, members of Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet huddle in the White House Situation Room, horrified at Speakes’s response. Even worse, they know something that the press secretary does not: the Soviets are taking advantage of Reagan’s condition by moving their submarines alarmingly close to America’s East Coast. A nuclear missile could strike Washington in just eleven minutes. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger has ordered America’s bomber crews to go on high standby alert. Yet with the president now unconscious and Vice President George H. W. Bush in the air somewhere over Texas, no one at the White House has the direct authority to respond to the Soviet threat.3
Fearing the worst, National Security Adviser Richard Allen has ordered that the special briefcase known as “the football,” which contains the nuclear launch codes that could begin World War III, be brought to him. It now sits on a conference table here in the Situation Room, safely concealed beneath a small pile of papers.
Suddenly, Gen. Alexander Haig takes charge. The secretary of state, who has long sought to expand his power, appoints himself temporary president.
“The helm is right here,” he declares to the startled Cabinet members. “And that means in this chair, right now, constitutionally until the vice president gets here.”
Haig, an intimidating man, looks around, daring anyone to dispute him. Constitutionally, the general is incorrect. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill should be next in line. But no one in the Situation Room cares to defy the former four-star army general who fought in Vietnam and Korea.
“How do you get to the press room?” he asks, rising from his chair.
The room goes silent. Before anyone can stop him, Haig races upstairs and barges into the press center. Knees buckling, voice cracking, and hands grasping the lectern so hard his knuckles turn white, Alexander Haig proclaims his authority to the nation on live TV.
“As of now, I am in control here in the White House.”
* * *
Nancy Reagan is not in control. She is desperately praying. She sits in the hospital chapel along with the wives of Press Secretary James Brady and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy. All three of their husbands are currently in surgery. The women are unaware that the media will soon report that James Brady is dead.
The women are not alone in this small second-floor sanctuary. White House chief of staff James Baker kneels in prayer, while Mike Deaver and Ed Meese join the vigil. They are as close to the president as any group of advisers could be, and the wait is torturous.
* * *
Finally, at 5:25 p.m., thanks to a set of X-rays that show the bullet’s location, Dr. Aaron feels the dime-size chunk of metal. The surgeon plucks the bullet from Reagan’s lung with his fingertips.
“I’ve got it,” he tells the surgical team, which includes a member of the Secret Service, who now steps forward to retrieve the bullet as evidence.
Dr. Aaron now turns his attention to the nonstop internal bleeding that still might kill Ronald Reagan.
Finally, at 6:46 p.m., an unconscious Reagan is closed up and wheeled from the operating room. The greatest crisis has passed, but danger remains.
Within an hour, Reagan is awake, though groggy. A breathing tube in his throat makes it impossible for him to talk, so he scribbles a note to his nurse. “If I’d had this much attention in Hollywood, I’d have stayed there.”
* * *
Twenty miles away, at Andrews Air Force Base, the plane carrying Vice President George H. W. Bush has finally touched down on the runway. His return marks the end of Alexander Haig’s self-declared three-hour reign as leader of the free world. And while Haig was legally wrong to declare himself in charge, his blunt behavior has had one positive effect: Soviet forces are backing down.
Alexander Haig briefs the press in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
In the White House Situation Room, National Security Adviser Richard Allen breathes a sigh of relief that there will be no need to open the special briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes.
Not today, at least.4
* * *
Meanwhile, John Hinckley sits in a Washington, DC, interrogation room. He complains that his wrist might be broken; there are also cuts and bruises on his face from being shoved to the concrete sidewalk. But for the most part, Hinckley is calm as Detective Eddie Myers of the Washington Metro Police Department’s Homicide Division interrogates him.
“How do you spell ‘assassinate’?” Myers absentmindedly asks a fellow officer during the questioning.
“A-s-s-a-s-s-i-n-a-t-e,” Hinckley answers, grinning.
The FBI has requested Hinckley be given a physical, including retrieving a sample of his pubic hair.
“Pubic hair?” the grizzled Myers asks in disbelief. “For Chrissakes. He didn’t fuck Reagan, he shot him.”5
* * *
It is not until morning that Ronald and Nancy Reagan are allowed to see each other again. She has spent a long night alone in the White House, sleeping at the side of his bed, hugging one of her husband’s T-shirts to feel his presence. At 10:00 a.m., Nancy enters the intensive care unit with Patti and Ron Reagan, who have made the flight to Washington upon hearing of the shooting. Although Michael and Maureen Reagan have traveled to the hospital, they are not ushered in until Nancy’s children have had their moment.6
John Hinckley Jr. in police custody following the shooting of Ronald Reagan and three others, March 30, 1981
Ronald Reagan is oblivious to any sibling rivalry. He sees his family and is deeply moved. His breathing tube has been taken out, allowing him to joke and visit with Nancy and his children. He knows the shooting has changed his life forever.
“Whatever happens now I owe my life to God,” he will write in his diary, “and I will try to serve him in every way I can.”