Parr’s many years fixing power lines in the blazing Florida sun had left him grizzled; his skin was perpetually tanned and his forehead and cheeks were creased with deep lines. Dark bags rimmed his brown eyes, but those eyes were bright and constantly moving—scanning left and right, up and down, lingering on anything that seemed suspicious. Even at home or when at rest, he noticed things that were out of place: a half-open window; a rustling shade; a delivery man wearing the wrong kind of shoes; the one scowl in a sea of smiles. His eyes, after all, might one day save the president’s life.
Parr pulled on a London Fog trench coat and said goodbye to his three daughters and his wife, Carolyn, an IRS lawyer. Then he walked across the soggy grass of his big yard and tossed handfuls of feed to the thirty chickens he kept in a coop. No matter that they sometimes dirtied his shoes, his chickens and his two-acre plot gave Parr’s suburban home a rural feel and made it a refuge from the considerable stress of his job.
In his bland suit and equally nondescript coat, the fifty-year-old agent looked completely ordinary—in fact, he was anything but. An eclectic reader, he enjoyed the works of such philosophers and writers as Immanuel Kant, Thomas Merton, and Ernest Hemingway. On his commutes, alone in the car, he often pondered his favorite poem, Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” a melancholy work about a soldier in World War I whose life is destined to end on a blazing battlefield. It was this poem that inspired President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous phrase “rendezvous with destiny,” and President Kennedy so admired it that he often asked his wife, Jacqueline, to recite it for him. But the meaning of Seeger’s famous poem was far darker than the campaign slogans it inspired, which is perhaps why it resonated so intensely with Parr, a man who relentlessly trained for a day he hoped would never come. He found the last two lines of the poem particularly powerful:
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Born in 1930, Parr grew up poor in Miami, the son of a cash register repairman and a beautician. His parents divorced when he was nine; after her second marriage failed, Parr’s mother married yet again, this time to a man who claimed to have slain his first wife and threatened to kill Parr’s mother if she left him. For four years, Parr slept with a knife under his pillow so he could protect his mother if the hot-tempered man ever attacked, though he never did. After high school, he took a job with a local electric company and spent thirteen years working as a lineman, interrupted only by a stint in the air force. He married and then decided to attend college, ultimately earning a degree in English and philosophy; when he graduated, he interviewed with a wide range of companies and organizations, including the Secret Service.
The service had intrigued Parr for years. As a boy, he’d been enthralled by a 1939 movie called The Code of the Secret Service, which starred twenty-eight-year-old Ronald Reagan as the dashing Secret Service agent Lieutenant “Brass” Bancroft. Hollywood’s version of an agent’s workday was wonderfully fanciful: Bancroft is falsely accused of killing a fellow undercover agent in Mexico, survives a shooting, breaks out of a Mexican jail, and arrests the villain on the other side of the U.S. border. Though the movie was absurd—many, including its star, judged it to be Reagan’s worst feature film—Parr never forgot Bancroft’s daring exploits and for years dreamed of following in his footsteps. When the opportunity arose, he jumped at it.
Parr joined the service in 1962. He was the oldest rookie in his class; in his earliest days as an agent, while standing guard at a New York airport, he marveled at the swagger and poise of President Kennedy’s Secret Service detail and decided that he wanted to be just like those agents. He even fantasized about being the lead agent in an inaugural parade and sitting in the front seat of the president’s armored limousine. But from the start, he understood that he would never come close to achieving his dream without putting in years of hard work; he also knew that his educational and professional background made him something of a misfit in the straitlaced service. His first supervisor, in fact, had written in an evaluation that Parr was “not White House material.”
Still, Parr was persistent and ambitious, and he loved the challenges he encountered each day. He rose through the ranks quickly, and was honored when he was chosen to serve on the vice presidential details of Hubert Humphrey and Spiro Agnew. He enjoyed devising ways to defeat potential terror threats while planning trips to war zones, former war zones, and the kinds of neighborhoods where everybody seemed to own a gun. Even visits to elementary schools were an ordeal, because nobody was above suspicion, not the principal or even the kindergarten teacher. Everyone and everything had to be checked, rechecked, and checked again. He often told friends that devising ways to protect the nation’s leaders was like eating a chicken gizzard. “The more you chew it,” he’d say, “the bigger it gets.”
An agent’s job is grueling, primarily because it requires an extraordinary ability to focus and a tremendous tolerance for boredom. Parr spent hours standing in the vacant stairwell of a hotel because the president was speaking in a nearby ballroom; he guarded a steaming cornfield because the president was scheduled to fly overhead. He suffered through stomach-shredding flights in thunderstorms on windowless cargo jets because an armored limousine had to reach Ohio or California or Alabama ahead of the president. And he routinely walked next to the president out in the open, in the so-called kill zone, where at every second he had to be prepared to throw himself in front of a bomb or bullet.
In 1979, Parr was tapped to become the lead agent of President Carter’s detail. Though he no longer stood post in cornfields, he still spent plenty of time in the kill zone, and now it was his job to supervise the more than one hundred intense and highly trained men and women who shielded the world’s number one target. He did everything possible to ensure that they remained vigilant; as a consequence, many had trouble leaving work at the White House gates. At home, they inspected shadows in their garages; in restaurants, they insisted on sitting in the booth that faced the door so they could immediately spot a gunman. Burnout was common. But Parr loved his job; though the work was taxing, he found it gratifying.
On January 20, 1981, Parr defied the odds and led the inaugural procession to and from the Capitol. In the morning, he rode in the front seat of the presidential limousine that carried President Carter, President-elect Reagan, and two lawmakers from the White House to the inauguration. During the ceremony, on a temporary stage on the west steps of the Capitol, Parr sat just a few rows behind Carter. After the ceremony ended, Parr watched the outgoing president walk somberly away. Then Parr turned his head and with it the focus of his attention to the new president. As Reagan left the stage, Parr fell in right behind him.
Every president presents different challenges, but in the two months since the inauguration Parr had had little trouble adjusting to the habits and routines of his new charge. Yet, as he poked around his office on this gray March morning, Parr realized that he and the president still didn’t know each other well. Other senior agents had spent a lot of time with Reagan on the campaign trail or during the transition, but Parr had protected Carter in the months before and after the election. Since the inauguration, a number of agents had begun to form bonds with Reagan, who clearly enjoyed bantering with those protecting him. But Parr had been so busy with administrative duties that he hadn’t spent much time shadowing the president.
Checking the day’s schedule, Parr saw that Agent Johnny Guy, one of his deputies, was due to accompany Reagan to his speech at the Washington Hilton hotel that afternoon. Thinking that the trip might provide a good opportunity to get to know the president a little better, Parr went looking for Guy to tell him that he would take his place.
* * *
AS MORNING LIGHT leaked into his drab hotel room, John W. Hinckley Jr. lay in bed, awake and anxious. The night before, he had gone to bed early, enormously tired after a grueling cross-country bus trip. But he hadn’t slept much, perhaps an hour at most. He’d
been depressed for weeks, maybe months; for a while, he’d seen a psychiatrist, but it hadn’t helped. And now he couldn’t shake the feeling that the fabric of his life was finally rending.
Hinckley had arrived in Washington the previous afternoon. He’d found the Park Central in a phone book where the hotel advertised its “Low Rates, AAA approved,” and checked in as a “visiting student.” At $47 for the night—Hinckley paid cash—Room 312 wasn’t bad, with a television and decent furniture, but its brown carpet, brown-striped design on one wall, and cheap-looking floral-patterned brown comforter were hardly cheerful. Still, the place was a step up from most of the seedy motels he had called home in recent weeks.
Hinckley was not accustomed to such places. The twenty-five-year-old son of a wealthy oil executive, he had grown up in affluent suburbs near both Dallas and Denver. Unlike his older brother and sister, Hinckley had been an indifferent student. After graduating from high school in 1973, he sporadically attended college but never earned a degree. He enjoyed writing poems, stories, and songs; he also spent a lot of time playing the guitar but was too shy to perform in public or for his family. At twenty, he moved to Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a professional songwriter, but he failed at this, too. With little money or sense of direction, he had spent the past few months living mostly with his parents in Evergreen, Colorado, a wooded suburb just west of Denver.
But returning to Evergreen was no longer an option: a month ago, his parents had kicked him out of the house and refused to give him any more money. To finance his life on the road, Hinckley had stolen several gold coins from them and then sold most of his remaining possessions. His funds ran so low that he was even forced to pawn his guitar and his beloved typewriter for $50. He also sold most of his small gun collection—including a .38-caliber revolver, a Mauser rifle, and a .22-caliber handgun—to a man named Larry in a shopping mall parking lot.
Down to his last few hundred dollars, he decided to make a final attempt to reclaim his life by flying to Los Angeles and trying to sell some songs to music producers. He drove to Evergreen, parked his white Plymouth Volare in his parents’ garage, and asked his mother to drive him to the airport for his Western Airlines flight.
As he stepped from the car, his mother handed him $100 in cash. “Well, Mom,” Hinckley said, “I want to thank you for everything. I want to thank you for everything that you have done.” It was the kind of thing people say when they don’t believe they’ll ever see a loved one again.
When he arrived in Los Angeles, his determination to make a new start faltered. He didn’t even try to sell his music; instead, he wandered the streets of Hollywood, noticing little beyond the drunks, bag ladies, and prostitutes. That night, he had trouble sleeping, kept awake by noise from the next room and by the cacophony of Hollywood street life coming through his window.
The following morning, he pondered suicide, a subject never far from his mind. Once he had even tried to overdose on pills, but now he was imagining more creative and public ways to end his life. Recently he had become obsessed with a woman and had begun thinking about how to stage a dramatic death in front of her. He also imagined killing her and then killing himself. He couldn’t decide which scenario he preferred, but either way he realized that it was pointless to stay in Los Angeles. The woman was a college student in New Haven, Connecticut; he didn’t know whether she would be willing to see him, especially since she had brushed him off several times before. But it was worth the risk.
On Thursday, March 26, Hinckley packed his things; at eleven a.m., he walked to the Greyhound bus station. He decided to travel first to Washington, D.C.—he’d been there several times and was familiar with its downtown—and then catch another bus to New Haven. His ticket cost $117.80.
The four-day trip was a blur of fast food and brief stops: Las Vegas, Cheyenne, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. Traveling through Utah, he awoke from a brief nap to find the bus hurtling through a massive snowstorm. He spent much of the trip slouched in a window seat, watching the scenery stream by or reading The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger’s novel of teenage angst and alienation. He identified with the story’s main character, Holden Caulfield, but the book was also special to him because he knew that John Lennon’s assassin had pulled it from his pocket and leafed through it moments after gunning down the rock-and-roll icon. Lennon, who had been killed three and a half months earlier, was Hinckley’s favorite musician; even so, he sometimes felt that he identified more with Lennon’s killer than with Lennon himself.
A minister who boarded in Salt Lake City sat next to Hinckley for a day and a night as the bus traveled east. Hinckley told his seatmate that he was on vacation; lying again, he claimed that he was a college graduate and that he ran a record store in Los Angeles. When the minister asked him whether he was a Christian, Hinckley offered no reply. As the miles flowed by, Hinckley revealed few details about his life. He didn’t even tell the minister his last name.
Hinckley slept poorly during the trip; by the time he arrived in Washington on Sunday, March 29, he was exhausted and hungry. He found a hotel, got some food, and spent another restless night.
Now it was Monday morning and he barely had enough energy to get out of bed. He had a little over $129 left, and he had managed to jam the jumbled detritus of his life into two suitcases. A plaid one, stacked neatly on his hotel room’s foldout stand, was stuffed with an army field jacket, a black sports coat, a Best Western road atlas, two pairs of underwear, and some shirts, pants, and jeans. The suitcase also held some of his poems and short stories, as well as several of his favorite books. In addition to The Catcher in the Rye, Hinckley had brought along a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and a book called Strawberry Fields Forever: John Lennon Remembered.
Hinckley’s distress was evident in some of the items he’d carried with him to Washington. Another of the books in the plaid suitcase was Ted Bundy: The Killer Next Door. The suitcase also held a box of ammunition containing six Devastator bullets, each nestled in a foam slot. In his smaller, tan suitcase, he had stashed a gun—an R.G. Industries model RG 14, a .22-caliber double-action revolver that had cost him about $45—and thirty-seven rounds of ammunition. The bags also held a number of tape recordings, magazine clippings, and photographs, artifacts of his obsession with the woman in New Haven.
Just after nine a.m., Hinckley dressed and left the hotel. He wandered through a bookstore and then strolled along bustling K Street. He stopped into a McDonald’s and ate an Egg McMuffin. His thoughts kept returning to a simple, mesmerizing plan: he would take a bus to New Haven and end his life. Everything he had ever experienced was colliding at this singular moment in time. His money was gone. His parents would not have him back. He’d been traveling for weeks, and now he felt sure he was on his final trip.
On his walk back to the hotel, he bought a copy of The Washington Star, the city’s afternoon newspaper. In his room, he flipped through its pages, and his eyes were drawn to page A4: “The President’s Schedule.” He read the schedule without excitement, put down the paper, and headed to the shower.
CHAPTER 2
THE MAN
When President Reagan reached the Oval Office just after 8:50 a.m., he did not remove his suit jacket. He revered the presidency too much to display shirtsleeves in the room that had long been the epicenter of the presidential universe. It had been more than two months since Reagan’s inauguration, but the space looked much as Jimmy Carter had left it on January 20. There was the same large brown oval carpet decorated with blue flowers, the same two striped couches, the same two large armchairs. Two smaller wooden chairs bracketed Reagan’s desk; a polished globe stood near the window. The room’s domed ceiling glowed from lights hidden behind intricate molding, and a portrait of George Washington hung above the fireplace, directly across from the president’s desk.
The desk—which Carter had also used—was known as the Resolute desk because it had been constructed from the timbers of a British warship,
H.M.S. Resolute, and given to the United States as a gift in 1880. Reagan, an Anglophile, loved its rugged look and rich history. It had been used by a number of presidents; Reagan enjoyed telling visitors that it was the very desk pictured in the famous photo of President Kennedy’s son John playing at his father’s feet. But there was just one problem: the Resolute desk did not fit Reagan. The arms of his large rolling chair bumped into the desktop, making it impossible for him to slide his legs under the writing surface. When he signed a bill or an executive order, Reagan had to shift his legs awkwardly to the side. The president did not want to have the legs of his favorite chair shortened, and he wouldn’t have dreamed of asking carpenters to alter the desk. Instead, he resigned himself to a bit of discomfort; the pleasure of working at the Resolute was worth it.
If the office did not yet have any Reagan flourishes, the president and first lady had managed to add a few personal touches. Reagan had placed several family photos on a credenza; a glass container of jelly beans, his favorite candy, stood on a coffee table next to one of the armchairs. The day before, he and Mrs. Reagan had moved some of the furniture around and put a set of miniature bronzed saddles on a display stand near a bookshelf.
As Reagan settled down to work, his three top advisors were summoned for the morning staff meeting. They were Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, Counselor Edwin Meese III, and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael K. Deaver. In most administrations, presidential power flows vertically from the president through a chief of staff. But unlike Carter and other presidents before him, Reagan delegated much of his authority, relying on his aides to shape policy and negotiate deals before coming to him for a decision or his final approval. He had left it to these advisors to organize his staff, which led to an unusual arrangement that divided control—sometimes unevenly—among the trio of ambitious aides.
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