In 1985, after twenty-three years on the job, Jerry Parr retired from the Secret Service. Before leaving, he paid a final visit to Reagan in the Oval Office. When the president saw him, he said, “You’re not going to throw me over the couch, are you?”
Parr had decided to travel to the Hilton hotel that day in March 1981 so that he could build a better bond with Reagan. In that he succeeded, but the shooting also changed him. After leaving the Secret Service, Parr came to believe that God had directed his life so that he could one day save the president’s. He ultimately obtained a master’s degree in pastoral counseling and became the copastor of the Festival Church, a member of a network of ecumenical churches in Washington.
Now eighty, Parr doesn’t want anyone to forget what happened—not because he considers himself a hero, but because he worries that security agents and officers may become complacent again. In March 2010, he visited the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia, to speak to two dozen young agents with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service who are often assigned to protect dignitaries and high-ranking navy officials all over the world. Parr was no longer the husky fifty-year-old agent who protected the president on that day in 1981. His hair and eyebrows were gray and bushy, and his once-confident strut had been replaced by a shuffle. But the young investigators—many of whom had not been born when the assassination attempt occurred—listened in rapt attention as Parr described how he pushed Reagan into the armored limousine and moments later decided to drive to the hospital instead of the White House. The president ultimately survived, Parr said, thanks to “human flesh, training, technology, and courage.”
* * *
IN THE DAYS following the assassination attempt, several congressional panels promised investigations into the shooting, but none ever took place. The Treasury Department issued its own report on the attempt in August 1981. While it lauded the efforts of Jerry Parr and Tim McCarthy, it noted that there were often conflicts between the White House and the Secret Service over security arrangements. It urged the service and the White House to determine “the balance that is to be struck among the security, scheduling and public exposure requirements of the president.” The report also noted the dramatic and dangerous difference between the elaborate security precautions taken to screen those attending the president’s speech and the lax security provided outside the hotel, where “members of the general public, without any Secret Service pre-screening whatever, could walk to a rope barricade and stand within 15 feet of the president.”
The Secret Service tried to deflect blame for the shooting onto the FBI by saying that the bureau never told them about Hinckley’s arrest in Nashville. In an internal report, the service offered an unpersuasive defense of its procedures that day. Among other dubious points, it took credit for locating the president’s limousine so that it could “effect instantaneous evacuation following the shooting.” Nowhere does this report—or any public statement by the Secret Service—admit that the service made a colossal mistake by allowing a crowd of unscreened spectators to stand so close to the president’s path to the limousine.
After the shooting the Secret Service did change a number of procedures for the better. It required that everyone entering a presidential event pass through a metal detector. It installed magnetometers at the White House (and discovered that a surprising number of guns were being toted in the purses of elderly ladies taking the official tour). And since March 30, 1981, presidents have rarely, if ever, walked in public without elaborate security arrangements. The revised procedures—which are regularly reviewed—have significantly increased the president’s safety. Still, no security perimeter is impenetrable, as demonstrated by the two socialites who in 2009 sneaked through the White House gates, attended a state dinner, and shook President Barack Obama’s hand.
Over the years, the Secret Service has steadily grown. In 2010, it had 3,500 agents—double the number in Jerry Parr’s day—and its budget was nearly $1.5 billion. Training has become ever more important. In the early 1960s, Parr received six weeks of training at Secret Service school; agents entering in 1981 received eight weeks of training at FLETC and eight weeks at a Secret Service school in the Washington area. Today, new hires spend twelve weeks at FLETC and nineteen weeks at Secret Service school before they become full-fledged agents. The training of the presidential protective detail is especially intense. These agents spend two weeks out of every eight at the agency’s sprawling training center in Beltsville, Maryland.
* * *
RONALD AND NANCY Reagan were forever grateful to the doctors and nurses who saved the president’s life. A decade after the shooting, the Reagans attended a gathering at George Washington University Hospital to commemorate the event and to announce the renaming of the emergency department: it became the Ronald Reagan Institute of Emergency Medicine. The speakers told a number of jokes, and everyone particularly enjoyed recalling the note Reagan wrote to Denise Sullivan: “Does Nancy know about us?” A few days later, Sullivan received a handwritten note from the president. Chagrined that he might have embarrassed her, Reagan apologized for his “ill-timed joke 10 years ago” but went on to write that “your hand clasp was one of the most comforting things done for me during all of my hospital stay.”
Dr. Joseph Giordano, who retired in 2010 as chairman of surgery for the George Washington University Medical Center, also received occasional notes from Reagan. In 1984, when Giordano was supporting Walter Mondale, a Democrat, for president, he wrote an op-ed piece that attacked the president’s position on government assistance. Within days, Giordano received a letter from the president. “There has been a steady drumbeat of political demagoguery duly reported in the press that we have slashed away at essential social programs in our cost-cutting efforts,” Reagan wrote. “The truth is we have done no such thing.… I owe you too much to let you go on believing the current propaganda.” A decade after the shooting, the Reagans dropped Giordano a kind note when they heard about the death of his father.
A year after the assassination attempt, Dr. Benjamin Aaron, Dr. David Gens, and Dr. Paul Colombani paid a house call to see how the president was doing, and a film crew making a documentary on behalf of the hospital tagged along. Reagan said he appreciated the doctors’ efforts to save his life, but he also told them he had a question. “I understand that you really kind of loaded me up with other people’s blood, about a whole full charge, and now am I back on my own blood now, and if so where did all of the other blood go?” Aaron explained that the donated blood broke down quickly and was replaced by new blood produced by the president’s body. Satisfied with the answer, Reagan chatted with them for a few more minutes and then thanked them again.
Ben Aaron retired from GW in 1996, but not before performing surgery on several other prominent patients, including future vice president Dick Cheney. (Aaron performed heart bypass surgery on Cheney in 1988, just before Cheney became defense secretary in George H. W. Bush’s administration.) Currently, David Gens is a senior attending surgeon at the University of Maryland’s R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, and Paul Colombani is the chief of pediatric surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The George Washington University Hospital building where Reagan was treated was demolished in 2003, a year after a new facility was erected across the street at a cost of $96 million. But the emergency department still bears the president’s name, and the hospital remains classified by the city government as a Level 1 trauma center. In the years after Reagan was shot, trauma care in the United States has steadily improved, despite the elimination of a federal program that oversaw the development of trauma centers and emergency response systems around the country. In 1981, there were 145 Level 1 and Level 2 trauma centers in the nation. Today, there are more than 470 such centers, as well as 392 Level 3 centers; about 80 percent of the country’s population is within an hour of a trauma center.
* * *
IN JUNE 1982, John W. Hinckley Jr. was found not guil
ty by reason of insanity of attempting to assassinate the president; the jury reached the same verdict on twelve other charges related to the shooting. The eight-week trial focused heavily on the testimony of psychiatrists who had examined Hinckley. It also featured videotaped testimony from Jodie Foster, who, though scarred by her brush with the would-be assassin, completed her education at Yale and then continued her film career.
Since his trial, Hinckley has been confined to St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill. The terms of his confinement require that he remain there until a federal judge determines that it is safe to free him.
Both St. Elizabeths’ doctors and Hinckley’s lawyers have in recent years argued that Hinckley’s depression and his unspecified psychotic disorder have been in remission for years and that his narcissistic personality disorder has receded. Accordingly, they have petitioned a federal judge to grant Hinckley—who turned fifty-five in May 2010—more freedom in preparation for the day when he is eventually released. Often over the objections of prosecutors, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman has granted Hinckley frequent and lengthy unsupervised visits with his mother at her home in Williamsburg, Virginia. (Hinckley’s father died in 2008.) In 2009, Friedman also ruled that Hinckley could obtain a driver’s license. Hinckley still spends his time much as he did in the months before shooting President Reagan—composing music and playing his guitar. Though his boyish looks have faded, his hair remains sandy blond and his face displays the same emotionless affect that so puzzled detectives and investigators thirty years ago.
* * *
IN JANUARY 1989, Ronald Reagan rode quietly into retirement. One of his first acts was to visit his tailor and replace the suit that had been cut to shreds in the GW emergency room. Over the next few years, he dedicated much of his time to writing his memoirs, giving speeches, and cutting wood on his sprawling ranch.
A decade before his death in 2004, Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. But he refused to allow the devastating affliction to darken his outlook on life. When he performed his final act as a public man in November 1994, Reagan once again displayed the optimism that had always been so central to his character.
“I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” he wrote in his own hand. “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
NOTES
A Note on Sources
Writing a detailed history about a single day three decades ago is a substantial challenge. Fortunately, I was able to unearth a wealth of documentary evidence in the form of hundreds of pages of Secret Service and FBI reports, confidential court records, long-forgotten trial transcripts, closely held audiotapes, and the contemporaneous notes and diaries of a number of people who participated in the drama that unfolded on March 30, 1981. I supplemented that record with interviews of more than 125 people, many of whom played a part in what happened that day. In deciding whether to trust memories of such distant events, I used the standard of a person’s “best recollection,” as long as it squared with the official record or the memories of other participants. On occasion, I relied on newspaper and magazine articles published soon after the assassination attempt. Sometimes, of course, I had to make a judgment call about whether to use a detail, a line of dialogue, or a sequence of events recalled by someone who was present at some point during the day re-created in this book. In every instance, my objective was to provide a scrupulously accurate record of what actually occurred, and my fervent hope is that I did not fail those who took so much time to tell me their stories in the expectation that I would get them right.
In constructing these notes, I chose not to provide a citation for every fact in the text. Instead, I cited the facts that seemed most important to this account, as well as those that might help readers better understand the story and my thought process in telling it. The comments I have included with a number of citations also allowed me to spare a few nuggets of information from what Leon Trotsky—and later Ronald Reagan—called “the ash heap of history.”
In describing the response by the Secret Service and the FBI to the assassination attempt, I relied heavily on interviews with former agents, as well as a review of trial testimony and extensive—and, until recently, confidential—Secret Service and FBI reports that I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. I also benefited from a lengthy Treasury Department report that provided a detailed description of the actions of Secret Service agents during the attack and in the days leading up to it.
To provide an account of the medical care given to Ronald Reagan and the other wounded men, I relied on interviews with more than thirty doctors and nurses, medical records that I obtained from various sources, and extensive unpublished recollections and journal entries written by several participants. Further, I read many news stories about Reagan’s treatment in the hospital, including articles in both medical journals and the popular press. One of the most comprehensive reports—an article by journalist John Pekkanen—appeared in the August 1981 issue of Washingtonian magazine.
Fortunately, I also obtained a copy of a thirty-minute documentary produced by George Washington University Hospital about the events of that day. Called The Saving of the President, it featured all of the principal doctors and nurses reenacting their own roles, thus providing an accurate record of what occurred in the hours following the president’s arrival in GW’s emergency room. This documentary—which aired once on national television and once on Washington-area television in 1982—was particularly helpful when describing locations in the hospital, which was torn down in 2003.
In telling John Hinckley’s story, I relied extensively on transcripts from his eight-week trial, which are housed at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. I obtained a 638-page confidential psychiatric assessment of Hinckley that was produced by prosecution psychiatrists. This document—which has never been made public—delved into every aspect of Hinckley’s life, from birth until his arrest, and featured interviews with the suspect, his family, his associates, and police and federal agents who confronted him on the day of the shooting. I also benefited from Secret Service and FBI reports that were attached to an appeals court filing and apparently forgotten. Hinckley did not respond to several letters seeking an interview; his attorney, Barry Wm. Levine, said Hinckley and his family members declined to comment for this book.
In writing about Ronald Reagan and his White House, I was fortunate to interview James A. Baker III, Edwin Meese III, and others who worked for the president in that time period. Richard V. Allen was especially helpful; besides providing extensive notes and making himself available for many interviews, he gave me access to the audiotapes he recorded in the Situation Room during that day’s most difficult hours. Unless noted otherwise, every line of dialogue used in the scenes set in the Situation Room comes from Allen’s tapes. I also benefited from a transcript of an interview conducted with Michael Deaver by another White House official the day after the shooting. This transcript provides the most detailed and illuminating account of the assassination attempt from any White House official who followed Reagan to the hospital. In telling the story of Air Force Two, I relied on Chase Untermeyer’s recollection and his diary entry for the day, as well as a transcript of an interview he conducted with Vice President Bush as they flew back to Washington.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library has a trove of records—documents, photographs, and audiotapes—that helped me construct this narrative. Among those records were memos produced by key administration figures that described their actions that day. In writing Reagan’s story, I referred to the diaries he kept while president and to his two autobiographies, Where’s the Rest of Me? and An American Life. Also useful was a detailed account of the events of March 30, 1981, provided by Nancy Reagan in her memoir, My Turn. Finally, I benefited from reading hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles about the Reagan administration; biographies of the former president by, among others, Lou Cannon and Garry Wills
; and a history of the administration’s first few years by Laurence I. Barrett.
In the interests of clarity, all times in this book are Eastern Standard Time.
Guide to Abbreviations and Shorthand in Notes
Secret Service reports: After the shooting, the Secret Service interviewed dozens of agents, police officers, and witnesses after the shooting. In citing information from these reports, I use the name of the agent or person who was interviewed. For example, Secret Service inspectors interviewed Jerry Parr, the chief of the White House detail. If I relied on information supplied to inspectors in that report, I cited it as Parr Secret Service report. Sometimes, the agent’s name was redacted in the record, but I have determined his or her identity through interviews. In that case, for example, I cite it as Green Secret Service report (redacted).
FBI reports: I obtained hundreds of pages of FBI reports, including the never previously released summary of agents’ interview of Ronald Reagan in the days after the shooting. These documents are cited the same way as the Secret Service reports.
Richard Allen’s tape recordings of the Situation Room: Allen tapes.
Memos by White House officials and cabinet secretaries: cited using the last name of the memo’s author (for example, Weinberger memo).
Unpublished material: I name the person who wrote it and provide a brief description of the record. For example, Dr. Benjamin Aaron wrote a sixteen-page personal reflection in the weeks after the shooting. In the notes, it appears as Aaron reflection. I have included most of these reflections and notes in my bibliography.
The Management Review on the Performance of the U.S. Department of Treasury in Connection with the March 30, 1981, Assassination Attempt on Ronald Reagan: Treasury report.
“Psychiatric Report in the Case of United States vs. John W. Hinckley, Jr.”: government psychiatric report.
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