Killing Reagan (15 page)

To them, neither presidential candidate offers the country the necessary ideology and passion. If only Reagan had defeated Ford in the primaries, this would have been their Election Day, and perhaps their night of triumph. Instead, they sit alone in the house, looking out over the lights of Los Angeles and wondering, “What if…?”

But tomorrow is a new day.

As always, Ronald Reagan will spend a few hours in his study, writing his letters and speeches, laying the ideological groundwork to expand his conservative constituency.

But the story is different for Nancy Reagan. She has nothing at all to do. Shopping and socializing with her wealthy friends gets dull after a while.

So Nancy Reagan looks ahead to the day that her husband, Ronald Wilson Reagan, becomes the president of the United States in 1980.

She will see to it.

*   *   *

At 3:18 a.m. in Washington, DC, an exhausted Gerald Ford finally goes to bed. He has been watching the election returns for hours, and there is still no clear winner. Thirty-six invited guests have spent the last three hours in the White House watching with Ford. The family's gathering is private, as compared with the giddy scene on ABC, where broadcasters Howard K. Smith and Barbara Walters talk over images of a festive Jimmy Carter party, presided over by his aging mother, Lillian. The matriarch speaks as if she senses victory.

Still, Ford thinks he will win. Too tired to stay awake any longer, he plans to fall asleep and then arise to the news that he has been reelected. He steps out into the hallway with Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, issues a few minor orders, and then walks to his bedroom. The president slips between the sheets, Betty Ford at his side. Good news or bad, in the morning it will all be over.

The fact that the election is this close is testament to Gerald Ford's tenacity. Back in the summer of 1976, as Ronald Reagan divided the Republican Party with his campaign attacks on Ford, Jimmy Carter held a thirty-three-point lead in the polls. America wanted to believe that the smiling small-town peanut farmer would heal the country's maladies.

But Carter almost self-destructed. Against the advice of his counselors, he gave an interview to
Playboy
magazine, hoping to attract voters who might have been put off by his conservative Christian religious views. In that interview, he admitted, “I've committed adultery in my heart many times.”
4

National headlines ensued, with Carter coming across as somewhat lurid.

The interview was a huge mistake. In attempting to be completely honest, the governor actually lost the support of some women voters and evangelical Christians who thought his admission unseemly.

The gap between Carter and Ford closed even further when the president won the first televised debate in late September. Looking physically robust and in command of the facts, Ford made it clear which candidate was the president and which was not.

Now, as Gerald Ford turns out the light at 3:20 in the morning, he does so with the knowledge that he is on the verge of accomplishing something no other presidential candidate has ever done: closing a twenty-point gap in the polls in just eleven weeks' time.

The White House master bedroom goes dark.

Gerald Ford sleeps for five hours.

In the morning, he opens his eyes, hoping for good news.

He doesn't get it.
5

 

13

E
GYPTIAN
T
HEATRE

H
OLLYWOOD
, C
ALIFORNIA

S
UMMER
1976

A
FTERNOON

Just fifteen miles from the home of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, John Hinckley Jr. sits alone in this aging movie palace watching a new film called
Taxi Driver
. It's a motion picture Hinckley will eventually see more than fifteen times. The twenty-one-year-old drifter, who continues to put on weight, wears an army surplus jacket and combat boots, just like the film's main character, Travis Bickle. Hinckley's hair is now down to his shoulders, and his breath smells of peach brandy, another affectation he has picked up from Bickle, who is played with frightening intensity by actor Robert De Niro.

Screenwriter Paul Schrader based the character of Bickle on Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin of presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. Bremer shot Wallace to become famous and impress a girlfriend who had just broken up with him. He had originally intended to kill President Richard Nixon but botched several attempts.
1

But it is not De Niro who stirs the most emotion in John Hinckley. Instead, it is the child prostitute Iris who brings him back to the Egyptian Theatre time after time. Portrayed by twelve-year-old Jodie Foster, Iris behaves like an innocent child by day while turning tricks with grown men at night. During the filming of
Taxi Driver
, Foster was so young that she had to undergo a psychological evaluation to make sure she could cope with the troubling subject matter. Her nineteen-year-old sister, Connie, was brought in to be a body double for her in explicit scenes.
2

Hinckley does not know these things. Nor does he care. He is falling in love with Jodie Foster, no matter what her age.

Outside the Egyptian, the once-glamorous streets of Hollywood that Ronald Reagan knew when he was a movie star thirty years ago are no more. Hustlers, con artists, pimps, and drug addicts troll the sidewalks. There is an air of menace as solitary men enter cheap X-rated theaters. Street thugs and drug addicts mingle with tourists who buy tacky souvenirs and study the cement sidewalk handprints of the stars at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

John Hinckley has come to Hollywood to be a star in his own right. He hopes to use his guitar skills to make his fortune, but that has not happened. His squalid accommodation at Howard's Weekly Apartments just off Sunset Boulevard has become a prison. “I stayed by myself in my apartment,” he would later write of his months in Southern California, “and dreamed of future glory in some undefined field, perhaps music or politics.”

The lonely Hinckley keeps to himself, living on fast food and slowly becoming convinced that Jews and blacks are the enemies of white men like him. The more time he spends in Hollywood, the more Hinckley expands his circle of loathing. He now views the city of Los Angeles as “phony” and “impersonal.”

Isolated, Hinckley does not even keep in contact with his parents unless he needs money. He has become a drifter, unwilling to finish his studies at Texas Tech or get a job, and would be homeless without their support. John and Jo Ann Hinckley are growing increasingly concerned about their son's behavior, but they support him financially, hoping that one day he will turn his life around and come back to Colorado. Hinckley gives them hope by writing that he is in a relationship with a woman named Lynn. But “Lynn Collins” is not real. She is a myth based on Betsy, Cybill Shepherd's character in
Taxi Driver
—a fact the Hinckleys will not learn for five more years.

Jodie Foster as Iris in
Taxi Driver

There are more lies, such as the one about the rock music demo he fictitiously records. In reality, the only good thing in John Hinckley Jr.'s life right now is up there on the screen at the Egyptian.
Taxi Driver
gives him hope and a sense of purpose. The fog of depression hanging over him lifts. Adopting the same manner of dress and behavior as Robert De Niro's character is empowering for him. In
Taxi Driver
, Hinckley sees a series of clues that will lead him to a better life.

“You talking to me?” Travis Bickle says, alone in a ratty apartment not much different from Hinckley's. Bickle stares at his reflection in the mirror, taunting an imaginary antagonist. “You talking to
m
e? Well, I'm the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?”
3

Hinckley is enthralled as the on-screen action shifts to an attempted political assassination. The scene shows Bickle intending to kill a presidential candidate in order to win the love of a woman. But the Secret Service foil Bickle's effort, and he slips away without firing a shot.

John Hinckley knows the next scene well. It is the final gun battle. Travis Bickle goes to rescue Jodie Foster's character from her pimp, who has sold her to an aging mobster. Jodie is beautiful up there on the screen, her blond hair rolled into tight curls, lips painted a vivid red. A one-man vigilante, Bickle blasts his way down the dingy hallway to where Iris's liaison is being consummated. Blood spatters the walls as the body count rises. The camera pulls in tight to the surprised look on Iris's face as she hears the approaching gunshots. It is her friend, Travis Bickle, who has come to save her. She is not afraid. Quite the opposite. She cries when it appears that Travis might die.

As the movie ends and the credits role, Travis Bickle is a hero in the eyes of Jodie Foster's character—and in the eyes of John Hinckley Jr.

And if Bickle can be a hero, then Hinckley can be a hero, too.

There are any number of reasons John Hinckley has fallen in love with that beautiful young girl up there on the screen. She is the one person the solitary Travis Bickle cares enough about to put his own life on the line for—and in real life, her name is Jodie, which is the nickname Hinckley's mother goes by. A delusion is beginning to take shape in Hinckley's disturbed brain: that Jodie Foster might just be capable of falling in love with him.
4

The screen grows dark. John Hinckley steps out into the hot California sunlight. He walks the streets, just as Ronald Reagan once did. It was here on Hollywood Boulevard, near the corner of Cahuenga, that Reagan received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. Hinckley strides over it without even noticing.

In addition to acquiring boots, a jacket, and a newfound thirst for peach brandy, John Hinckley now also keeps a journal, just like Travis Bickle. The only trait he has not borrowed from the taxi driver is a passion for owning guns.

That will soon change.

 

14

W
HITE
H
OUSE

A
PRIL
25, 1980

5:43
A
.
M
.

President Jimmy Carter is depressed. The White House switchboard wake-up call has not made his real-life nightmare disappear. In fact, it's getting worse. Having his press secretary leak the horrible news to the media in the dead of night was bad enough, but the weight of what he must do now feels like a heavy stone upon his chest.

Carter is a man who likes to micromanage. He dresses quickly, in a dark suit, light blue shirt, and yellow-and-blue tie. The president then picks up the bedroom phone to call his press secretary, Jody Powell. Throughout the last four years, Powell has been very busy, as Carter's presidency has seen one setback after another. Catastrophic inflation has weakened the dollar. Skyrocketing oil prices and long lines to purchase gasoline have shocked and angered the public.
1
And now there is humiliation overseas.

Jimmy Carter and Jody Powell talk intensely about what the president will say on television in just one hour. An anonymous scheduler keeps track of the president's calls, inserting a
P
next to this moment in the president's daily worksheet, indicating that it was Carter who placed the call to Powell. (An
R
is used when the president receives a call.)

The two men talk for five minutes. Neither has any interest in breakfast. They are used to working under pressure. But even though the day is still young, they are already drained. The speech on television should have been one of celebration, the president of the United States proclaiming jubilant news to the world:
A daring rescue attempt has freed the fifty-two American hostages
. The hostages have been held in Iran by Muslim militants for six harrowing months because of U.S. support for the shah of Iran, who was admitted to the United States for cancer treatment shortly after going into exile. The radicals holding the Americans hostage insisted that he be returned to Iran to be put on trial for crimes committed during his thirty-eight-year reign.

Instead of celebration, though, there is disaster: eight American soldiers and pilots lie dead in the hot sands of the Iranian desert following an aborted rescue attempt, their bodies burned beyond recognition. In a rush to flee without being captured, their fellow soldiers left the dead Americans behind. It is, perhaps, one of the greatest military humiliations in U.S. history.
2

But Jimmy Carter's nightmare will not end with a public explanation of why he authorized the rescue attempt, why he suddenly ordered it aborted, and why eight American servicemen are now dead.

Iranian militants have long threatened to kill the hostages if any rescue attempt were launched. Carter finally called their bluff—only to fail miserably. Now he has to explain the tragedy to the American people.