Killing Reagan (19 page)

“It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams,” he preaches in his inaugural address. “We're not, as some would have us believe, doomed to inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do.

“I believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.”

*   *   *

The last inaugural ball winds down well past midnight, but at nine o'clock the same morning, Ronald Reagan sits down at the
Resolute
desk in the Oval Office and scans his list of scheduled meetings. He wears a coat and tie, as he will each and every time he sets foot in this legendary work space.

Reagan is firmly in command. Or so it seems to those around him.

Little does he know the violence that lies ahead.

 

17

S
TAPLETON
A
IRPORT

D
ENVER
, C
OLORADO

M
ARCH
7, 1981

6:00
P
.
M
.

John Hinckley shuffles off the United Airlines flight from New York, eyes glazed from fatigue and face unshaven. He has spent a week on the East Coast in yet another futile attempt to win Jodie Foster's love. “Dear Mom and Dad,” the twenty-five-year-old wrote in a note just seven days ago. “Your prodigal son has left again to exorcise some demons. I'll let you know in a week where I am.”

But Foster once again rejected Hinckley, and yesterday morning at four thirty, a broke and incoherent Hinckley phoned his parents, begging for a ticket to fly home. He is unaware that Jodie Foster has given his love letters to the Yale University campus police, who are currently launching an investigation into his whereabouts.

Hinckley is among the last passengers to disembark. His fifty-five-year-old father, Jack, is waiting. His mother has not made the drive into the city from Evergreen because she is so distraught about her son that she has spent the day sobbing. The entire Hinckley family has been devastated by John's behavior. His sister, Diane, and elder brother, Scott, both phoned yesterday to encourage their parents to place John in a mental hospital. “He just keeps going down,” Scott Hinckley told his father. “John doesn't seem like he can cope anymore.”

But coping is the least of it. If Jack and Jo Ann Hinckley were the sort of people to pry, they would find a handgun, bullets, and paper targets in the shape of a man's torso in a small green suitcase hidden in their son's bedroom closet. But they do not believe in snooping into their son's belongings or his personal business. They have no idea why John impulsively flew back to New York City, and certainly no knowledge of the grandiose scheme to court Jodie Foster.

This does not mean that Jack and Jo Ann are completely hands-off parents. It was through their urging that their troubled son has begun seeing a Colorado psychiatrist about his failing mental health. Dr. John Hopper, however, does not see anything greatly wrong with John Hinckley. In their sporadic sessions together over the last five months, Hopper has seen no signs of delusion or other symptoms of mental illness. John Hinckley trusts Hopper enough to confess that he is “on the breaking point” mentally, but rather than be alarmed, the psychiatrist thinks him a typical socially awkward young man who exaggerates his obsessions. Hopper treats Hinckley by attaching biofeedback electrodes to his forehead and thermometers to his fingers in an effort to teach him relaxation techniques.

Relaxation, Hopper believes, is vital to curing Hinckley.

The psychiatrist also believes that Jack and Jo Ann Hinckley are mostly to blame. He believes they coddle their son, not holding him accountable for his behavior. They allow him to live at home and don't force him to find a job. So Hopper has encouraged them to draw up a contract to set in motion the wheels of John Hinckley's independence. By March 1, he is to have a job; by March 30, he is to have moved out of the house. “Give John one hundred dollars,” Dr. Hopper told the Hinckleys, “and tell him good-bye.”

Technically, John Hinckley has remained true to the contract. He beat the deadline for finding employment, landing a menial position with the local Evergreen newspaper. But he walked away from that job when he flew to New York. Now, in the busy Denver airport, a heartbroken Jack Hinckley must perform a most gut-wrenching act of parenting: he must tell his son good-bye.

Jack Hinckley guides John to an unused boarding gate. “Have you eaten anything?” he asks.

“I bought a hamburger in New York, and ate again on the plane,” John replies.

They sit down. Jack is direct, telling his son that he is no longer welcome in their home. “You've broken every promise you've made to your mother and me. Our part of the agreement was to provide you with a home and an allowance while you've worked at becoming independent. I don't know what you've been doing these past months, but it hasn't been that. And we've reached the end of our rope.”

John Hinckley is shocked. Even at age twenty-five, he is so accustomed to having his parents solve his problems that his father's words stun him.

Jack presses two hundred dollars into John's hands. “The YMCA is an inexpensive place to live,” he says softly.

“I don't want to live at the Y.”

“Well, it's your decision, John. From here on you're on your own.”

The two men walk to the airport garage, where John Hinckley Jr. parked his white Plymouth Volare seven days ago. Jack Hinckley has brought along antifreeze, knowing that the car has been sitting in the winter cold all week. He empties the jug into the engine and then stands back as his son turns the key in the ignition.

“I watched him drive slowly down the ramp,” Jack Hinckley will later write of that moment.

“I did not see my son face-to-face again until we met in prison.”

*   *   *

Three weeks later, John Hinckley parks the white Volare in his parents' driveway. He has been living at a dive called the Golden Palms Hotel, thirty minutes away in Lakewood.

Jack is at work, so it is Hinckley's mother who answers the door. John is flying to California to start his new life, and Jo Ann Hinckley has agreed to drive him to the airport. The date is Wednesday, March 25, 1981. At this same moment, Ronald Reagan is taking advantage of one of the great perks that come with being president, flying by helicopter to Marine Corps Base Quantico, where he will spend two hours on horseback.

Mother and son barely speak during the hour-long ride into Denver. She does not want him to leave but forces herself to stick with what she and her husband now call the Plan.

John parks in front of the Western Airlines terminal. Jo Ann violates the Plan by giving him one hundred dollars. “He looked so bad and so sad and in absolutely total despair,” she will later recall. “I thought he would take his own life.”

But John Hinckley's flirtation with suicide has passed. He has a very different form of killing on his mind. “Mom,” he tells her, saying good-bye once and for all to his former life, “I want to thank you for everything you've ever done for me.”

Jo Ann Hinckley knows something is wrong. Her son never speaks with such formality. But the Plan must be obeyed, so she overrules her intuition and does nothing to stop John from leaving. If not for the Plan, the course of history might have been changed.
1

“You're very welcome,” Jo Ann tells her son. Her voice is intentionally cold because she knows she will start sobbing if she lets down her guard. Then, without a kiss or hug or even a handshake, she gets in the Volare and drives away.

Little does she know, her son is carrying one of his RG-14 .22-caliber Saturday Night Specials in his luggage.

It has become a vital part of
his
plan.

 

18

W
HITE
H
OUSE

W
ASHINGTON
, DC

M
ARCH
3, 1981

1:22
P
.
M
.

Seated inside the Diplomatic Reception Room, President Ronald Reagan makes small talk with CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite as a sound engineer adjusts their lapel microphones. The two men sit opposite each other on simple wooden chairs. Behind them, the iconic Frederic Remington bronze sculpture
Broncho Buster
perches on a credenza. Reagan's legs are crossed, and he rests his hands on his knees to keep them still as he speaks. Both men are dressed in dark suits, with Reagan's maroon tie in subtle contrast to the blue and yellow favored by the newsman.

Walter Cronkite has been a major figure in broadcasting for forty years, and Reagan has specifically chosen him to conduct his first interview since taking office six weeks ago. The anchorman has personally known each president since Herbert Hoover and has an opinion on each.
1
Cronkite finds Reagan to be “a lot of fun to be with, the kind of guy you really like to have as a friend.”

Despite that admiration, Cronkite has a job to do. In this instance, he must ask Reagan tough questions in an attempt to reassure the world that the president does not plan on waging a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. So far Reagan has done little to dispel that notion, taking the same hard-line stance against the Soviets that he took against Communists in Hollywood almost four decades ago.

The situation has grown worse in the past week. On February 24, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev gave a three-hour speech in front of a Communist Party gathering in Moscow. The seventy-four-year-old Brezhnev is a short, overweight man with enormous bushy eyebrows who has ruled his nation for almost seventeen years. During that time, he has pursued a ruthless path of aggression against the United States and the rest of the West, secretly building a nuclear arsenal and military that now dwarf those of America and NATO.
2
This is in violation of several treaties between the two nations designed to keep world peace. Since the Nixon administration, the United States has pursued a policy of détente, in which the Soviet Union has often played the part of the aggressor and America has usually acceded to its demands in an effort to keep the peace.

It is a policy that Ronald Reagan abhors, and he is determined that Brezhnev understand that. “It has been a long time since an American president stood up to the Soviet Union,” he says to his son Michael in 1976. “Every time we get into negotiations, the Soviets are telling us what we are going to have to give up in order for us to get along with them, and we forget who we are.”
3

At the time of Brezhnev's speech at the Kremlin, many within the KGB fear that the Soviet Union can no longer keep up with the United States economically or militarily.
4
A nation can be militarily successful for only so long. At some point, the economy must also be powerful, and this is where the Soviets are failing. The Cold War, that decades-old ideological conflict between capitalism and communism, could soon come to an end—and communism could lose.

For this reason, Brezhnev's speech included an invitation that Ronald Reagan sit down at the negotiating table. Pretending to seek peace, Brezhnev was again bluffing. He wanted to bully the untested American president.

But Ronald Reagan is in no mood to be bullied—not by Leonid Brezhnev, nor by Walter Cronkite.

From the very first question, Cronkite attempts to put Reagan on the defensive. He asks about the “crisis” in American foreign policy, drawing comparisons between the United States military advisers in El Salvador and the early days of America's involvement in Vietnam.

Reagan fires back in a cordial yet firm tone of voice. “No, Walter,” referring to the newsman by his first name, “the difference is so profound.”

The president continues for a full minute, rattling off the details of the growing Communist threat in Central America thanks to military groups controlled by the Russians and Cubans.

Cronkite replies with another pointed question about the “wisdom” of Reagan's foreign policy. Reagan responds instantly, his command of the facts absolute. Back and forth they go for twenty minutes, two master communicators making sure their message is heard. And while Cronkite is speaking to the American people, Ronald Reagan is talking directly to Leonid Brezhnev. Every word of this interview, right down to each comma, will be transcribed and scrutinized in Moscow. Reagan wants the Russians to know one thing above all else: he is not Jimmy Carter.

Soon enough, the subject turns to Brezhnev's demand for a summit meeting.

“You might have overdone the rhetoric a little bit by laying into the Soviet leadership, calling them liars and thieves,” Cronkite states, referring to a comment Reagan made at his first press conference. “The world, I think, is looking forward to some negotiations to stop the arms race, to get off this danger point.”

But Reagan does not budge.

“I do believe this,” Reagan begins, distancing himself from a détente that he considers phony. “It is rather foolish to have unilaterally disarmed, you might say, as we did by letting our defensive [
sic
], our margin of safety, deteriorate, and then you sit with the fellow who's got all the arms. What do you have to negotiate with?”

*   *   *

Leonid Brezhnev is not pleased.

The Soviet leader sits in his Kremlin office on this cold winter day, craving the cigarettes that doctors are forcing him to quit. The last time he met with an American president was a year and a half ago, at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Austria. There, after signing an arms-control treaty that limited the Soviet Union and United States to the same number of missiles and long-range bombers, a jubilant Brezhnev embraced Jimmy Carter, kissing him on both cheeks. To the millions worldwide watching this display on television, Brezhnev seemed to want to appear both charming and lighthearted.