Rawhide Down (13 page)

R
EAGAN EMERGED FROM
the elevator after the quick ride from the holding room on the ground floor. Seconds behind him, David Fischer, the president’s body man, and Rick Ahearn, his advance man, ran up the wide spiral staircase. They wondered aloud why Reagan didn’t just take the stairs. “It’s such a short ride,” Fischer said.

With each stride toward the VIP doors, Reagan accumulated a larger entourage. Just ahead of the president, Mike Deaver and Jim Brady walked out the exit. When Deaver spotted the clutch of reporters standing behind the rope line, several of whom were already shouting questions at the president, he steered the burly press secretary toward them. “Go deal with it,” he said.

Stepping through the Hilton’s doors, Reagan saw the same reporters who had caught the attention of his deputy chief of staff. He would not be taking any questions, though—not today. Lately he and his advisors had been trying to be more disciplined; answering random questions from journalists rarely served their purposes. But the president did plan to make one dramatic gesture. With his back to the reporters, he would step onto the edge of the limousine’s door frame and boost himself up to wave to the spectators across the street.

*   *   *

J
ERRY
P
ARR SLID
a step behind the president as they moved away from the VIP entrance and strode across the slick hotel driveway. Glancing up, Parr saw dark scudding clouds; then he scanned the crowd of reporters and spectators behind the rope line as well as those across the street. His eyes swept the limousine and the driveway. All the agents and police officers were positioned properly. Behind Parr, Ray Shaddick carried a bulletproof steel slab coated in leather, which was used to shield the president whenever he approached a crowd.

Everything was in order.

Walking eighteen inches behind the Man, Parr guided Reagan toward the limousine. As always in such situations, the agent was busily plotting his response in case of an emergency. If an attack had occurred just after they’d walked through the VIP doors, Parr would have pulled the president back into the safety of the hotel. Now, halfway to the limousine, his plan changed: if something happened, they would dive into the armored Lincoln.

As they approached the limousine, Tim McCarthy, Parr’s point man, opened the Lincoln’s right rear door. Looking toward the dozens of spectators lining T Street, Reagan smiled, raised his right arm, and waved. A woman to his left shouted, “Mr. President, President Reagan.” The president swiveled his head toward the rope line, raised his left arm as if to acknowledge her, and seemed to mouth the word “Hi.”

Eyeing the crowd, Parr began gliding to a point just off Reagan’s left shoulder, where he would serve as a barrier between the president and anyone who might try to attack him from that side. As he continued to guide Reagan toward the door, Parr heard what sounded like gunfire.

Pop. Pop.

Instantly, Parr’s left hand grabbed Reagan’s left shoulder. His right hand reached for the president’s head, and his torso twisted into a human shield. He drove Reagan toward the open door of the Lincoln, his legs pumping like a running back pounding through a defensive line.

He heard another
pop,
then another.

All in a seamless motion—part programmed, part improvised—Parr grabbed and twisted, shoving Reagan forward. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tim McCarthy turn and spread his arms wide to protect the president.

Parr heard another
pop
and felt Ray Shaddick’s strong hands ramming him and the president through the limousine’s doorway.

One final
pop.

They tumbled into a heap on the axle hump. Parr’s mind raced, instantly ruling out firecrackers, balloons, pranks.

He knew it was gunfire. Someone was trying to assassinate the president.

*   *   *

J
OHN
H
INCKLEY COULDN
’
T
believe his luck. After the president’s arrival at the Hilton, Hinckley had walked into the hotel’s lobby and loitered there for a while, the gun still in his jacket pocket. Then he’d returned to the rope line and waited with the others in the crowd, at one point shouting at some journalists who were pushing to get into better position. A few minutes later, Hinckley saw Reagan emerge from the VIP entrance. Unbelievably, the president was completely out in the open—and Reagan would pass right in front of him.

Hinckley felt exceedingly calm. Standing between the hotel’s wall and a cameraman, he reached into his jacket’s right pocket. But even now he wondered whether he should pull out the gun and start firing. Two police officers turned away toward Reagan; a Secret Service agent looked down at the ground. Nobody was paying any attention to him; the cameramen and reporters were focused on the president, as was everyone else in the crowd.

There was no time to think. He knew only that he would never get another chance as good as this one. He pulled the gun from his pocket. As he did, he saw himself dying in a fusillade of Secret Service bullets. And then he crouched, gripped the revolver’s handle with both hands, and aimed.

Goodbye,
he thought.
Goodbye to myself.

He pulled the trigger. Blue flame spat from the gun.

*   *   *

T
HE FIRST PERSON
hit was Reagan’s press secretary, Jim Brady, who’d been standing a few feet from the rope and just in front of the president. Hinckley’s bullet smashed into Brady’s head, and the press secretary toppled. He fell so close to Hinckley that he nearly landed on him.

Officer Thomas Delahanty had turned away from the crowd to check Reagan’s progress toward the limousine when he heard the sharp sound of gunfire. Instinctively, he pivoted to shield the president, but then he fell hard to the ground, wounded in the back by Hinckley’s second shot. “I am hit!” he screamed.

The sight line between Hinckley and the president was now clear. Hinckley’s third shot sailed over Reagan’s head.

Positioned at the limousine’s rear door, Agent Tim McCarthy whirled to face the gunfire. He assumed a blocking stance and spread his arms, becoming an extension of the armored door. As the president and Jerry Parr vanished behind the agent’s body, Hinckley’s fourth shot hit McCarthy in the chest, spinning him to the ground.

The fifth bullet slapped the bulletproof window of the backward-opening limousine door as Reagan and Parr flashed behind it.

The sixth shot cracked across the driveway.

It was 2:27 p.m. Just 1.7 seconds had elapsed since Hinckley’s first shot, and now three men lay wounded.

*   *   *

S
ITTING AT THE
Lincoln’s wheel, Drew Unrue couldn’t believe what was happening. He heard gunfire through the open door and watched his friend Tim McCarthy fall; then Jerry Parr and the president landed in a heap on the floor between the limousine’s front and rear seats. He saw agents and police officers draw their guns as spectators scattered. Unrue wanted to slam his foot on the accelerator and speed away from the hotel, but the limousine’s backward-opening rear door hadn’t been closed and might shear off if it hit an obstacle. An age seemed to pass before Ray Shaddick finally shut the door. Unrue’s foot was already moving for the gas pedal when Parr screamed, “Let’s get out of here! Haul ass!”

Unrue aimed the heavy limousine for T Street and with his right hand flipped the switch that activated the car’s lights and siren. As he peeled away, he replayed the sight of Tim McCarthy falling to the sidewalk near his rear right wheel.
God, don’t let me run over Timmy,
prayed Unrue
. I hope I don’t run over Timmy.

*   *   *

A
GENT
D
ENNIS
M
C
C
ARTHY—
no relation to Tim McCarthy—had been scouring the crowd of reporters and spectators behind the rope line, looking for trouble, as the president walked through the VIP doors. Then he heard what he thought were firecrackers—until he saw bodies falling and spectators ducking and people running for their lives.

But where was the gun? Suddenly he saw it: a black pistol in the hands of a man who was crouching between a photographer and the wall and inching toward the president as he fired. Desperate, the agent hurled himself at the pistol.
I have got to get to it,
his mind screamed.
I have got to get to it and stop it.

As he slammed into the attacker and they fell to the ground, the gunman kept pulling the trigger. Despite the screaming and tussling and commotion, McCarthy could clearly hear the hammer
click, click, click
ing against the revolver’s now-spent cylinder.

Sergeant Herbert Granger was facing the president when he heard the first cracks of gunfire. Whipping around, he spotted a blond man in a combat crouch. The gunman was holding a small revolver with both hands and firing at the president, tracking his target from right to left. Granger lunged toward the shooter, but his body felt strangely sluggish, as if he were moving through syrup. He heard screams and his own grunting, but they echoed in his ears like an audiotape being played on its slowest setting. He was puzzled by the gunman’s blank and emotionless expression; then he watched as an elderly man in a yellow sweater raised his arms and slammed them down on the neck of the assailant. “Kill the son of a bitch!” the old man yelled. “I’ll kill you!” Meanwhile, another man was throwing wild punches at the shooter.

Granger’s vision narrowed. It seemed to take forever to reach the gunman, but he arrived at almost the same moment as Dennis McCarthy. Then a flurry of agents and officers crashed into them, propelling McCarthy, Granger, and the gunman into the stone wall with such force that the sergeant’s Timex watch shattered.

At the bottom of the pile, Dennis McCarthy handcuffed the attacker, who offered no resistance. McCarthy scrambled up from the sidewalk, his mind repeating a single thought:
We have to keep him alive, we have to keep him alive.
Now his job was to protect the assailant instead of the president—there mustn’t be another Lee Harvey Oswald.

A roiling mass of people—agents, police officers, journalists, and spectators—converged on McCarthy, Granger, and the gunman, many of them screaming or shouting.

“Get out of the way!”

“Back up, back up!”

“Get me a squad car!”

“You motherfucker!”

“Call an ambulance!”

A police car appeared, and a scrum of agents and police surrounded the would-be assassin and surged toward the car’s rear door. McCarthy punched a man who stepped in their way. Another agent scrambled inside the squad car but couldn’t get the right rear door to open. Outside the car, officers couldn’t budge the door either—it was jammed.

“Let’s move him to another car,” McCarthy yelled. They hustled their suspect toward another police car that had just stopped on T Street, and after McCarthy opened the right rear door he jumped inside, dragging the gunman behind him by his handcuffed wrists.

A second later, they were joined by Dennis McCarthy’s partner, Agent Danny Spriggs. He too was thinking about Oswald. They had to get the gunman away from the scene, but they needed to find someplace safe. Where to go? Spriggs ruled out the service’s Washington field office—located on busy L Street, it would be too crowded with civilians, and escorting the shooter through the office’s public lobby would be a nightmare. No, they should go to D.C. police headquarters. It was built like a fortress, and it had an underground garage and a secure cell area. “Head to police headquarters,” Spriggs told the officer driving the cruiser.

McCarthy thrust his prisoner’s hands onto the grate that separated the front and back seats. He wanted to keep those hands where he could see them.

“I think my wrist is broken,” the man said. “Can you loosen the handcuffs?”

McCarthy exploded. “You are fuckin’ lucky that’s the only god-damned thing that is broken!”

*   *   *

A
T THE FIRST
sound of gunfire, Agent Jim Varey watched Reagan being thrown into the limousine and then turned to find the gunman. But when he saw that the assailant was already under a pile of agents and officers, his attention shifted to the three men lying on the ground. One was his friend Tim McCarthy; another was a police officer. The third was Jim Brady, the president’s press secretary, who lay at the agent’s feet. Brady was moaning and blood was already pooling on the concrete by his head.

Varey dropped to his knees and put his face right up to Brady’s where it lay on the sidewalk. “Can you hear me?” he asked.

Brady twitched, and Varey thought he heard him say yes.

“Don’t move,” Varey said. “Help is coming.”

Rick Ahearn, the presidential advance man, had been standing near Reagan when the shooting started. Now he rushed to Brady’s side and helped apply pressure to the press secretary’s wounds. Stunned, Ahearn felt blood and bits of brain oozing into his hands. He felt as if he were holding his friend’s head together.