Rawhide Down (7 page)

In the fall of 1973, under pressure from his parents, Hinckley enrolled at Texas Tech, a large university with a sprawling campus in the dusty, hardscrabble city of Lubbock. Soon afterward, his parents relocated to Colorado; his father had grown tired of Dallas and had always wanted to live near the Rocky Mountains. After completing his freshman year at Texas Tech, Hinckley skipped a semester and then returned in the spring of 1975. His new roommate was black, and though Hinckley considered him nice enough, the experience changed him. Later, in an autobiographical essay, he would write: “It was during my years at Texas Tech that I received my education in the school of harsh reality.… The differences between the black and white race are too great for there ever to be an integrated America.” Within three years, he’d become a white supremacist and, as he put it, an “all-out anti-Semite.”

In the fall semester of 1975, Hinckley chose to live alone. He rented a sparsely furnished off-campus apartment and spent most of his time watching television, writing songs, and fantasizing about becoming a successful musician. The following spring, he dropped out of school, sold his red Camaro, and flew to Los Angeles with the hope of selling some of his songs. He rented a small apartment a few blocks from Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and paid a few visits to music publishers. But in the end, his move to Los Angeles accomplished little: he had exchanged one drab apartment littered with fast-food wrappers for another. As before, he spent his days playing the guitar, watching TV, and going to movies.

One film in particular seized his imagination.
Taxi Driver,
released in February 1976, was the dark and disturbing story of Travis Bickle, an angry, alienated loner who, after being spurned by a pretty woman, purchases an arsenal of weapons and then plots the assassination of a U.S. presidential candidate. The movie ends in an orgy of violence as the taxi driver tries to rescue a young prostitute from her pimp. Directed by Martin Scorsese and featuring a brilliant performance by Robert De Niro, the movie was one of the most talked-about films of the year, in part because it explored two of the most troubling trends of that era, urban violence and political assassination. In fact, one reason the movie rang true was because the screenwriter, Paul Schrader, had drawn on the story of the near assassination of Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who was badly wounded in May 1972 while running for president. Wallace’s would-be assassin—a twenty-one-year-old busboy from Milwaukee named Arthur Bremer—had kept a journal about stalking both President Richard Nixon and Governor Wallace in the days leading up to the shooting; it was later published under the title
An Assassin’s Diary
.

Hinckley was all but hypnotized by
Taxi Driver
; he watched the movie at least fifteen times. Sitting in the famous Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, he felt as if he were watching his own life on-screen. He identified so completely with Travis Bickle that he began keeping a diary and buying guns. And, like the film’s taxi driver, he developed an unhealthy fascination with a woman. In the movie, Bickle is consumed by feelings for a campaign worker and then becomes fixated on rescuing the prostitute. In Hinckley’s case, he became obsessed with the young actress who played the prostitute. Her name was Jodie Foster.

CHAPTER 3

WITHOUT FAIL

His feet planted shoulder width apart, Jerry Parr dangled his hands loosely by his sides, ready to react the instant a paper target appeared at the other end of the firing range. The smell of cordite hung in the stuffy air. An ineffective ventilation fan rattled away. Suddenly the target snapped forward: it was an image of a well-dressed man aiming a large handgun right at him. His movements a blur, Parr’s right hand flicked his suit jacket away from his holster and drew his gun to eye level, while his left hand reached up and grabbed the butt of his weapon. Aiming with the revolver’s sights, he squeezed off two quick rounds and watched the bullets shred the target.

Parr holstered his handgun and waited for the technician to reset the target and run the drill again. The Secret Service could take no chances—assassins had to go down and not stand up again—so Parr’s revolver was a fearsome and reliable weapon. A Smith & Wesson Model 19, it had a 2½-inch barrel and fired hefty .38-caliber bullets that blasted from the muzzle at 1,100 feet per second. Getting shot by one was a bit like getting smashed with a sledgehammer, only much worse: the Secret Service used hollow points, which mushroom on impact, tearing a broad channel through flesh and bone.

Parr was practicing at the Secret Service’s firing range in the basement of the Old Post Office, just a few blocks from the White House. It was about nine a.m., and he was taking the monthly shooting exam that all agents on the presidential and vice presidential details had to pass in order to keep their jobs. In about fifteen minutes, Parr fired thirty rounds at targets as close as nine feet and as far away as forty-five feet. Using a two-handed grip, the agent fired first with his right hand and then with his left. Always, he pulled the trigger twice in rapid succession, a technique designed to reduce the gun’s recoil and help agents stay on target. And throughout the test, Parr stood rigid and tall. Police officers, FBI agents, and soldiers all crouch when shooting. Agents on the presidential detail stand tall because they are supposed to take bullets, not avoid them.

The monthly exam was part of the Secret Service’s efforts to keep its agents sharp. Originally formed in 1865 to investigate counterfeiting, the agency had started as a single small unit in the Treasury Department. By the time Jerry Parr joined, in 1962, the service had a $4.8 million budget and about 325 agents scattered across the country in fifty-five field offices. Its mission had evolved as well: though its agents still devoted considerable time to fighting counterfeiting and investigating forgeries of government checks, the service’s top priority had shifted to presidential protection. Training, however, was minimal. On Parr’s first day, he arrived at the twenty-member New York field office and was immediately taken to a firing range. He passed the test and was given a gun. Before he got his badge, though, the field office’s top agent handed Parr the keys to a government car and ordered the rookie to take him on a drive to see if he could handle New York traffic. Parr did just fine until he hit a deep pothole, knocking his boss into the ceiling and wrecking his nice felt hat.

Parr began his job as an agent the next day. He spent much of his time investigating a range of financial crimes, but he also helped protect President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson when they visited the city. Mostly, he learned how to do his job by watching experienced agents investigate counterfeiting rings and stand guard over the president. After six months, he was sent to the Treasury Department’s six-week law enforcement course, where all agents in the department’s various branches learned the basics of criminal law, self-defense, and arrest techniques. Back in New York, he continued his investigations and stood post outside restaurants, hotels, and airports whenever the president or the first lady came to the city. Once Jackie Kennedy apparently ran out of money: she asked him if she could borrow $800. Parr, who at the time made less than $6,000 a year, restrained himself from laughing and politely told the first lady that he didn’t have that kind of cash on him. By this time, the Parrs had two young daughters; in their small Queens apartment, husband and wife slept on a pull-out couch while their children shared the single bedroom.

In the fall of 1963, Parr was transferred to Nashville; a few days later, on November 22, President Kennedy was assassinated. Almost immediately, Parr was sent to Dallas to guard the wife and mother of Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was himself slain just two days after the president. Parr would never forget standing in a small kitchen just feet from the assassin’s mother, Marguerite Oswald, listening in amazement as she boasted about becoming “a mother of history.”

The next summer, Parr was sent to the Secret Service academy in Washington, where he received another few weeks of rudimentary training. He took courses in covering and evacuating the president, protecting the president in a parade and at a rope line, and investigating threats to the president—all essential training for a job he had already been doing for months. A year later, Parr was assigned to guard Vice President Hubert Humphrey. During Richard Nixon’s presidency, Parr was promoted to deputy in charge of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s contingent of agents; he rode with the disgraced vice president after Agnew resigned and when Agnew traveled to Baltimore’s federal courthouse to plead no contest to charges of federal tax evasion. In 1979, Parr was named head of Carter’s protective detail, a job he kept until Reagan was inaugurated. He now worked at the pinnacle of an active agent’s career in an organization that had rapidly expanded and gradually adapted to confront a burgeoning array of threats.

During Parr’s nearly two decades in the Secret Service, the agency had grown more than 400 percent: in March 1981, it fielded 1,544 agents and had an annual budget of $175 million. Its mandate had expanded significantly as well. In the wake of Senator Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, agents were assigned to protect presidential candidates. Three years later, they also became responsible for guarding foreign heads of state and visiting dignitaries. During the 1980 presidential campaign, agents protected seven candidates in addition to President Carter; they attended more than seven thousand rallies, fund-raisers, and other events. The service’s caseload of financial investigations had also grown: by 1981, field agents were looking into more than 100,000 counterfeiting and Treasury check fraud cases a year.

But one fundamental aspect of the agency’s culture had been much slower to change. Even in the mid-1970s, the service put agents to work immediately upon hiring them; only later were they provided a few weeks of training. Despite three fairly recent assassinations—John Kennedy’s, Robert Kennedy’s, and Martin Luther King’s—agents were still not receiving rigorous refresher courses, and too often their skills eroded. This relaxed attitude toward training was dangerous: few jobs in the world require as much preparation for the unknown as that of a Secret Service agent. Only constant drilling can enable agents to react instantly in the unlikely event of a real threat.

Better training might have prevented some of the terrible tragedies that haunted the agency. For instance, the driver of President Kennedy’s limousine didn’t recognize the sound of gunfire after Oswald’s first shot. When Kennedy was hit by the second bullet, the driver slowed down as he glanced over his shoulder to see what was happening behind him. A few seconds later, with the agent having taken no evasive action and the limousine still lumbering straight down the street, the third, fatal bullet struck Kennedy in the head. Nearly a decade later, George Wallace was shaking hands at a rope line during a campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland, when he was shot by a gunman standing in the crowd. The agents had allowed Wallace to walk up the rope line and then back down it, giving the would-be assassin time to steel his nerves and take careful aim. Wallace, hit four times, fell to the ground; meanwhile, one agent was struck in the neck and another dove at the gunman. A third agent, startled by the gunfire, hesitated momentarily before dropping to check on Wallace’s vital signs; it was the governor’s wife, not an agent, who covered her husband’s bleeding body. Although Wallace survived, the chaotic scramble to protect him and provide first aid was an embarrassment.

That shooting, as well as the growing threat of terrorism and the rising number of political killings around the world, forced the service to take action. The agency began by revamping its woefully inadequate first-aid training. Agents were required to take and pass “Ten Minute Medicine,” a course designed to provide them with the skills needed to keep a wounded person alive for ten minutes, usually about the time needed to reach a hospital. Among other things, agents were taught how to assess internal injuries, how to treat a sucking chest wound with plastic wrap, and how to perform an emergency tracheotomy with a razor blade and a pen.

The service also borrowed a number of techniques from the military, which drilled its members to react without thinking. This revolution in training was led not from the top but by the field office in Los Angeles, where agents had been growing increasingly alarmed at the rising number of attacks on dignitaries and political leaders around the world. Over coffee or beers, they lamented not having the skills to cope with such assaults in the United States. On their own initiative and with the consent of their supervisor, the agents enlisted the Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team and began staging mock attacks at rope lines, on motorcades, and at speeches. They trained at an abandoned hospital for alcoholics in nearby Saugus, where they set off explosions, fired live ammunition, and staged ambushes on fast-moving motorcades. The exercises were so realistic that several agents who had served in Vietnam suffered nightmares and combat flashbacks. After some resistance, the service’s headquarters eventually adopted a similar approach to training and began putting all agents through ever more complex drills and scenarios, each designed to teach instantaneous reactions in a crisis.

By 1981, the new training regime had become part of the service’s culture. Jerry Parr, like all the veteran agents, had lost count of the number of times he had practiced throwing himself in front of a candidate at a rope line, smothering a protectee behind a podium, or shoving a president into an armored limousine. And Parr’s training had taught him one thing above all: when faced with an actual threat, he could never freeze. Not for three seconds, not for one second. Without fail, he had to respond instantly.