Rawhide Down

by Del Quentin Wilber

  The words were flowing from his heart, but this was more than a love letter. It was also Hinckley’s attempt to retrace and justify his obsession with Jodie Foster and to describe the steps he was willing to take to gain her attention. “As you well know by now, I love you very much,” he wrote. And she did know, because this was not the first time he had reached out to Foster, an eighteen-year-old movie actress who had left Hollywood the previous fall to attend Yale University.

  Hinckley had been fixated on the actress since 1976, when he’d first seen Taxi Driver. His obsession had grown with each passing year: Foster seemed so intelligent and so precocious, so unlike any other movie star Hinckley had ever seen or read about. He desperately wanted to meet her, talk to her, run away with her. But any thought of actually getting in touch with her remained a fantasy until May 1980, when he read a People magazine profile that described her decision to leave Hollywood so that she could go to college and earn a degree. By that September, Hinckley had sold off more than $3,500 worth of stock in his father’s oil company to finance an excursion to New Haven.

  He told his parents he was taking a writing workshop at Yale. That was a lie; instead, he spent most of his time pursuing Foster. He located her dorm room and left her a dozen of his best poems and letters. Then he got her phone number and somehow summoned the courage to call, even tape-recording the conversations for posterity. He had expected their talks to be magical, but instead they were demoralizing. In a series of halting conversations, Foster—clearly uncomfortable and worried—tried to fend off a pitiable man-boy who was no more confident than a high school freshman struggling to ask a popular girl to the fall dance.

  In their first call, Hinckley identified himself as “the person that’s been leaving notes in your box for two days.”

  “Am I supposed to know you?” she asked.

  “Well, no,” he said.

  “No. Oh, well, I don’t … We have, we must not have much in common.”

  “Jodie, listen.”

  “Yes.”

  “I just want to talk to you. Okay?”

  “I got to go out to dinner,” she said. “Look, it’s nice meeting you but I, I’m not supposed to talk to people I don’t know, okay?”

  During their next and longest phone conversation, Foster couldn’t even get Hinckley’s name right. “Is this John Hendrix?” she asked.

  He corrected her and then said, “Jodie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw you.”

  She soon tried to bring the awkward call to an end. “Look, I can’t really be bothered with this, and I don’t want, I don’t want to be mean, and do you know, it just, it upsets my roommates and it upsets me.… You understand why I can’t, you know, carry on these conversations with people I don’t know. You understand that it is dangerous, and it’s just not done, and it’s not fair, and it’s rude.”

  “Oh.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, I’m not dangerous. I promise you that.”

  A bit later, Hinckley heard snickering in the background. “What are they laughing at?” he asked.

  “They’re laughing at you.”

  “Jodie.”

  “Seriously, this isn’t fair. Do me a favor and don’t call back. All right?”

  Hinckley was devastated by his inability to develop a relationship with Foster. By late October, he had returned home. He had long complained about a variety of maladies, including dizziness, headaches, pain in his arms, weakness in his legs, and heart palpitations. A few months earlier, a doctor had diagnosed him with “depressive reaction” and prescribed an antidepressant and Valium. In August, he had seen a psychologist who worked for his father’s firm. After two sessions, the psychologist concluded that Hinckley was someone “who needed to get his shit together,” not a deeply troubled man.

  Writing was one of Hinckley’s passions, and if he had allowed anyone to read his poems and short stories he would have provided clues to his distress. In recent years, his writing had grown increasingly dark, exploring such themes as suicide and patricide. In one story, a chess player kills himself; in another, a man rejects God on his deathbed, an act Hinckley portrayed as an act of courage. His most vivid descriptions were of pain: of a mind being destroyed by “dozens of ravenous lice,” of “a hypodermic penis caught inside a working meat grinder,” of a “few more hungry animals” chewing on a man’s bones.

  After he had returned home, Hinckley made a halfhearted attempt to kill himself by overdosing on the antidepressants. Within days, feeling himself near a breaking point, he had his first appointment with a psychiatrist. “A relationship I had dreamed about went absolutely nowhere,” he wrote in a short autobiographical essay for the psychiatrist. “My disillusionment with EVERYTHING was complete. I gave up on myself and came back to Colorado.” In the essay, he said that he cared about only two things: writing and Jodie Foster. Despite the warning signs, the psychiatrist probed no further. During their next ten sessions, which ended in February, the subject of Foster was never discussed again.

  In late November, Hinckley struck back at the actress, hoping to complicate her life, or at least shake it up a bit. He sent an anonymous and threatening letter to FBI headquarters in Washington. In block letters, he wrote: “THERE IS A PLOT UNDERWAY TO ABDUCT ACTRESS JODIE FOSTER FROM YALE UNIVERSITY DORM IN DECEMBER OR JANUARY. NO RANSOM. SHE’S BEING TAKEN FOR ROMANTIC REASONS. THIS IS NO JOKE! I DON’T WISH TO GET FURTHER INVOLVED. ACT AS YOU WISH.”

  Over the next three months, he returned to New Haven several times and left Foster more messages and letters. In early March, before yet another trip east, he left his parents a note. “Your prodigal son has taken off again to exorcise some demons. I’ll let you know where I am in a few days. This is something I have to do even though I know you don’t understand.”

  His approaches to Foster grew more and more brazen, especially during his final trip to New Haven. “Just wait,” he wrote in one letter he left at her door, “I’ll rescue you very soon. J.W.H.” In another, he scribbled: “Jodie, Goodbye! I love you six trillion times. Don’t you maybe like me just a little bit? (You must admit I am different.) It would make all of this worthwhile.” Foster turned the letters over to her dean.

  Now, nearly a month after that most recent trip to New Haven, Hinckley had managed to get as far as Washington, D.C., but couldn’t bring himself to make one final visit to Foster. Instead, he would find a way to impress the object of his obsession and leave a mark on the world. As he sat at the modest desk in his room at the Park Central Hotel, he had worked it out and made up his mind: he would kill the president of the United States.

  “I feel very good about the fact that you at least know my name and know how I feel about you,” Hinckley wrote, continuing his letter to Foster. “And by hanging around your dormitory, I’ve come to realize that I’m the topic of more than a little conversation, however full of ridicule it may be. At least you know that I’ll always love you.

  “Jodie, I would abandon the idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you, whether it be in total obscurity or whatever. I will admit to you that the reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you.”

  Finishing, Hinckley wrote: “This letter is being written only an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel. Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance, with this historical deed, to gain your respect and love. I love you forever, John Hinckley.”

  With that, he neatly folded the letter into thirds, stuffed it into a white envelope, and labeled the envelope “Jodie Foster” before slipping it into his plaid suitcase. From the same suitcase, he removed a box containing the six Devastator bullets. Then he reached for his gun.

  * * *

  THE SPEECH WAS printed in all capital letters on 5¼-inch by 8-inch heavy white bond paper, just the way the president liked it. Sitting at his desk in the
Oval Office, Reagan carefully reviewed the text for mistakes and typos. Sometimes he was handed the script of a talk just an hour before he was to appear on stage; this speech, though, was important, and two days ago he had spent part of his Saturday editing and rewriting the draft he’d been given by his staff.

  It was now a little after eleven. In three hours, the president was scheduled to address the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, in the International Ballroom of the Washington Hilton hotel. Reagan, a pro-business Republican, was a natural adversary of unions. But White House officials, especially Ray Donovan, Reagan’s labor secretary, had urged the president to accept the invitation to speak at the trades department’s national convention. On election day, Reagan had done surprisingly well among blue-collar workers; his political advisors had begun speaking of a new voting bloc, already being dubbed Reagan Democrats, that was generally conservative on social issues and very receptive to the president’s message of lower taxes, less government, and a stronger military. The White House wanted to broaden Reagan’s appeal to such voters before the 1984 reelection campaign. Making inroads with this AFL-CIO branch—a group composed of fifteen affiliated unions with 4.5 million members—could help pave the way to more such support.

  But the speech mattered to Reagan for a more personal reason: he had once been president of the Screen Actors Guild, a union also affiliated with the AFL-CIO. He fondly recalled that time and often reminisced about the guild’s principles and the lessons he’d learned while squaring off against powerful studio executives. In some ways, his speech to the trades department that Monday would be a homecoming: he was the first president to be a card-carrying member of an affiliated AFL-CIO union.

  The text of Reagan’s talk had been drafted by Mari Maseng, a young speechwriter who had worked for Senator Bob Dole during the 1980 primary season and then joined the Reagan campaign in the fall. Maseng had produced a solid draft: she’d made all the right points about domestic and foreign policy, and she had found a good anecdote about a factory worker who had lost his job but nevertheless felt that Reagan’s spending cuts should be given a chance to work, even if they might reduce his benefits and hurt his family. Maseng’s boss had delivered the draft to the president on Friday; the following afternoon, Reagan read the text in his study in the White House residence and then took out a pen and rewrote the entire first section. He had spent years writing and honing his speeches, and though his new job kept him too busy to edit most of the talks he gave, he still spent time revising important addresses or those that meant something to him.

  “I am pleased to take part in this Nat. Conference,” Reagan wrote in his smooth and readable cursive. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I point with some pride to the fact that I am the 1st Pres. of the U.S. to hold a lifetime membership in an AFL-CIO Union. Members of your organization have played & do play a great part in the building of America. They also are an important part of the industry in which my union plays a part.”

  Reagan then deployed a trademark bit of humor. “Now, it’s true that grease paint and make believe are not tools of your members’ trade but we all know the meaning of work, family and country. For 2 decades I participated in renegotiating our basic contract when it came renewal time. Here too we have much in common. Sitting at the negotiating table we were guided by 3 principles in our demands: is it good for our people, is it fair to the other fellow and to the customer and is it good for the industry?”

  Drawing from a trove of hundreds of favorite quotations that he had jotted down on index cards, the president inserted one from Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor, which would later become the AFL-CIO. Gompers, discussing the importance of self-reliance, had asserted that the “welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative.” Adding a gloss of his own, Reagan wrote, “Sam Gompers was repudiating the socialist philosophy when he made that statement.”

  The president tweaked other parts of the speech as well, scratching out most of a paragraph that began, “The American people have had enough of tinkering here and there with our massive problems.” He also added a few lines asking his listeners to have faith in his plans and in themselves. “I’ve heard the complaints coming from those who had a hand in creating our present situation. They demand proof in advance that what we have proposed will work. Well, the answer to that is we’re living with the proof that what they want to continue doing won’t work. I believe what we have proposed will work because it always has.”

  Now, as he reviewed the final draft of the speech in the Oval Office, Reagan had a question about a potential mistake in the Gompers quotation as it appeared in the revised text. He called in his writers to discuss it; then, at about 11:30, he retired to the residence for lunch and some private “speech preparation time.” He would have about two hours to himself before the motorcade trip to the Hilton.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE city’s prime venues for presidential speeches, events, and fund-raisers, the Washington Hilton had been built in the early 1960s. Its design was intended to inspire: from above, the hotel looked like a seagull in flight. Two of its curving facades faced south, so that many rooms had a view of the Washington Monument and the city’s stately skyline. To entice high-profile visitors, Hilton officials had directed the architects to include an enormous ballroom that could accommodate thousands of guests. They also designed a VIP entrance on the side of the hotel and, one floor below it, a holding room known as the bunker. From here, the hotel’s most important guests could walk down a short hallway lined with presidential portraits and then enter the ballroom.

  At eleven that Monday morning, Secret Service agents at the hotel were running through their final security checks. Bill Green, a slight and methodical South Carolinian who had joined the service in 1974, conducted a walk-through of all the arrangements for the event. Green was the lead advance agent for the president’s trip to the Hilton; to prepare for Reagan’s visit, he had drawn up a detailed security plan, determined precisely where his agents should be posted, and ensured that everyone slated to meet Reagan undergo a background check. Green and another agent inspected the ballroom, including the basementlike area under its floor, and then checked the holding room and the VIP entrance.

  Green had been working on the visit since Wednesday, March 25. It was the first time he had handled security preparations for a presidential event at the Hilton, but his job had been made easier because Reagan was due to visit the hotel the following evening for the Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner. Green read a standard security survey of the hotel written by a Secret Service agent and then observed another agent prepare for the broadcasters’ function.

  On Friday, he went to the Hilton and reviewed security procedures with Rick Ahearn, the lead White House advance man, as well as with hotel security officers and union representatives. Ahearn, a voluble and burly Reagan supporter who had slogged through the 1980 campaign, was in charge of ensuring that the visit went off as smoothly as possible from a performance and political standpoint. During the review, Ahearn made it clear that he was not happy with the union’s plan to station the press at the far end of the room, since that would make it more difficult for photographers to take high-quality pictures of Reagan during his speech. But union officials did not want the media to obscure their members’ view of the president, and since Ahearn didn’t want to spark an unnecessary fight with the hosts he agreed.

  Green, Ahearn, and the others then toured the hotel as Reagan would experience it, from the VIP entrance to the ballroom and back. Standing outside the hotel, Green and Ahearn discussed the arrival of the presidential motorcade. To prevent the general public from getting too close to the president, they agreed to place a rope line across the sidewalk that ran from the VIP entrance to the public entrance on T Street. This was the rope line’s usual location, and it would keep people about thirty-five to forty feet away from the VIP entrance. On at least one previous visit by a forei
gn dignitary, the line had been placed about sixty feet from the VIP entrance. But no one felt that a similar measure was necessary for this event; besides, such a distant rope line would have required the closing of the T Street entrance, a considerable inconvenience to hotel guests. Green finished his work at the hotel that day by getting a list of the fifteen people expected to shake hands with the president before the speech, as well as an updated list of hotel employees whom he and his agents would need to check for criminal records and other potential risks.

  On Saturday, Green visited the hotel for another tour. On Sunday, he made some final calls and worked on a report covering all the necessary security arrangements. At 7:30 on Monday morning, he arrived at the White House, turned in his plan, and called the District of Columbia field office for intelligence updates. He was informed that there were no threats related to Reagan’s appearance at the hotel, and he was also told that the field office would be furnishing four agents as part of “protective intelligence” teams that would roam the hotel’s grounds to check suspicious people. This news pleased him: earlier, he had been told that he would probably be getting only two such agents. (Later, he would be disappointed again when the field office reversed course and furnished only two agents after all.)

  A little before eleven, Green drove to the Hilton in a Secret Service station wagon, which he parked near the hotel next to several other cars that were part of the president’s “emergency motorcade.” If there was a demonstration or a serious incident, the emergency motorcade could provide a speedy and inconspicuous means of escape.

  Green then conducted his walk-through of the building to ensure that everything was ready to go. At noon, he briefed the more than two dozen Secret Service agents who would cover a variety of posts: outside the Hilton’s entrance, on nearby rooftops, in the hotel’s hallways, and in the area under the ballroom’s floor. By the time a team of agents and officers with bomb-sniffing dogs began scouring the ballroom and other sensitive areas, Green was escorting a group of agents through the Hilton. One by one, he dropped them off at their posts, giving his most experienced agents the most critical assignments. He walked outside to verify that agents and police officers were in their proper places, then ducked back into the hotel for yet another check of security procedures. Finally, he authorized the opening of the ballroom doors to the waiting crowd of union members.