Rawhide Down (10 page)

“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.

*   *   *

T
HE 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.

*   *   *

O
NE 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 foreign 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.

The president’s arrival was now about thirty minutes away.

CHAPTER 5

THE ROPE LINE

By 1:10 p.m., the presidential limousine was waiting near the White House’s diplomatic entrance. The 21½-foot car, code-named Stagecoach, was a black 1972 Lincoln Continental weighing 6½ tons. Covered in heavy armor plating and with windows of thick bulletproof glass, it had a powerful V-8 engine, a rear bumper that folded into a platform capable of carrying Secret Service agents, and a self-sealing fuel tank designed to reduce the risk of an explosion. Hidden hooks allowed for secure tie-down in cargo planes, and an extra large sunroof enabled the president to stand and wave to crowds. Oddly, its rear doors opened backward.

The armored car was a necessary protection. Four presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John Kennedy—had been slain while in office. President-elect Franklin Roosevelt and President Harry Truman had survived assassination attempts that killed others. In 1975, a quick-acting Secret Service agent stopped a woman from shooting President Gerald Ford; seventeen days later, another woman fired a shot at Ford but missed. Presidents were at their most vulnerable, of course, when away from the White House and out in the open.

Reagan was not one to dwell on the dangers of holding public office, but he knew the risks. When Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles in 1968, Reagan was governor of California and running as a favorite-son candidate in his state’s presidential primary. He was quickly assigned Secret Service protection. Within weeks, an agent in Reagan’s detail surprised two men as they attempted to firebomb the governor’s Sacramento home.