Rawhide Down (37 page)

“we have to find a way to knock”
: Interview with Allen; Reagan echoed these words later during one of his most famous speeches at the foot of the Berlin Wall in 1987 when he urged the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” I encourage anyone interested in this speech to read Romesh Ratnesar’s
Tear Down This Wall
.

In another revealing episode from the European trip, Reagan had some fun with the German language. Shortly after arriving in West Germany, Reagan was sitting in the back of their sedan as they roared down the autobahn. He kept jerking his head to read road signs.

“Everything okay, Governor?” Allen asked from the front passenger seat.

Reagan replied that he wanted to know when they got to a place he pronounced as “Owls Fart.”

“No, Governor, that isn’t a place,” Allen said, realizing that Reagan was reading German road signs with a German word in all capital letters on them. “It’s Ausfahrt,” Allen said. “It means exit.”

“No, there is no place like that,” Reagan said. “You just can’t have a word like that.”

Allen, fluent in German, rattled off a stream of words derived from
fahrt
:
wassenfahrt
(trip on water),
himmelfahrt
(Ascension of Christ),
einfahrt
(entrance),
rundfahrt
(tour).

“Can you write them down for me?”

Allen jotted a few dozen German words on a sheet of paper and gave it to Reagan. That afternoon, at a meeting with high-ranking German officials, the future president pulled out the list and chuckled.

at the president’s first news briefing
: Transcript of the president’s news conference, January 29, 1981, RRPL; interview with Allen.

While taking a shower
: Government psychiatric report; testimony from psychiatrists at Hinckley’s trial.

Instead, he found himself thinking
: The government psychiatric report delves into this moment, as did several psychiatrists at Hinckley’s trial. Dr. Sally A. Johnson, a psychiatrist at a federal prison where Hinckley was held in 1981, testified that the idea to assassinate Reagan “resurfaced” after Hinckley saw the schedule in the paper. “He denies really thinking about doing this prior to seeing the schedule, I mean as I have described he thought about doing it in the past, but he denied having any specific plan when he first got up that morning,” Johnson testified. “He said it was not until he read the schedule in the paper that the idea resurfaced. He said that at that point in time he showered and while in the shower thought about the idea and then when he came out of the shower he said that, using his words, his mind ‘was starting to turn,’ and he took some Valium to calm himself down.”

In the government psychiatric report, the assailant was quoted as saying: “I guess it was in the shower or getting toweled off that I debated whether to ‘detour to the Hilton’ or to ‘go up to New Haven.’ I was thinking should I go over to the Hilton and take my little pistol, and see how close I could—well, see what the scene was like.… Maybe I can get close enough that I could end this madness.”

Born in 1955
: Government psychiatric report; trial testimony; FBI reports.

Hinckleys moved to Dallas in 1958
: Hinckley and Hinckley,
Breaking Points
, p. 44.

But in junior high school
: Government psychiatric report and testimony from various psychiatrists at trial.

Later, his mother
: Government psychiatric report.

“College isn’t all that important for a musician”
: Hinckley and Hinckley,
Breaking Points
, p. 51.

enrolled at Texas Tech
: Hinckley’s college transcripts were introduced at trial; government psychiatric report; trial testimony; Hinckley and Hinckley,
Breaking Points
,
p. 53.

After completing his freshman year
: Hinckley’s college transcripts.

His new roommate was black
: Undated autobiographical essay by Hinckley seized by the FBI.

In the fall semester
: The government psychiatric report and various newspaper stories described Hinckley’s college life. Carpenter testified that Hinckley “lived off campus in an apartment that he rented and at that point was not attending classes with any regularity and not having any relationship, acquaintanceship with other college students, so that he was spending this time, virtually, entirely alone with the exception of those occasions when he would go to classes, and he had no social network that he built up.” Johnson also testified that Hinckley lived alone in apartments.

The following spring
: Government psychiatric report; trial testimony; Hinckley and Hinckley,
Breaking Points
, pp. 66–83.

One film in particular
: There was extensive trial testimony about Hinckley’s interest in
Taxi Driver
.

Travis Bickle, an angry
:
Taxi Driver
, and its screenplay by Paul Schrader. The movie’s most memorable scene comes as De Niro stands in front of a mirror—armed with a gun that slides out from his left sleeve—and imagines a conversation with another man: “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talking—You talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

Directed by Martin Scorsese
: Newspaper critics lauded the movie, especially the performance by De Niro and the directing of Scorsese. One reviewer described the movie as “a vivid, galvanizing portrait of a character so particular that you may be astonished that he makes consistent dramatic sense” (Vincent Canby, “Flamboyant Taxi Driver by Scorsese,”
NYT
, February 9, 1976, p. 35).

one reason the movie rang true
: Gregg Kilday, “‘Taxi Driver’—Up from the Dark Side of Schrader’s L.A.,”
LAT
, May 14, 1976, p. V32; Alethia Knight and Neil Henry, “Love Letter Offers Clue to Motive in Shooting,”
WP
, April 1, 1981, p. A1.

Hinckley was all but hypnotized
: Government psychiatric report. Hinckley told government psychiatrists that he “identified totally” with Bickle. The government report also said that Hinckley felt “he was hypnotized by the music and he identified with Travis because Travis was living alone the way he had been living and Travis was also trying to accomplish something. He said that Travis was totally alienated and hated New York City and all of society.”

3: Without Fail

His feet planted shoulder width
: Interview with Parr; the former agent described going to the range that morning for target practice and provided a detailed description of the range and the shooting test; interview with Paul Kelly, who was an instructor at the Secret Service’s training center at the time.

Originally formed
:
Excerpts from the History of the United States Secret Service 1865–1975
, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978.

By the time
: Testimony of Secret Service officials on March 7, 1962, before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Treasury and Post Office Departments and Executive Office Appropriations. At the hearing, Secret Service chief James J. Rowley requested more agents because the agency was stretched thin. “We have 325 agents devoted to investigative and protective activities, but this is simply not enough to meet our responsibilities,” Rowley said, six months before Parr joined the service. “With the advent of President Eisenhower the mode of presidential transportation was stepped up from Constellation to jets and to helicopters. President Kennedy has continued in this pattern and we find today that we require more agents. When I was on the detail years ago, I could hedgehop, as it were, in a DC-3 and keep ahead of the president across the country. Today, with the use of the jet, we cannot hedgehop. We have to put two or three men at another stop, so that in all you may have 20 men out there in advance, whereas I only took five men in those days.” After Kennedy’s death, the agency swelled—to 575 agents in 1968, another watershed year in the service’s history. By 1973, there were 1,238 agents, according to congressional testimony.

During Parr’s nearly two decades
: Treasury report; Secret Service testimony before the Appropriations Subcommittee of Treasury, Postal Service and General Government, April 2, 1981; “The U.S. Secret Service: An Examination and Analysis of Its Evolving Mission,” Congressional Research Service, January 23, 2009.

But one fundamental aspect
: Interviews with more than a dozen Secret Service agents.

recent assassinations
: Of these three men, only President Kennedy had Secret Service protection.

Better training might have
: Many Secret Service agents expressed this sentiment in interviews. Vincent Bugliosi meticulously documented Kennedy’s slaying in his tome
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(Kindle location 2068–2094 is an especially helpful reconstruction of what transpired in Dallas)
;
William Manchester, who also chronicled the assassination, criticized the service’s lackluster training. When Kennedy was shot, the driver of his limousine, Bill Greer, and another agent in the car, Roy Kellerman, froze, according to Manchester. “Even more tragic was the perplexity of Roy Kellerman, the ranking agent in Dallas, and Bill Greer, who was under Kellerman’s supervision. Kellerman and Greer were in a position to take swift evasive action, and for five terrible seconds they were immobilized,” Manchester wrote in
The Death of a President
, pp. 155–56. Manchester blames the Secret Service hierarchy for the agents’ failures. “It was the responsibility of James J. Rowley, Chief of the Secret Service, and Jerry Behn, Head of the White House Detail, to see that their agents were trained to cope with precisely this sort of emergency. They were supposed to be picked men, honed to a matchless edge,” he wrote.

Nearly a decade later
: The description of the Wallace shooting comes from transcripts of the trial of Arthur Bremer and a lengthy interview with former Secret Service agent Larry Dominguez, who was guarding Wallace when the politician was nearly assassinated on May 15, 1972. Because he was never properly trained on what to do when someone opened fire in a crowd with a pistol, Dominguez thought he was hearing a “string of firecrackers” when Bremer started shooting, and he hesitated before taking any action. In later years, Dominguez went through stepped-up training. Assigned to protect Reagan at the Hilton on March 30, 1981, the agent reacted instantly when he heard Hinckley’s first shot and raced to subdue the gunman. Dominguez made Secret Service history that day, becoming the first and only agent to be present at two assassination attempts.

The agency began by revamping
: Interviews with Fran Uteg, Robert Powis, John Simpson, Le Gette, Kelly, Parr, and other former agents. Former agent Ernest Kun described the “Attack on Principal” drills he helped create in Los Angeles. The Secret Service provided me with a course outline of “Ten Minute Medicine” from 1975, as well as a 1981 internal newsletter that briefly described the agency’s “AOP” training.

At 9:15
: DDPRR; details of the phone conversation between Schmidt and Reagan come from Allen’s extensive notes and my interviews with Allen, as well as a transcript of a press briefing that morning by James Brady, RRPL.