Rawhide Down (5 page)

On Thursday, March 26, Hinckley packed his things; at eleven a.m., he walked to the Greyhound bus station. He decided to travel first to Washington, D.C.—he’d been there several times and was familiar with its downtown—and then catch another bus to New Haven. His ticket cost $117.80.

The four-day trip was a blur of fast food and brief stops: Las Vegas, Cheyenne, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. Traveling through Utah, he awoke from a brief nap to find the bus hurtling through a massive snowstorm. He spent much of the trip slouched in a window seat, watching the scenery stream by or reading
The Catcher in the Rye,
J. D. Salinger’s novel of teenage angst and alienation. He identified with the story’s main character, Holden Caulfield, but the book was also special to him because he knew that John Lennon’s assassin had pulled it from his pocket and leafed through it moments after gunning down the rock-and-roll icon. Lennon, who had been killed three and a half months earlier, was Hinckley’s favorite musician; even so, he sometimes felt that he identified more with Lennon’s killer than with Lennon himself.

A minister who boarded in Salt Lake City sat next to Hinckley for a day and a night as the bus traveled east. Hinckley told his seatmate that he was on vacation; lying again, he claimed that he was a college graduate and that he ran a record store in Los Angeles. When the minister asked him whether he was a Christian, Hinckley offered no reply. As the miles flowed by, Hinckley revealed few details about his life. He didn’t even tell the minister his last name.

Hinckley slept poorly during the trip; by the time he arrived in Washington on Sunday, March 29, he was exhausted and hungry. He found a hotel, got some food, and spent another restless night.

Now it was Monday morning and he barely had enough energy to get out of bed. He had a little over $129 left, and he had managed to jam the jumbled detritus of his life into two suitcases. A plaid one, stacked neatly on his hotel room’s foldout stand, was stuffed with an army field jacket, a black sports coat, a Best Western road atlas, two pairs of underwear, and some shirts, pants, and jeans. The suitcase also held some of his poems and short stories, as well as several of his favorite books. In addition to
The Catcher in the Rye,
Hinckley had brought along a copy of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
and a book called
Strawberry Fields Forever: John Lennon Remembered.

Hinckley’s distress was evident in some of the items he’d carried with him to Washington. Another of the books in the plaid suitcase was
Ted Bundy: The Killer Next Door
. The suitcase also held a box of ammunition containing six Devastator bullets, each nestled in a foam slot. In his smaller, tan suitcase, he had stashed a gun—an R.G. Industries model RG 14, a .22-caliber double-action revolver that had cost him about $45—and thirty-seven rounds of ammunition. The bags also held a number of tape recordings, magazine clippings, and photographs, artifacts of his obsession with the woman in New Haven.

Just after nine a.m., Hinckley dressed and left the hotel. He wandered through a bookstore and then strolled along bustling K Street. He stopped into a McDonald’s and ate an Egg McMuffin. His thoughts kept returning to a simple, mesmerizing plan: he would take a bus to New Haven and end his life. Everything he had ever experienced was colliding at this singular moment in time. His money was gone. His parents would not have him back. He’d been traveling for weeks, and now he felt sure he was on his final trip.

On his walk back to the hotel, he bought a copy of
The Washington Star,
the city’s afternoon newspaper. In his room, he flipped through its pages, and his eyes were drawn to page A4: “The President’s Schedule.” He read the schedule without excitement, put down the paper, and headed to the shower.

CHAPTER 2

THE MAN

When President Reagan reached the Oval Office just after 8:50 a.m., he did not remove his suit jacket. He revered the presidency too much to display shirtsleeves in the room that had long been the epicenter of the presidential universe. It had been more than two months since Reagan’s inauguration, but the space looked much as Jimmy Carter had left it on January 20. There was the same large brown oval carpet decorated with blue flowers, the same two striped couches, the same two large armchairs. Two smaller wooden chairs bracketed Reagan’s desk; a polished globe stood near the window. The room’s domed ceiling glowed from lights hidden behind intricate molding, and a portrait of George Washington hung above the fireplace, directly across from the president’s desk.

The desk—which Carter had also used—was known as the
Resolute
desk because it had been constructed from the timbers of a British warship, H.M.S.
Resolute,
and given to the United States as a gift in 1880. Reagan, an Anglophile, loved its rugged look and rich history. It had been used by a number of presidents; Reagan enjoyed telling visitors that it was the very desk pictured in the famous photo of President Kennedy’s son John playing at his father’s feet. But there was just one problem: the
Resolute
desk did not fit Reagan. The arms of his large rolling chair bumped into the desktop, making it impossible for him to slide his legs under the writing surface. When he signed a bill or an executive order, Reagan had to shift his legs awkwardly to the side. The president did not want to have the legs of his favorite chair shortened, and he wouldn’t have dreamed of asking carpenters to alter the desk. Instead, he resigned himself to a bit of discomfort; the pleasure of working at the
Resolute
was worth it.

If the office did not yet have any Reagan flourishes, the president and first lady had managed to add a few personal touches. Reagan had placed several family photos on a credenza; a glass container of jelly beans, his favorite candy, stood on a coffee table next to one of the armchairs. The day before, he and Mrs. Reagan had moved some of the furniture around and put a set of miniature bronzed saddles on a display stand near a bookshelf.

As Reagan settled down to work, his three top advisors were summoned for the morning staff meeting. They were Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, Counselor Edwin Meese III, and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael K. Deaver. In most administrations, presidential power flows vertically from the president through a chief of staff. But unlike Carter and other presidents before him, Reagan delegated much of his authority, relying on his aides to shape policy and negotiate deals before coming to him for a decision or his final approval. He had left it to these advisors to organize his staff, which led to an unusual arrangement that divided control—sometimes unevenly—among the trio of ambitious aides.

Mike Deaver was closest to the president, but he was the antithesis of the hardy cowboy image cultivated by the Reagan White House. A former barroom piano player who grew up near the Mojave Desert, Deaver had a large, nearly bald dome of a head and a soft body, and bowed legs contributed to his shuffling gait. During Reagan’s years as governor of California, Deaver had been his chief scheduler, a job that had brought him into close contact with Nancy Reagan. He and the Reagans had become very friendly, and Deaver stuck with Reagan after he left Sacramento, helping to manage the former governor’s speaking engagements. He knew Reagan so well that others called him “the keeper of the body”; once, during the 1976 presidential campaign, he had even saved Reagan’s life by dislodging a peanut from the candidate’s throat during an airplane flight. Deaver, now forty-two, occupied the office closest to the president’s, just beyond a subtly disguised door in one wall of the Oval Office. A public relations man and an acknowledged master of the media, Deaver was already carefully managing public perception of the president by choreographing outings and events that projected the image of a vibrant and engaged leader.

Ed Meese, forty-nine, was another member of Reagan’s California inner circle who had followed the president to Washington. An amiable and cautious former prosecutor, Meese had recently retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. But he did not look like a soldier; instead, with his jowly face and plain gray suits, he resembled a high school math teacher. The tip of his tie usually rode an inch below his belt, and the brown case of his reading glasses almost always jutted from his shirt pocket. Like Deaver, Meese was close to Reagan, but their relationship was more professional than personal. A fourth-generation Californian, he had served as chief of staff while Reagan was governor and was skilled at synthesizing complex ideas. Early on, he’d been considered a front-runner for the post of presidential chief of staff, but his weak organizational skills sank his candidacy. Insiders called his briefcase the Meesecase, or, more explicitly, the Black Hole.

During the transition, a number of people urged Reagan to look further afield for a chief of staff, and ultimately the president-elect had surprised many by naming Jim Baker to the post. A smooth and shrewd political operator from Texas, Baker had waged two fierce political campaigns against Reagan in the previous five years. In 1976, he had played a key role in President Gerald Ford’s narrow victory over Reagan for the Republican nomination; in 1980, he had managed the primary campaign of his close friend George H. W. Bush. Baker was detail-oriented and disciplined, and though he chewed Red Man tobacco and cussed like a Texas cattle rancher, he expertly played the role of quintessential Washington insider. Still youthful-looking at fifty, he spoke in a silky southern drawl and always wore nicely tailored suits and bold ties. To many, it was a sign of Reagan’s supreme confidence that he would hire a man who’d been a political rival and award him such a key position. The choice proved wise, too: Baker went on to become one of the most effective presidential chiefs of staff in modern history.

Just weeks after the election, Baker and Meese hammered out a power-sharing arrangement, which the careful lawyers then put on paper. Baker controlled paper flow and personnel; Meese was responsible for domestic and national security policy. Each had the authority to walk into the Oval Office at almost any time; each also had the right to attend any meeting between the president and other government officials. Both men relied on Deaver to read and understand the president’s moods, and they nearly always ran scheduling decisions by him. Thus far, the three men—each with competing interests, skills, and agendas—had been working well together. Their efforts had already earned the aides an apt nickname that described their symbiotic relationship: the Troika.

Nearly every morning, Baker hosted a daily breakfast with Meese and Deaver so they could review the day’s schedule, policy issues, and political challenges. At about 7:30 on March 30, the three men had gathered in Baker’s spacious office, just down the hall from Reagan’s. Among other matters, they discussed a recent trip to China by former president Ford, who had carried a secret note from Reagan to that country’s leaders. They also discussed how to lift the controversial grain embargo that President Carter had imposed on the Soviet Union. Though taking a tougher line on the Russians, Reagan had announced during the campaign that he wanted to lift the trade restrictions because he believed they hurt U.S. farmers more than they did the Soviets. But the geopolitical situation was making the pledge difficult to fulfill: in recent weeks, the Soviet Union had been applying intense pressure to one of its western neighbors, Poland, where the Solidarity labor movement was beginning to crack the country’s communist regime, and now American irritation with the Soviet Union was once again on the rise. It was just the sort of dilemma that faces every new administration as it tries to reconcile the realities of governing with promises made during a campaign.

The Troika entered the Oval Office at precisely nine that morning. During this daily summit, Reagan and his advisors conferred about both the day ahead and any pressing issues that had been raised earlier at the Troika breakfast and at a subsequent larger staff meeting. The aides tried to keep these get-togethers brief, not least because Reagan detested long meetings and often started doodling when he became bored. Today they kept it short for another reason. In fifteen minutes, Reagan had an important call to make about the increasingly tense situation in Poland.

*   *   *

J
ERRY
P
ARR FOUND
his colleague Johnny Guy in his small office next to W-16, the agency’s command post in the White House basement, directly under the Oval Office. A balding and burly agent who looked like a football lineman, Guy was one of Parr’s top assistants, and the two men were quite friendly. Guy was due to travel with Reagan to the Washington Hilton that afternoon.

“I’d like to work the president today,” Parr told Guy. “I feel like I need to get to know him better.”

“Not a problem,” said Guy. He understood the point of Parr’s request; although agents were discouraged from becoming friends with their so-called protectees, they needed to understand a person’s quirks and habits in order to protect him or her effectively. Conversely, it was important that the president—whom agents referred to casually as “the Man”—trust the members of his Secret Service detail and even take their orders when necessary. The only way to build that bond was to spend time with the man himself.

Guy had been granted such an opportunity when he and platoons of agents were sent to California to guard the president-elect after his victory in November. For more than a month, Guy had watched Reagan up close—lounging about his house in a robe, on official trips to the airport and at press briefings, and during private dinner parties. The agent even got a surprise preview of the president-elect’s inaugural address.