Rawhide Down (9 page)

Now, only a few hours into the long day, Air Force Two circled to land at Carswell Air Force Base. Untermeyer looked out his window and saw a fleet of parked B-52 bombers glinting in the bright Texas sunshine. Beyond the bombers, a patchwork of green plains seemed to stretch forever. Untermeyer marveled at the sight: in Washington, the weather had been damp and gray, but here the morning was warm and clear. Everything seemed so peaceful.

*   *   *

S
HORTLY BEFORE ELEVEN
a.m., Nancy Reagan arrived at the elegant mansion in Washington that housed the Phillips Collection, the nation’s first museum of modern art. The first lady, wearing a bright red raincoat over a form-fitting gray suit with a pencil skirt, had come to the Phillips to tour its new wing and then attend a reception and social tea, where she would meet a group of volunteers in the Washington arts community. Joining her were Barbara Bush—the vice president’s wife—and about two hundred other women, most of them wearing linen suits or silk dresses.

This morning’s gathering resembled others Mrs. Reagan had attended since coming to the White House two months earlier. But she still felt unaccustomed to her new life: despite her years as first lady of California, she had spent most of her adulthood in the protective embrace of Hollywood high society and had not been prepared for the Washington media’s intense scrutiny of her and her husband. A number of commentators were already suggesting that she had too much influence over the president, and aides sniped anonymously in the press that she could be vicious in upbraiding them for mistakes. Mrs. Reagan was needled for admitting that she had stashed a “tiny little gun” in her bedroom drawer for protection when her husband was out of town, for her expensive wardrobe, for her decision to fly hairstylists to the inauguration, and for her ambitious plans to refurbish the White House’s living quarters because she found them too shabby—all while the country’s economy was suffering.

Like all first ladies, Mrs. Reagan was expected to dedicate herself to a worthy cause. An avid equestrian, she had visited a program designed to teach mentally challenged children to ride horses, and she planned to highlight the efforts of the Foster Grandparents program. She was also mulling the possibility of launching an antidrug campaign. But she was still searching for an appropriate and worthwhile focus for her considerable energies, and she often seemed tentative in her new role. The pressure was relentless: even when the Reagans escaped Washington, they never really left the White House behind. On their first trip back to their secluded ranch in the California mountains following the inauguration, Mrs. Reagan was unnerved to see dozens of Secret Service agents, police officers, military officials, and communications technicians swarming the grounds.

Still, she was where she wanted to be: at the side of her husband, the love of her life. She had met Reagan in 1949, when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild and she was just starting out in Hollywood. Then twenty-eight and named Nancy Davis, the young actress had recently signed a seven-year contract with MGM, but she was deeply worried for her new career because her name had appeared in a newspaper’s listing of communist sympathizers. The Red Scare, then in full cry, was causing havoc in the film business; as head of the trade union representing movie actors and actresses, Reagan was working hard to clear the names of falsely accused union members. (Much later, it was revealed that Reagan was simultaneously an FBI informant; he and his first wife, also an actress, provided agents with the names of actors they suspected of communist sympathies.) When Nancy sought his help, Reagan quickly determined that she wasn’t a communist. Through a mutual friend, he promised that the guild would defend her if a problem arose, but Nancy wanted to hear it from Reagan himself. So, that same night, Reagan took her out on their first date, a dinner at La Rue, a trendy restaurant and nightspot on the Sunset Strip. Recently divorced, he enjoyed her stories of growing up in Chicago as the daughter of a former Broadway actress and the stepdaughter of a brain surgeon. He marveled at her hazel eyes and enjoyed her laugh so much that he kept throwing out borrowed lines from George Burns and George Jessel just to hear it again. For her part, Nancy thought he was charming, and she enjoyed hearing about the Screen Actors Guild, his ranch, and his horses. They married three years later and had a daughter and then a son. (Reagan also had two children from his previous marriage.) The couple appeared together in 1957’s
Hellcats of the Navy,
but Mrs. Reagan soon gave up acting to devote all her time to her husband and their children. She stood by him as he weathered good years and bad in the movie and television businesses and, later, in politics. In 1976 and 1980, she fully supported his runs for president and helped shape the campaigns.

Now she was first lady and attending a social tea with the vice president’s wife on a dreary Monday in March. After a brief tour of the museum—she admired a landscape and a self-portrait by Paul Cézanne—Mrs. Reagan joined Barbara Bush near a podium in front of a painting of ballet dancers by Edgar Degas. The two women were introduced to the assembled guests; Mrs. Bush, wearing an aqua-green jacket and skirt, spoke first. “One wonderful thing I’ve learned,” she said, “is when your leader is here, you keep your remarks very, very short. And I try not to be so fresh.” Continuing, she told the gathering that “public service and volunteerism are the rent you pay for living on this wonderful earth.”

Then it was Mrs. Reagan’s turn. “Barbara,” she said, “your leader’s going to make remarks as short as yours.” She went on to offer a few words about her many years of volunteering for various causes and closed by saying, “I’m a big believer in volunteer work. I think we may have gotten away from it a bit. It gives you such a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. And you do so much good.”

With that, the women put on their raincoats and headed for their cars. They were both due to attend a lunch at the Georgetown home of Michael Ainsley, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. There they would be joined by the wives of several members of Reagan’s cabinet, among them Catherine Donovan, the spouse of the labor secretary. As it happened, while Mrs. Reagan and Mrs. Donovan were eating lunch in Georgetown, their husbands would also be together, sharing a limousine ride to the president’s speech at the Hilton.

CHAPTER 4

“I’M NOT DANGEROUS”

John Hinckley pulled out a blue pen and a piece of lined yellow paper and sat down in a plain wooden chair, at a plain wooden desk, in front of a bland rectangular mirror in his room at the Park Central Hotel. He meant to declare his feelings, perhaps for the final time, to the woman he loved.

“Dear Jodie,” he began in a tight script that led methodically across the page. “There is a definite probability that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. It is for this very reason that I am writing you this letter now.”

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.