Rawhide Down (12 page)

Now, having returned to Washington, he was determined to kill the president. After loading the gun in his hotel room, he’d put on his jacket and dropped the small revolver into his right pocket and a John Lennon pin into another pocket. A few minutes later, he hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him to the Hilton. On the way, he thought about what he wanted to do. He could pull out the gun and shoot; he could pull it out but then choose not to shoot; or he could just leave the gun in his pocket and walk away. He also worried that he might not get close enough to actually hit the president. Even after all of his target practice, his effective range was still only twenty to thirty feet.

Once the cab pulled to a stop near the hotel, Hinckley paid the fare, walked to the nearby Holiday Inn, and used the bathroom. Then he walked to the Hilton, where he saw cameramen and spectators gathering behind a black rope strung across the sidewalk not far from the VIP entrance. Hinckley joined the small crowd. He didn’t think security seemed especially tight.

Five minutes later, the long motorcade arrived. The presidential limousine appeared at the Hilton’s driveway on T Street and pulled to a stop at the VIP entrance. A Secret Service agent in a tan trench coat got out of the front passenger seat and opened the right rear door. Out stepped the president. He turned to the spectators and journalists standing behind the rope line and waved.

Hinckley felt as if the president were staring right at him. He raised his arm to wave back, but by then Reagan had already turned toward the hotel. A moment later, surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents, the president walked through the Hilton’s brass-plated doors and was gone.

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J
ERRY
P
ARR HOVERED
by Reagan’s shoulder as the president entered the elevator with Ray Donovan and the chief of hotel security. As Reagan and the others took the elevator to the ground floor, several agents hurried down a spiral staircase to meet them. The president stepped off the elevator and then, with Donovan providing introductions, shook hands with labor leaders and smiled for the official White House photographer in the foyer of the holding room.

At two p.m., Reagan walked down the short, curving hallway lined with portraits of previous presidents and arrived at the backstage entrance to the International Ballroom. Just before he went onstage, Reagan popped out one of his contact lenses. The severely nearsighted president couldn’t read a speech while wearing his contact lenses, so he had devised a unique solution: he read the text with his unaided eye and used the other to pan the crowd.

At the sound of “Hail to the Chief,” Reagan strode onstage. He walked behind the head table and toward the podium, where he shook hands with Robert Georgine, the president of the trades department of the AFL-CIO. After a brief introduction, he stepped to the dais.

“Thank you all,” Reagan said as the audience applauded. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” The president opened his speech with a story, one he had written down on an index card long ago. He had often told a punchier version on the campaign trail, and by now it was an old standby, perfect for a group of blue-collar workers who loved sports.

“There’s been a lot of talk in the last several weeks here in Washington about communication and the need to communicate,” the president began. His first months in office, he said, had brought to mind an old story “about some of the basic rules of communication.”

The president then told his audience about a young baseball player and his wife who invited a well-known sports announcer named Danny Villaneuva to dinner. While his wife prepared the meal, the player talked with his guest about sports. Then the couple’s baby began to cry.

Warming to his story, Reagan continued: “And over her shoulder, the wife said to her husband, ‘Change the baby.’ And this young ballplayer was embarrassed in front of Danny and he said to his wife, ‘What do you mean, change the baby? I’m a ballplayer. That’s not my line of work.’

“And she turned around, put her hands on her hips”—here Reagan paused for the briefest moment—“and she communicated. She said, ‘Look, buster, you lay the diaper out like a diamond, you put second base on home plate, put the baby’s bottom on the pitcher’s mound, hook up first and third, slide home underneath, and if it starts to rain, the game ain’t called—you start all over again.’”

The room burst into hard laughter. “So,” Reagan said, “I’m going to try to communicate a little bit today.”

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O
UTSIDE THE
H
ILTON
, Drew Unrue repositioned the president’s limousine, parking it about twenty-five or thirty feet from the VIP entrance with its front end aimed at T Street and its trunk close to the rope line that held back the spectators on the Hilton’s sidewalk. The car’s position would require the president to walk from the VIP entrance to the waiting limousine while moving roughly parallel to the rope; during this brief period, he would be fifteen to twenty feet from the spectators.

Unrue parked the limousine this way because of the somewhat peculiar design of the Hilton. The hotel sat on the northeast corner of Connecticut Avenue and T Street, and circular driveways from each street led to the hotel’s entrances. Connecting the two driveways was a lane that ran past the VIP entrance. Unrue had used the T Street driveway and dropped Reagan off directly in front of the VIP entrance; if he picked up the president in the same spot and continued on, he would follow the lane out toward Connecticut Avenue. But the connecting lane was narrow and curving, and the Secret Service worried that the hulking limousine might get stuck on a curb or become trapped while trying to negotiate the sharp turn onto Connecticut Avenue. Moreover, a police car was always stationed at the top of the lane, sealing off the area to prevent attackers and protesters from driving straight toward the presidential departure area. If the officer responsible for that car didn’t get it out of the way quickly during an emergency, the limousine would smash right into it.

To solve the problem, the service instructed agents driving the limousine to drop off the president, back away from the VIP entrance, and then park the car with its nose pointing toward T Street. From this position, the drivers could make a quick getaway in case of an incident. But the service’s solution did have a downside: the president had to walk in the open for a few seconds until he reached the safety of the limousine’s right rear door. This degree of exposure was not uncommon, and the service believed that the risks associated with negotiating the narrow lane were greater than those attending a short walk past some spectators. Besides, during the past decade the service had handled more than one hundred presidential visits to the Hilton and there had never been any reason to question this trade-off.

After watching Unrue park the Lincoln in its usual spot, Sergeant Herbert Granger decided that the rope line seemed a little too close to the president’s limousine. Granger directed his officers to move the brass stanchions holding the rope back a few feet, just past a drainage grate in the sidewalk. Even with the repositioning, however, spectators and reporters behind the line—none of whom had been screened by the Secret Service—would still be about fifteen feet from the president as he stepped up to his car.

Unrue, having parked the limousine, walked over to the follow-up car and began chatting with its driver. None of the agents or police officers had seen any sign of trouble. A heckler had caused a bit of a ruckus, but he was a regular on the Reagan circuit who often appeared at public events to chant antinuclear slogans. Just in case a photograph might prove useful, the hotel security chief pulled out his Olympus camera and snapped a picture of the crowd, hoping to capture the heckler’s image for his files. Police officers and agents shooed a few spectators away from the president’s limousine and other cars in the motorcade, although they allowed the Hilton’s cafeteria manager to peek inside the armored Lincoln after listening to a persuasive plea on her behalf from a hotel security officer. Meanwhile, across T Street, agents and officers worked diligently to prevent any of the approximately two hundred onlookers from slipping across the closed street.

As departure time neared, Mary Ann Gordon, the motorcade’s advance agent, inspected the line of motorcycles, police cars, and government vehicles. Everything seemed in order, so she took her place in the lead cruiser. Unrue returned to the limousine, took his seat, and switched on the car’s engine. The follow-up driver started his engine and flipped on his flashing red lights. Agents and police officers began to return to their assigned posts. By now, the crowd of spectators and reporters hoping to catch a glimpse of the president had swelled to about twenty-five people.

It was 2:20 p.m.

CHAPTER 6

2:27 P.M.

Agent Jerry Parr stood backstage, watching President Ronald Reagan finish his address to the four thousand union members sitting politely in the International Ballroom. Standing behind the familiar blue podium with the presidential seal, Reagan was bathed in bright television lights as he read from his cards between practiced glances at the audience. He was wrapping up his speech in typically optimistic and patriotic fashion: “I know that we can’t make things right overnight. But we will make them right. Our destiny is not our fate. It is our choice. And I’m asking you as I ask all Americans, in these months of decision, please join me as we take this new path. You and your forebears built our nation. Now, please help us rebuild it, and together we’ll make America great again.”

The crowd rose to its feet, but the applause was more polite than enthusiastic. The speech had not been one of Reagan’s better efforts, but he hadn’t blundered and no one had heckled him or booed.

Parr moved to the edge of the stage and stood behind a swath of gold bunting as Reagan shook a few hands before walking past the head table and off the stage. The agent fell in step behind the president and trailed him down the curving hallway toward the holding room, where White House aides awaited Reagan’s return.

A platoon of Secret Service agents rushed ahead. They took the stairs up from the ground floor two at a time and then moved quickly out the VIP doors and into the gray, misty afternoon. One agent aimed for the rope line; another trotted along the hotel’s stone wall; a third angled for the limousine’s right front fender; a fourth swept around the far side of the limousine. A fifth, carrying an Uzi submachine gun in a briefcase, kept an eye on a group of spectators on a traffic island in the middle of the hotel’s driveway. A sixth, Tim McCarthy, strode to the limousine’s right rear door. It would be his job to open the door for the president.

Directly across T Street, Jerry Parr’s wife, Carolyn, looked out her fourth-floor window and saw that the president’s limousine was preparing to leave. The IRS lawyer knew her husband would be directing Reagan’s security detail that day—he had called her a couple of hours ago to tell her so—and since her office happened to overlook the Hilton’s VIP entrance, she’d decided to keep an eye on the motorcade and then go down to the street to watch her husband escort the president to his limousine. Now she dashed down the stairs, hoping she wasn’t too late.

*   *   *

T
HE CROWD OUTSIDE
the VIP doors continued to grow. The reporters and cameramen who had attended Reagan’s speech were now leaving the public entrance to the hotel on T Street, about thirty feet beyond the rope line, and working their way through the waiting spectators. Some of the journalists were hoping to get video or photographs of Reagan as he left the Hilton. Others wanted to toss questions at the president—this would be as close as they got to him all day. And a few were on the so-called body watch, the morbid duty of tracking the president’s every move so that if something terrible happened they could report it immediately.

Sam Donaldson, ABC’s brash and outspoken White House correspondent, was on the body watch, but he also hoped to ask Reagan about the situation in Poland. Donaldson nudged his way through the crowd behind the rope line, slipping past three officials from Iowa who were in town for meetings with federal officials, an office worker who had just finished his lunch, and a cocktail waitress reporting for her shift at the hotel. By the time Donaldson reached the rope, he was standing near two union leaders awaiting Reagan’s departure. One told the other: “Let’s count his wrinkles.”

Two or three journalists and cameramen began shoving their way through the spectators. “Press, press, let us through!” a reporter shouted, trying to get to the front of the rope.

“No, we were here first!” screamed an agitated young man in a beige jacket who was standing near the two union officials. “You ought to get here on time,” he yelled at the journalists. He turned to the other spectators. “They think they can do anything they want! Don’t let them do that!”

There were now more than thirty people clustered behind the rope line. Three police officers, including Herbert Granger and Thomas Delahanty, stood between the spectators and the president’s projected path from the VIP entrance to the limousine. One Secret Service agent moved to a spot between the rope line and the VIP entrance; a second agent stood at the curb near the limousine, keeping an eye on the crowd in case anyone tried to maneuver around the rope line and run toward the president. Meanwhile, five agents on Reagan’s working shift formed a cordon around the limousine.

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