Crimes of the Century (2013–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - The Shooting of Ronald Reagan - full transcript
We interrupt... There's
been a late development.
At this moment, we don't
know precisely what happened.
Oh, my God.
He's been shot.
- Shots fired!
- Get him out!
The president of
the United States has been shot.
I could see it
through the viewfinder...
Even now.
An inch from his heart.
He was minutes away
from not making it.
- Get him out!
- Who is the shooter?
And then, he says, "Well, if you know
about that, you know about everything."
A bizarre motive... And he thought
the relationship was real.
He was a really,
severely disturbed person.
And his crime changed history.
The shooting of Ronald Reagan,
next.
On January 20, 1981, Ronald
Wilson Reagan was sworn in
as the 40th President
of the United States.
I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear...
As with most new administrations,
Reagan's first couple
of months are rocky.
And this is the 70th day
of Reagan's presidency.
Things were not going
particularly well.
He had a very low approval rating, the lowest
of any President that early in his first term.
It's a Monday, and Reagan has
one big event that day.
It's to deliver a speech
to the AFL-CIO.
It's 2:00, a kind of gray day
in Washington.
And Ronald Reagan's motorcade has just arrived
for his speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel,
which is behind us, this...
and this is the special entrance
back here, the V.I.P. entrance that Reagan
walked into at 2:00 p.m. When he arrived.
Government's first duty is to protect
the people, not run their lives.
The event is covered
by all the major networks.
For ABC News photographer hank
Brown, it's a routine job.
We're the pool crew that travel with
the president wherever he goes.
We wanted to get the picture of the president
walking out of the hotel and getting in a limo.
15 feet from that door was
a rope line.
All the cameramen...
Everybody's laughing.
It was unsecured...
no I.D. checks.
People thought
it was a press line.
It wasn't.
Anyone could be
behind that line.
You see Hinckley's face about three rows
back, totally passive... no reaction at all.
I got my camera out, aimed it at the
door where the president was coming out.
I could see it through
the viewfinder, even now.
Reagan is walking towards
his way to the limousine.
The Secret Service agents are surrounding
him as he goes towards the car.
Just 15 feet from him is
John W. Hinckley Jr.
He pulls out
his .22-caliber revolver...
and unleashes six shots
in 1.7 seconds.
1. 7 seconds is the time it
takes me to say "1.7 seconds."
It's that fast.
The first shot hits Jim Brady, the
press secretary, in the head.
Brady is seen here, between Reagan
and Secret Service Agent Jerry Parr.
The second shot hits Tom Delahanty, a D.C.
police officer, in the back.
- Get him out!
- Get him out!
- Get him out!
- Get back!
The third shot goes high, hits that
building across the street right there.
The fourth shot hits Timothy McCarthy, a
Secret Service agent, square in the chest.
He's not wearing
a bulletproof vest.
He falls to the ground.
The fifth shot hits the armored,
bulletproof window of the car...
as Reagan and Parr flash
behind it, diving in.
The sixth shot cracks
across the driveway.
No one knows
where that sixth shot went
until, later, they realize it
slapped off the side of the car,
slipped through a gap between
the door and the door frame.
I thought it was firecrackers.
And the next thing I knew,
one of the Secret Service agents
behind me just seized me here by the waist
and plunged me headfirst into the limo.
The agent is 50-year-old Jerry Parr,
head of Reagan's Secret Service detail.
As we go in, I go in on top of him, and I'm
sure I hit my radio or my gun or something...
hit him on the back.
And I said, "Jerry, get off.
I think you've broken
a rib of mine."
Jerry Parr is looking
out the window.
He's pulling out this way.
Jerry Parr is looking
out the window.
He sees three men down, a
bullet mark on the left window.
He knows there's been
an assassination attempt.
And that limousine is alone.
Parr checks Reagan out
really quickly, you know?
He seems okay.
Reagan thinks he's okay.
I ran my hands up under his coat and felt all
around his belt with my hands... no blood.
I ran my hands
up under his arms... no blood.
"Rawhide" is Reagan's
Secret Service code name.
And on this day, there's no better code name for
a president than "Rawhide" for Ronald Reagan.
We're going right.
We're going to crown.
Okay, back to the White House.
Back to the White House.
Rawhide is okay.
We interrupt... There's been a late development...
Shots reported fired outside the hotel
where President Reagan spoke
a short while ago.
Here's Bernard Shaw
in our Washington bureau.
Okay, my apology.
Details are very sketchy
at this moment.
We don't know precisely
what happened.
We don't know the sequence.
First of all,
the president is safe.
Safe, yes, but not okay.
Reagan starts complaining of pain in his back
and his chest and side... not feeling so good.
And just then, I coughed, and I had a
handful of bright red, frothy... blood.
And he said, "I think I've cut
the inside of my mouth."
And I said, "Let me look."
And it was pretty profuse.
And Parr knows
this is big trouble.
So, he has a decision to make... "Do
I head back to the White House,
the safest place
in the known universe?"
Or does he divert to George Washington
Hospital, the nearest trauma center,
where there's not
an ounce of security?
But Ronald Reagan's life, literally, on this
day, hung in the balance of a split second
and a mere inch.
And I'm not exaggerating.
Outside the hotel,
the scene is chaotic.
In the bedlam,
the shooter is tackled.
There was pushing.
There was shoving.
- Back up!
- Back up!
Get him out!
You hear the agents scream,
"Get him out of here!
Get him out of here!"
- Get him out!
- Get him out!
And at the same time,
an ambulance was arriving.
Here, come on!
Back it up, please!
So I immediately went back
to filming the scene.
I thought,
"I have to preserve history."
It brought tears to my eyes.
I still see Brady lying there.
I still think about Delahanty.
I see his face.
I still see McCarthy being lifted up off the
ground and being thrown back by the bullet.
Within minutes of the shooting, President
Reagan arrives at George Washington hospital.
He insists on walking in.
The nurse met me, and I told her I was
having a little trouble breathing.
The president was at the point where we, in
medicine, would say he was ready to crash.
The next thing I knew then was my knees began
to turn to rubber, and I wound up on a gurney.
If he had gone to the White House, they would've
dragged him out of the car, looked him over,
found out he was in big trouble, put him
back in the car, drove him to G.W....
Yeah, it would've taken
10, 15, maybe more minutes.
He didn't have that time.
And there's a nurse there trying to get the
president's blood pressure, and she can't detect it.
She can't feel
his blood pressure.
He's not doing so good.
And she's going, "Oh, my God.
He's gonna die.
I'm gonna lose the president
of the United States."
I didn't know I was shot.
I really do believe that he was
minutes away from not making it.
The shot that got me caromed
off the side of the limousine
and hit me while I was diving
into the car.
And it hit me back here, under
the arm and then hit a rib,
and that's what caused
an extreme pain.
And then, it tumbled, it turned instead
of edgewise and went tumbling down
to within an inch of my heart.
First Lady Nancy Reagan is in the solarium
at the White House when she gets the news.
George Opfer, who was head of my detail, He said,
"there's been a shooting, but don't worry.
The president's
all right."
George kept saying,
"You don't have to go.
He's all right.
He hasn't been hurt."
I said, "George, I'm going.
You better get the car
because I'm going."
And she comes into the E.R.
and the first thing Ronald Reagan says
to her is, "Honey, I forgot to duck."
As he's prepped for surgery, Reagan stays
in character and jokes with his doctors.
He looked at me, and he says,
"I hope you're all Republicans."
And I'm a notorious
liberal Democrat.
And I said, "Today, Mr. President,
we're all Republicans."
The surgical team is
led by Dr. Benjamin Aaron.
As the main head surgeon is
digging
through Reagan's chest, trying to find this bullet
fragment, worried it could slip into an artery
and shoot into the president's
brain and kill him,
Dr. David Adelberg reached his
hand in the president's chest,
gently cupped the president's beating
heart in his hand, and held it aside.
A 31-year-old surgical intern
literally held the beating life
of the president of
the United States in his hand.
While Reagan is in surgery, the
suspect, John W. Hinckley Jr.,
of Evergreen, Colorado, is
being questioned.
He admitted who he was.
He made no attempt
to hide who he was.
The FBI and Secret Service have two questions...
why did he do it, and did he act alone?
He said to them at the time, "You'll understand
why I did this when you see my room."
According to sources, John Hinckley Jr., the
accused gunman, may have tried to kill Mr. Reagan
because of an infatuation
with a young actress.
We can report that shots were fired as President
Reagan left the Washington Hilton Hotel
following that address
we carried live here on CNN.
The suspect was rushed to
district of police headquarters.
John W. Hinckley Jr., age 25, is a
complete mystery to his captors.
When I walked into the room, John Hinckley
was just sitting quietly on his seat,
showed no emotion.
Secret Service Agent
Stephen Colo is among
the first to see Hinckley.
He told me that his wrist hurt because
of the handcuffs that were placed on him
and that his throat hurt.
Someone hurt his throat
when they arrested him.
Well, certainly, in my mind, it was not
typical that he was complaining about himself
after he had just shot
a number of people.
As investigators begin
to question Hinckley,
White House press secretary Jim Brady's wife, Sarah
Brady, is at home with their 2-year-old son.
We were sitting in our rec room watching
television when they announced it.
The president did not appear to be hurt
according to United Press International.
So, I thought to myself,
"Oh, that's great,"
never dreaming that Jim would even
have been with him for some reason.
But the phone rang immediately.
It was a friend of mine, and she
had heard that Jim had been shot.
The White House immediately sends a
car to take Sarah to the hospital.
And for some reason, I just
thought, "He's been winged."
You know, it just never dawned on me
that he'd been badly hurt or killed.
I just kept thinking
he was shot in the arm.
It was very obvious
that he was seriously injured
with a gunshot wound
to the head, but he was alive.
And he probably should not have made it,
but he got exceedingly great medical care
from a doctor named Art Kobrine.
With her husband on his way to surgery,
hospital workers usher Mrs. Brady
into a secure waiting room.
Mrs. Reagan came in,
and she came over to me.
And we hugged each other.
And she said, "I am so scared."
And I said, "I am, too."
While surgeons work to save the shooting
victims, suspect John Hinckley is transferred
to the FBI's Washington
field office for questioning.
Two senior FBI agents are assigned
to conduct the interview.
As a courtesy, they invite Secret
Service Agent Steve Colo to sit in.
I was there in a liaison
position at that time,
keeping in mind the Secret Service could not be
part of the investigation because technically
the Secret Service is at fault anytime one
of our protectees has been shot or injured.
Before the questioning begins, the agents
inventory Hinckley's personal possessions.
When they opened the wallet,
there was a picture.
The belief was that the picture
of this attractive woman came
with the wallet because
she was somewhat recognizable
as, like, a young starlet,
but none of us knew her name.
There was a piece of paper
that was stuck
in the billfold section that had
a telephone number on it.
Well, one of the FBI agents said, "Oh,
that's a Connecticut telephone number."
It meant nothing to me
at the time.
When the interview begins, Hinckley
doesn't react well to the questioning
by his FBI interrogators, so
they ask Agent Colo to step in.
Within minutes,
Hinckley opens up.
He told me about the different
doctors that he had been to.
He talked about dropping
out of school.
He talked about his relationship with his
parents and how annoyed they were with him.
So, I asked him
how could he explain his issues?
And he says,
"I have no direction in life."
I decided to take a long shot.
So, I said to him, "I saw the piece
of paper with the telephone number...
the number
that goes to Connecticut."
When I said that to him, he, all
of a sudden, became animated.
Here was a guy who was
almost stoic in his answers,
and all of a sudden now,
he is twitching, and he says,
"Well, if you know about that,
you know about everything."
And I knew I hit on a really important fact,
and I had no idea what he was talking about.
So I said to him, "I know, but I
have to hear it in your words."
And he said, "Well, that telephone
number goes to Yale University.
It goes to Jodie Foster's room."
And bingo, that was the picture
in the wallet.
Back at the hospital, Dr. Kobrine is
meticulously removing bullet fragments
and damaged tissue
from Jim Brady's brain.
The surgery is slow,
delicate, and dangerous.
At one point, they're hearing on
the radio that Jim Brady's died.
And someone rushes in to tell Art Kobrine,
"Hey, they're reporting Jim Brady's dead."
And Art Kobrine turns to the guy and says, "What
do they think I'm operating on, a... corpse?"
That's what's he said.
And they kept it totally away from us, 'cause
we had no television or anything like that,
which was really good.
But a lot of people did hear, including
friends who were watching TV
with the Bradys'
2-year-old son, Scott.
When they announced his death,
they showed his picture.
Scott said,
"Oh, there's my daddy,"
and went up
and kissed the screen.
But, of course, he didn't...
he didn't know that, um...
After five hours, Dr. Kobrine
emerges from the operating room.
The minute I saw his face,
I knew it was successful.
I mean, it was a miracle.
Against all odds, Jim Brady survives,
though he'll be permanently disabled
and wheelchair-bound
for the rest of his life.
The other victims also undergo
surgery and survive.
Secret Service Agent Tim
McCarthy was hit in the chest
and D.C. policeman Tom Delahanty
was shot in the back.
That evening, FBI agents search John
Hinckley's Washington, D.C., hotel room.
Hinckley had laid out... and this was the bizarre
thing, really bizarre... He had laid out there
from the morning's newspaper,
the president's schedule.
He had beside that a statement really in the
form of a letter to the actress Jodie Foster.
In his letter, Hinckley writes, "I am
doing all this for your sake, 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."
It was when we read the letter
from the hotel room
that we finally put
the pieces together.
It looked to all of us, gut feeling, this is
a lone gunman, and there was the motive...
to impress this actress.
We can understand political motives,
but here we have a motive of love.
President Reagan had just delivered a fairly
well-received speech at the Hilton Washington Hotel.
Then, shots.
Within 24 hours of the assassination attempt,
the FBI and Secret Service are digging deeply
into John Hinckley Jr.'s
background.
Leads were going out
all over the country.
We literally took his life apart to track
him off every receipt he ever had,
any dollar that was spent
that we could track.
We wanted to know where he had been and what
he had done as far back as we could go.
What they found was a long trail
of despair, deceit, and delusion.
Hinckley had a seemingly normal childhood, growing
up in an affluent suburb of Dallas, Texas.
He played sports as a boy
and did well in school.
But as he grew older,
Hinckley began to withdraw.
His parents chalked it up
to shyness.
From the time Hinckley graduated
from this high school,
Highland Park in the Dallas area, in 1973, until
his arrest, there was also a personality change.
He had become quieter, more
introverted, somewhat of a recluse.
In 1973, Hinckley moved to Evergreen,
Colorado, with his parents.
They hoped
he would go to college.
He did for a while,
attending Texas Tech off and on
for a few years
but never graduating.
Mostly, he spent time in his room alone
writing gloomy poems and playing his guitar.
♪ Da-da-da ♪
♪ Da-da-da ♪
He dreamed of being
a songwriter, a musician.
And so, for a summer,
he spent some amount of time
out in L.A., pretending he was going to sell
his music to companies and all that stuff.
He certainly had a grandiose view of himself
and an exaggerated view of his accomplishments
as a composer and as a musician.
But he didn't do anything.
He sat and watched TV
in his apartment.
He didn't go anywhere.
He seemed like, in a sense,
a lost soul, you know?
He goes out to Hollywood expecting something
and just ends up in a room by himself
and going to see this movie over
and over, the "Taxi Driver" movie.
Investigators soon realize that the movie
"Taxi Driver" is a central influence
on Hinckley's life, so much that Hinckley even
adopts the persona of the lead character played
by Robert De Niro, that of a disturbed
Vietnam vet named Travis Bickle.
Hinckley begins dressing
in Army fatigues, like Bickle.
He begins drinking peach brandy,
like Bickle.
And he becomes obsessed with guns
and assassination, like Bickle.
He saw that movie 15 times, "Taxi
Driver," a very violent movie.
And he becomes obsessed
with Jodie Foster in this movie.
Jodie Foster plays a 12-year-old
prostitute named Iris.
He felt the relationship
with Jodie Foster was real,
not something that was based
on her role in a movie.
He was just
one of these warped guys.
While the FBI investigates Hinckley, Ronald Reagan
is recovering at George Washington Hospital,
which has been transformed
into the seat of government.
The White House is always
wherever the president is.
Everything had moved there.
The decisions were being made,
and the staff was over there.
It was so strange.
It's a turmoil around here.
I thought, for intensive care, you know,
that everybody would be whispering,
but it's like
Grand Central Station.
Everything was very surreal
for a couple of days there.
I mean, it just...
It was like living in a movie.
Has the president at all asked or has he been
told about the condition of his press secretary?
He is not aware of the number... of the other
people who were shot and injured at this time.
It isn't until Reagan asks his
staff if anyone else was shot
that he's told about Officer Delahanty, Agent
McCarthy, and Press Secretary Jim Brady.
He called me down
and said he was so sorry.
And... I told him... you know, that Jim
was doing what he loved to do the most.
And I kind of tried
to reassure him,
but he was very emotional
about it, of course.
Reagan also wants to see the Secret Service
agent who took a bullet for him, Tim McCarthy.
Reagan looks at him, and he can...
Maybe he senses something in McCarthy.
I don't know, but Reagan looks
at him and says,
"So, Tim... McCarthy, Reagan,
Brady, and Delahanty.
What did this guy have
against the Irish?"
He handled it very well.
And as he said to us in his interview,
he didn't know what had happened.
He still managed
to make jokes about it,
bringing his personality forth to make everybody
in the country feel better about themselves.
Everybody but John Hinckley Jr.
In this hour, John Hinckley Jr. pleads not guilty
to charges he tried to kill President Reagan,
and both his lawyer and the government
agree he is competent to stand trial.
From the moment he was arrested, the
issue of sanity became paramount
to the legal teams assigned to
prosecute and defend John Hinckley.
Facing a judge for the first time, Hinckley stood
while the clerk read the 13-count indictment.
Among the spectators were
Hinckley's parents.
They watched intently as the clerk
asked their son, "How do you plead?"
In a clear, loud voice, the 26-year-old
Hinckley answered, "Not guilty."
You know, Hinckley is an interesting person
but not interesting at the same time.
There didn't seem
to be much there.
You could not form
a rapport with him.
He seemed to have
little expression of emotion.
Dr. Will Carpenter, a research psychiatrist
at the University of Maryland, was hired
to give an expert opinion
in Hinckley's defense.
I believe that I spent
about 44 hours evaluating him.
Most of that would have been
in interviews with him.
He was self-centered,
but he wasn't narcissistic.
It was more like kind of a loner who
doesn't have much else going on
and then would get grandiose
ideas, including delusional ideas.
He made up a whole girlfriend
for his parents for a year.
She didn't exist.
She seemed awfully real
to him at times.
But it's very much to manipulate his parents
so that he could be off and doing what it was
that he intended to do
without their interfering.
In the summer of 1980, Hinckley
read a story about Jodie Foster.
The 18-year-old actress was taking a sabbatical
from Hollywood to attend Yale University.
So, Hinckley told his parents that he was going
back to college... but at Yale, not Texas Tech.
And so he makes up a whole elaborate ruse to
his parents about how he's gonna go to Yale
for a writing class that doesn't exist, and
the whole time he spent stalking Foster.
He finds out where she lives.
He's slipping notes
under her door.
And he's on the phone with her,
and he taped these calls.
Who is this?
We started to yell
at the recorder, "Hang up!
Hang up!"
Because this is what we'd tell our
wife or our daughter, you know?
You hang up right away.
And they're just really
sad and pathetic calls.
He's reaching out to this woman he
idolized and wanted to be part of.
And so he gets in his mind, you know, "If
I get the president of the United States,
she'll love me.
You know, she'll want me.
She'll know who I am."
And so he starts stalking
Jimmy Carter.
It was just a month
before Reagan was elected.
He and President Carter were
campaigning hard for every vote.
In October 1980, John Hinckley gets
within arm's reach of Jimmy Carter
at an event in Dayton, Ohio.
One week later, Hinckley is in Nashville,
Tennessee, still stalking Carter.
When Hinckley leaves, airport police
find several guns in his luggage.
He was arrested, never fingerprinted and
photographed for carrying a weapon.
And the information was never
sent to the Secret Service.
They took the weapons, he paid a
fine, and that was the end of that.
Within days, Hinckley is in Dallas, where
his sister lives, shopping for more guns
at Rocky's Pawn Shop.
He buys two revolvers for $98, including the
one he'll use to shoot President Reagan.
He purchased it legally
at the time.
Caliber .22... It was a very
lightweight, snub-nose handgun.
He had actually gone
to firing ranges.
You know, he had trained
or given himself training.
John Hinckley took
a lot of target practice.
I mean, he took
a lot of target practice.
He never shot at moving targets.
And Jerry Parr is moving
the president
towards
that open limousine door.
On December 8, 1980, John Hinckley's
fragile world begins to crack
when he hears shocking news
from new York City.
The news ripped through the air
in shock waves.
John Lennon shot and killed in the Dakota
apartment building where he lived.
Gunned down in front
of his exclusive
Manhattan apartment building.
The suspect is identified
as Mark David Chapman.
Hinckley idolized Lennon.
That New Year's Eve, he locks himself in his
room at his parents' house, drinks peach brandy,
plays his guitar,
and wallows in his own misery.
♪ Da-da-da ♪
Sometime during the night, Hinckley writes in
his diary, "John Lennon is dead. Forget it.
It's just gonna be insanity.
I still think about Jodie
all the time.
Anything I might do in 1981 would
be solely for Jodie Foster's sake.
I want to tell the world
that I love her."
Valentine's Day, 1981.
John Hinckley, the man who will soon shoot Ronald
Reagan, has been in New Haven for two days
leaving more notes
for Jodie Foster.
On one postcard he writes, "One day,
you and I will occupy the White House.
Please do your best
to remain a virgin.
You are a virgin, aren't you?"
But this time, Hinckley is not
just leaving her notes.
He's contemplating
a violent act.
He had guns with him when he was in New Haven
stalking Jodie Foster, and he was just unsure
what he was doing with it.
Spurned once more by Foster and feeling
suicidal, Hinckley goes to New York City
still carrying the guns
he bought in Dallas.
We talked about the guns
and the whole history with guns.
And he described,
you know, having them with him
when he was in New York.
And he considered killing himself then... kind
of standing on the place where Chapman had been
outside the Dakota.
But Hinckley does not
act on any of his thoughts.
Instead, he goes back
to Evergreen, Colorado,
where his parents live.
He came back, and there was
a lot of friction between him
and his father and his mother about what he was
going to do with his life... get a job or not.
They recognized he had some mental problems,
so they sent him to see a psychiatrist.
Hinckley first saw the
psychiatrist the previous October.
And in one of the first sessions, he tells
the psychiatrist, "I'm kind of... Hey,
I'm really interested
in guns and Jodie Foster.
I'm obsessed
with these two things."
And after that, the psychiatrist never asked
him another question about those two things.
At one point, the psychiatrist, Dr. John
Hopper, had told Hinckley's parents
that their son was simply immature, that he needed
to grow up, get a job, and live on his own.
The last of 15 sessions takes place 4
1/2 half weeks before the shooting.
The mother of the troubled young
man might have kept him home.
The brother and the sister would
have had him institutionalized.
But the family followed
the psychiatrist's advice,
as troubled families will do, and, to
put it mildly, it didn't work out.
His parents actually gave him
an ultimatum.
They were supplying
the funding for his travels.
And they were getting tired
of it.
And they told him emphatically,
in his words, that, you know,
he had to clean up his act and get a job, and
they're cutting off his funds at the end of March.
He was not capable of taking that as a
challenge and then straightening his life out.
He was more capable of drifting off as
a loner into his own fantasy world.
And so, at the end of March, he makes the
decision that he has to do something.
Six days before the shooting, Hinckley flies to Los
Angeles, then boards a bus to Washington, D.C.
From there, he'll go to New Haven and
commit his act of love for Jodie Foster.
He even writes her another note,
telling her to wait for him.
His plan was to shoot Foster,
shoot himself,
or kill both of them in this orgy
of violence... that was his plan.
On his way to Yale,
Hinckley stops off in D.C.
He checks in to the Park Central Hotel, sleeps,
gets up, and goes for a fast-food breakfast.
It was just by chance that
that morning he got up
and read the paper and saw the president was
going to the Hilton to talk to the AFL-CIO.
Saw the president's schedule
on page A-4
of The Washington Star
newspaper, said, you know,
"I'm gonna see how close I can get to
the president with my little gun."
He wrote Foster a note...
takes a cab up
to the Washington Hilton Hotel,
gets there, is behind the rope
line, sees Reagan approaching,
pulls out
his .22-caliber revolver...
He thought something magical was gonna happen that
didn't have anything to do with Ronald Reagan.
You know, it had to do with some union
that he was gonna have with Jodie Foster.
By the spring of 1982, a year after the
presidential assassination attempt,
the four victims are
all healing.
Jim Brady's recovery is
painfully slow, but positive.
Though losing most use of the left side of
his body, he retains his cognitive thinking
and great sense of humor.
Agent Tim McCarthy makes
a full recovery
and continues his career
with the Secret Service.
D.C. Police officer Tom Delahanty
suffered a crippling wound
that eventually forced
his retirement.
President Reagan surprised his doctors and the
nation, healing quickly for a man his age.
As for John W. Hinckley Jr.,
his life story was
a tabloid soap opera played out
for a worldwide audience.
About his alleged assailant,
Mr. Reagan said, "I hope
and pray he can find an answer
to his problem."
Said the president, "He seems to
be a very disturbed young man."
Even Jim Brady was
compassionate.
And he said, well, he didn't
hold any ill will toward him,
but then again he hoped he wouldn't
win the Irish sweepstakes.
Hinckley's motive
seemed simply surreal.
None of this was political.
It was a way to try to force the
recognition that should be granted to him.
In a surprising move,
the judge in the case ordered
Jodie Foster to give
a deposition for the trial.
It took place March 30, 1982, the
first anniversary of the shooting.
By court order, Hinckley was
allowed in the room.
When Foster denied a relationship,
Hinckley became enraged.
He had to be restrained
and removed from the room.
I receive a great deal of unsolicited
mail, but I seldom read it.
I've never met, spoken to, or in any way
associated with one John W. Hinckley.
Last fall, I received several pieces of unsolicited
correspondence signed John W. Hinckley,
or J.W.H.,
and I threw them all away.
John Hinckley's trial
began on May 4, 1982.
His defense... innocent
by reason of insanity.
Under Federal Law at the time,
once the defendant raised
the defense of insanity,
the prosecution had to disprove
the insanity claim beyond
a reasonable doubt.
Professor Richard Bonnie is an
expert on law and psychiatry.
He wrote what is considered a definitive
textbook on the Hinckley trial.
As far as the prosecution was concerned, that the
dominant diagnosis was that this was a person
with a narcissistic personality disorder
that was infatuated with Jodie Foster
and basically what
he was really, really wanted was
to be famous but that he was
in touch with reality.
As far as the defense was concerned, that
he basically had a form of schizophrenia,
a schizophrenic process disorder, that
he was out of touch with reality,
was descending into psychosis,
that he was delusional.
My interpretation of insanity goes
back to the old M'Naghten Rule.
And it's very simply can the individual
differentiate right from wrong?
And clearly, during my interview with John
Hinckley, he clearly understood the difference
between right and wrong.
The prosecution argued that Hinckley
had carefully planned the attack.
The fact that he was able to travel, the
fact that he did look at the schedule,
put that type of effort
into planning this event...
devastator rounds...
That's premeditated activity.
The defense countered with Dr. Will
Carpenter's testimony on schizophrenia.
In general, with illnesses
like schizophrenia,
people can do most things in life in an ordinary
way, so they're not conspicuously crazy.
They don't go into McDonald's
and order watermelons.
Hinckley did not have a lot
of disorganization pathology.
His was much more the reality distortion,
the false beliefs, and his belief in those,
and letting those guide
his life.
It came down to our psychiatrist
versus his psychiatrist.
John W. Hinckley Jr. Has been found not guilty
by reason of insanity on all 13 counts.
I was surprised at the verdict.
I think almost everyone was
surprised by this verdict.
I would characterize it
as astonishment.
I think the reason
it went in that direction is
that the prosecution
basically denied mental illness.
This was a case in which
there was much evidence
in Hinckley's own hand...
in his writings, in his poetry,
in his essays... to suggest that he was, in
fact, degenerating into a psychotic killer
by the time
March of 1981 rolled around.
Expecting a guilty verdict, Hinckley
had prepared a statement...
"From the start, all I wanted
was for someone to love me.
On March 30, 1981, I was asking
my family to take me back,
and I was asking Jodie Foster
to hold me in her heart.
My assassination attempt was
an act of love."
After the verdict, Hinckley was
committed indefinitely
to St. Elizabeth's Hospital
in Washington, D.C.
It wasn't until years later that I was assigned
to the Reagan detail and we had an opportunity
when I was in the limo with the
president to talk about John Hinckley.
His desire was that John Hinckley got
the necessary help that he needed.
And then he said, "But I have to tell
you something... It hurt like hell."
And Reagan had a very good way
of putting things behind him.
He was very good
at kind of separating himself
from bad moments.
And I don't think
it bothered him.
Nancy Reagan, though...
It bothered her.
She was concerned about...
Every time that they would
make mention that John Hinckley
might be released,
she would come to me and say, "Steve, I just
need to make sure that that won't happen."
In 2003, the year before President Reagan died, a
federal judge ruled that Hinckley was no longer
a danger to himself or others
and should be allowed
limited visits to
his mother's home in Virginia.
To this day, the Secret Service
watches Hinckley,
tracking his whereabouts, the people he meets...
even the books he checks out of the library.
Is he dangerous
to other people still?
Will he do this again?
I never had any sense
that there was any deep remorse,
yet I don't think
that he'd be very capable.
He had mental illness at that
time, and there are still issues.
Clearly, I think
that he is where he should be.
In the years
after the assassination attempt,
President Ronald Reagan's
approval rating skyrocketed.
Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall.
He became one of the most popular
presidents in American history.
During Reagan's second term,
Jim and Sarah Brady became
vocal supporters
of gun-control legislation.
Their efforts paid off in 1993 with the signing
of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.
It required federal background checks on
commercial sales of handguns to individuals.
Unfortunately, the Brady Bill came
too late for John W. Hinckley.
Several months after the shooting, his father
asked him what might have stopped him.
Hinckley replied, "Maybe if I'd had to wait
a while to buy a gun, had to fill out forms
or get a permit first or sign in with
the police or anything complicated,
I probably wouldn't
have done it."
been a late development.
At this moment, we don't
know precisely what happened.
Oh, my God.
He's been shot.
- Shots fired!
- Get him out!
The president of
the United States has been shot.
I could see it
through the viewfinder...
Even now.
An inch from his heart.
He was minutes away
from not making it.
- Get him out!
- Who is the shooter?
And then, he says, "Well, if you know
about that, you know about everything."
A bizarre motive... And he thought
the relationship was real.
He was a really,
severely disturbed person.
And his crime changed history.
The shooting of Ronald Reagan,
next.
On January 20, 1981, Ronald
Wilson Reagan was sworn in
as the 40th President
of the United States.
I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear...
As with most new administrations,
Reagan's first couple
of months are rocky.
And this is the 70th day
of Reagan's presidency.
Things were not going
particularly well.
He had a very low approval rating, the lowest
of any President that early in his first term.
It's a Monday, and Reagan has
one big event that day.
It's to deliver a speech
to the AFL-CIO.
It's 2:00, a kind of gray day
in Washington.
And Ronald Reagan's motorcade has just arrived
for his speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel,
which is behind us, this...
and this is the special entrance
back here, the V.I.P. entrance that Reagan
walked into at 2:00 p.m. When he arrived.
Government's first duty is to protect
the people, not run their lives.
The event is covered
by all the major networks.
For ABC News photographer hank
Brown, it's a routine job.
We're the pool crew that travel with
the president wherever he goes.
We wanted to get the picture of the president
walking out of the hotel and getting in a limo.
15 feet from that door was
a rope line.
All the cameramen...
Everybody's laughing.
It was unsecured...
no I.D. checks.
People thought
it was a press line.
It wasn't.
Anyone could be
behind that line.
You see Hinckley's face about three rows
back, totally passive... no reaction at all.
I got my camera out, aimed it at the
door where the president was coming out.
I could see it through
the viewfinder, even now.
Reagan is walking towards
his way to the limousine.
The Secret Service agents are surrounding
him as he goes towards the car.
Just 15 feet from him is
John W. Hinckley Jr.
He pulls out
his .22-caliber revolver...
and unleashes six shots
in 1.7 seconds.
1. 7 seconds is the time it
takes me to say "1.7 seconds."
It's that fast.
The first shot hits Jim Brady, the
press secretary, in the head.
Brady is seen here, between Reagan
and Secret Service Agent Jerry Parr.
The second shot hits Tom Delahanty, a D.C.
police officer, in the back.
- Get him out!
- Get him out!
- Get him out!
- Get back!
The third shot goes high, hits that
building across the street right there.
The fourth shot hits Timothy McCarthy, a
Secret Service agent, square in the chest.
He's not wearing
a bulletproof vest.
He falls to the ground.
The fifth shot hits the armored,
bulletproof window of the car...
as Reagan and Parr flash
behind it, diving in.
The sixth shot cracks
across the driveway.
No one knows
where that sixth shot went
until, later, they realize it
slapped off the side of the car,
slipped through a gap between
the door and the door frame.
I thought it was firecrackers.
And the next thing I knew,
one of the Secret Service agents
behind me just seized me here by the waist
and plunged me headfirst into the limo.
The agent is 50-year-old Jerry Parr,
head of Reagan's Secret Service detail.
As we go in, I go in on top of him, and I'm
sure I hit my radio or my gun or something...
hit him on the back.
And I said, "Jerry, get off.
I think you've broken
a rib of mine."
Jerry Parr is looking
out the window.
He's pulling out this way.
Jerry Parr is looking
out the window.
He sees three men down, a
bullet mark on the left window.
He knows there's been
an assassination attempt.
And that limousine is alone.
Parr checks Reagan out
really quickly, you know?
He seems okay.
Reagan thinks he's okay.
I ran my hands up under his coat and felt all
around his belt with my hands... no blood.
I ran my hands
up under his arms... no blood.
"Rawhide" is Reagan's
Secret Service code name.
And on this day, there's no better code name for
a president than "Rawhide" for Ronald Reagan.
We're going right.
We're going to crown.
Okay, back to the White House.
Back to the White House.
Rawhide is okay.
We interrupt... There's been a late development...
Shots reported fired outside the hotel
where President Reagan spoke
a short while ago.
Here's Bernard Shaw
in our Washington bureau.
Okay, my apology.
Details are very sketchy
at this moment.
We don't know precisely
what happened.
We don't know the sequence.
First of all,
the president is safe.
Safe, yes, but not okay.
Reagan starts complaining of pain in his back
and his chest and side... not feeling so good.
And just then, I coughed, and I had a
handful of bright red, frothy... blood.
And he said, "I think I've cut
the inside of my mouth."
And I said, "Let me look."
And it was pretty profuse.
And Parr knows
this is big trouble.
So, he has a decision to make... "Do
I head back to the White House,
the safest place
in the known universe?"
Or does he divert to George Washington
Hospital, the nearest trauma center,
where there's not
an ounce of security?
But Ronald Reagan's life, literally, on this
day, hung in the balance of a split second
and a mere inch.
And I'm not exaggerating.
Outside the hotel,
the scene is chaotic.
In the bedlam,
the shooter is tackled.
There was pushing.
There was shoving.
- Back up!
- Back up!
Get him out!
You hear the agents scream,
"Get him out of here!
Get him out of here!"
- Get him out!
- Get him out!
And at the same time,
an ambulance was arriving.
Here, come on!
Back it up, please!
So I immediately went back
to filming the scene.
I thought,
"I have to preserve history."
It brought tears to my eyes.
I still see Brady lying there.
I still think about Delahanty.
I see his face.
I still see McCarthy being lifted up off the
ground and being thrown back by the bullet.
Within minutes of the shooting, President
Reagan arrives at George Washington hospital.
He insists on walking in.
The nurse met me, and I told her I was
having a little trouble breathing.
The president was at the point where we, in
medicine, would say he was ready to crash.
The next thing I knew then was my knees began
to turn to rubber, and I wound up on a gurney.
If he had gone to the White House, they would've
dragged him out of the car, looked him over,
found out he was in big trouble, put him
back in the car, drove him to G.W....
Yeah, it would've taken
10, 15, maybe more minutes.
He didn't have that time.
And there's a nurse there trying to get the
president's blood pressure, and she can't detect it.
She can't feel
his blood pressure.
He's not doing so good.
And she's going, "Oh, my God.
He's gonna die.
I'm gonna lose the president
of the United States."
I didn't know I was shot.
I really do believe that he was
minutes away from not making it.
The shot that got me caromed
off the side of the limousine
and hit me while I was diving
into the car.
And it hit me back here, under
the arm and then hit a rib,
and that's what caused
an extreme pain.
And then, it tumbled, it turned instead
of edgewise and went tumbling down
to within an inch of my heart.
First Lady Nancy Reagan is in the solarium
at the White House when she gets the news.
George Opfer, who was head of my detail, He said,
"there's been a shooting, but don't worry.
The president's
all right."
George kept saying,
"You don't have to go.
He's all right.
He hasn't been hurt."
I said, "George, I'm going.
You better get the car
because I'm going."
And she comes into the E.R.
and the first thing Ronald Reagan says
to her is, "Honey, I forgot to duck."
As he's prepped for surgery, Reagan stays
in character and jokes with his doctors.
He looked at me, and he says,
"I hope you're all Republicans."
And I'm a notorious
liberal Democrat.
And I said, "Today, Mr. President,
we're all Republicans."
The surgical team is
led by Dr. Benjamin Aaron.
As the main head surgeon is
digging
through Reagan's chest, trying to find this bullet
fragment, worried it could slip into an artery
and shoot into the president's
brain and kill him,
Dr. David Adelberg reached his
hand in the president's chest,
gently cupped the president's beating
heart in his hand, and held it aside.
A 31-year-old surgical intern
literally held the beating life
of the president of
the United States in his hand.
While Reagan is in surgery, the
suspect, John W. Hinckley Jr.,
of Evergreen, Colorado, is
being questioned.
He admitted who he was.
He made no attempt
to hide who he was.
The FBI and Secret Service have two questions...
why did he do it, and did he act alone?
He said to them at the time, "You'll understand
why I did this when you see my room."
According to sources, John Hinckley Jr., the
accused gunman, may have tried to kill Mr. Reagan
because of an infatuation
with a young actress.
We can report that shots were fired as President
Reagan left the Washington Hilton Hotel
following that address
we carried live here on CNN.
The suspect was rushed to
district of police headquarters.
John W. Hinckley Jr., age 25, is a
complete mystery to his captors.
When I walked into the room, John Hinckley
was just sitting quietly on his seat,
showed no emotion.
Secret Service Agent
Stephen Colo is among
the first to see Hinckley.
He told me that his wrist hurt because
of the handcuffs that were placed on him
and that his throat hurt.
Someone hurt his throat
when they arrested him.
Well, certainly, in my mind, it was not
typical that he was complaining about himself
after he had just shot
a number of people.
As investigators begin
to question Hinckley,
White House press secretary Jim Brady's wife, Sarah
Brady, is at home with their 2-year-old son.
We were sitting in our rec room watching
television when they announced it.
The president did not appear to be hurt
according to United Press International.
So, I thought to myself,
"Oh, that's great,"
never dreaming that Jim would even
have been with him for some reason.
But the phone rang immediately.
It was a friend of mine, and she
had heard that Jim had been shot.
The White House immediately sends a
car to take Sarah to the hospital.
And for some reason, I just
thought, "He's been winged."
You know, it just never dawned on me
that he'd been badly hurt or killed.
I just kept thinking
he was shot in the arm.
It was very obvious
that he was seriously injured
with a gunshot wound
to the head, but he was alive.
And he probably should not have made it,
but he got exceedingly great medical care
from a doctor named Art Kobrine.
With her husband on his way to surgery,
hospital workers usher Mrs. Brady
into a secure waiting room.
Mrs. Reagan came in,
and she came over to me.
And we hugged each other.
And she said, "I am so scared."
And I said, "I am, too."
While surgeons work to save the shooting
victims, suspect John Hinckley is transferred
to the FBI's Washington
field office for questioning.
Two senior FBI agents are assigned
to conduct the interview.
As a courtesy, they invite Secret
Service Agent Steve Colo to sit in.
I was there in a liaison
position at that time,
keeping in mind the Secret Service could not be
part of the investigation because technically
the Secret Service is at fault anytime one
of our protectees has been shot or injured.
Before the questioning begins, the agents
inventory Hinckley's personal possessions.
When they opened the wallet,
there was a picture.
The belief was that the picture
of this attractive woman came
with the wallet because
she was somewhat recognizable
as, like, a young starlet,
but none of us knew her name.
There was a piece of paper
that was stuck
in the billfold section that had
a telephone number on it.
Well, one of the FBI agents said, "Oh,
that's a Connecticut telephone number."
It meant nothing to me
at the time.
When the interview begins, Hinckley
doesn't react well to the questioning
by his FBI interrogators, so
they ask Agent Colo to step in.
Within minutes,
Hinckley opens up.
He told me about the different
doctors that he had been to.
He talked about dropping
out of school.
He talked about his relationship with his
parents and how annoyed they were with him.
So, I asked him
how could he explain his issues?
And he says,
"I have no direction in life."
I decided to take a long shot.
So, I said to him, "I saw the piece
of paper with the telephone number...
the number
that goes to Connecticut."
When I said that to him, he, all
of a sudden, became animated.
Here was a guy who was
almost stoic in his answers,
and all of a sudden now,
he is twitching, and he says,
"Well, if you know about that,
you know about everything."
And I knew I hit on a really important fact,
and I had no idea what he was talking about.
So I said to him, "I know, but I
have to hear it in your words."
And he said, "Well, that telephone
number goes to Yale University.
It goes to Jodie Foster's room."
And bingo, that was the picture
in the wallet.
Back at the hospital, Dr. Kobrine is
meticulously removing bullet fragments
and damaged tissue
from Jim Brady's brain.
The surgery is slow,
delicate, and dangerous.
At one point, they're hearing on
the radio that Jim Brady's died.
And someone rushes in to tell Art Kobrine,
"Hey, they're reporting Jim Brady's dead."
And Art Kobrine turns to the guy and says, "What
do they think I'm operating on, a... corpse?"
That's what's he said.
And they kept it totally away from us, 'cause
we had no television or anything like that,
which was really good.
But a lot of people did hear, including
friends who were watching TV
with the Bradys'
2-year-old son, Scott.
When they announced his death,
they showed his picture.
Scott said,
"Oh, there's my daddy,"
and went up
and kissed the screen.
But, of course, he didn't...
he didn't know that, um...
After five hours, Dr. Kobrine
emerges from the operating room.
The minute I saw his face,
I knew it was successful.
I mean, it was a miracle.
Against all odds, Jim Brady survives,
though he'll be permanently disabled
and wheelchair-bound
for the rest of his life.
The other victims also undergo
surgery and survive.
Secret Service Agent Tim
McCarthy was hit in the chest
and D.C. policeman Tom Delahanty
was shot in the back.
That evening, FBI agents search John
Hinckley's Washington, D.C., hotel room.
Hinckley had laid out... and this was the bizarre
thing, really bizarre... He had laid out there
from the morning's newspaper,
the president's schedule.
He had beside that a statement really in the
form of a letter to the actress Jodie Foster.
In his letter, Hinckley writes, "I am
doing all this for your sake, 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."
It was when we read the letter
from the hotel room
that we finally put
the pieces together.
It looked to all of us, gut feeling, this is
a lone gunman, and there was the motive...
to impress this actress.
We can understand political motives,
but here we have a motive of love.
President Reagan had just delivered a fairly
well-received speech at the Hilton Washington Hotel.
Then, shots.
Within 24 hours of the assassination attempt,
the FBI and Secret Service are digging deeply
into John Hinckley Jr.'s
background.
Leads were going out
all over the country.
We literally took his life apart to track
him off every receipt he ever had,
any dollar that was spent
that we could track.
We wanted to know where he had been and what
he had done as far back as we could go.
What they found was a long trail
of despair, deceit, and delusion.
Hinckley had a seemingly normal childhood, growing
up in an affluent suburb of Dallas, Texas.
He played sports as a boy
and did well in school.
But as he grew older,
Hinckley began to withdraw.
His parents chalked it up
to shyness.
From the time Hinckley graduated
from this high school,
Highland Park in the Dallas area, in 1973, until
his arrest, there was also a personality change.
He had become quieter, more
introverted, somewhat of a recluse.
In 1973, Hinckley moved to Evergreen,
Colorado, with his parents.
They hoped
he would go to college.
He did for a while,
attending Texas Tech off and on
for a few years
but never graduating.
Mostly, he spent time in his room alone
writing gloomy poems and playing his guitar.
♪ Da-da-da ♪
♪ Da-da-da ♪
He dreamed of being
a songwriter, a musician.
And so, for a summer,
he spent some amount of time
out in L.A., pretending he was going to sell
his music to companies and all that stuff.
He certainly had a grandiose view of himself
and an exaggerated view of his accomplishments
as a composer and as a musician.
But he didn't do anything.
He sat and watched TV
in his apartment.
He didn't go anywhere.
He seemed like, in a sense,
a lost soul, you know?
He goes out to Hollywood expecting something
and just ends up in a room by himself
and going to see this movie over
and over, the "Taxi Driver" movie.
Investigators soon realize that the movie
"Taxi Driver" is a central influence
on Hinckley's life, so much that Hinckley even
adopts the persona of the lead character played
by Robert De Niro, that of a disturbed
Vietnam vet named Travis Bickle.
Hinckley begins dressing
in Army fatigues, like Bickle.
He begins drinking peach brandy,
like Bickle.
And he becomes obsessed with guns
and assassination, like Bickle.
He saw that movie 15 times, "Taxi
Driver," a very violent movie.
And he becomes obsessed
with Jodie Foster in this movie.
Jodie Foster plays a 12-year-old
prostitute named Iris.
He felt the relationship
with Jodie Foster was real,
not something that was based
on her role in a movie.
He was just
one of these warped guys.
While the FBI investigates Hinckley, Ronald Reagan
is recovering at George Washington Hospital,
which has been transformed
into the seat of government.
The White House is always
wherever the president is.
Everything had moved there.
The decisions were being made,
and the staff was over there.
It was so strange.
It's a turmoil around here.
I thought, for intensive care, you know,
that everybody would be whispering,
but it's like
Grand Central Station.
Everything was very surreal
for a couple of days there.
I mean, it just...
It was like living in a movie.
Has the president at all asked or has he been
told about the condition of his press secretary?
He is not aware of the number... of the other
people who were shot and injured at this time.
It isn't until Reagan asks his
staff if anyone else was shot
that he's told about Officer Delahanty, Agent
McCarthy, and Press Secretary Jim Brady.
He called me down
and said he was so sorry.
And... I told him... you know, that Jim
was doing what he loved to do the most.
And I kind of tried
to reassure him,
but he was very emotional
about it, of course.
Reagan also wants to see the Secret Service
agent who took a bullet for him, Tim McCarthy.
Reagan looks at him, and he can...
Maybe he senses something in McCarthy.
I don't know, but Reagan looks
at him and says,
"So, Tim... McCarthy, Reagan,
Brady, and Delahanty.
What did this guy have
against the Irish?"
He handled it very well.
And as he said to us in his interview,
he didn't know what had happened.
He still managed
to make jokes about it,
bringing his personality forth to make everybody
in the country feel better about themselves.
Everybody but John Hinckley Jr.
In this hour, John Hinckley Jr. pleads not guilty
to charges he tried to kill President Reagan,
and both his lawyer and the government
agree he is competent to stand trial.
From the moment he was arrested, the
issue of sanity became paramount
to the legal teams assigned to
prosecute and defend John Hinckley.
Facing a judge for the first time, Hinckley stood
while the clerk read the 13-count indictment.
Among the spectators were
Hinckley's parents.
They watched intently as the clerk
asked their son, "How do you plead?"
In a clear, loud voice, the 26-year-old
Hinckley answered, "Not guilty."
You know, Hinckley is an interesting person
but not interesting at the same time.
There didn't seem
to be much there.
You could not form
a rapport with him.
He seemed to have
little expression of emotion.
Dr. Will Carpenter, a research psychiatrist
at the University of Maryland, was hired
to give an expert opinion
in Hinckley's defense.
I believe that I spent
about 44 hours evaluating him.
Most of that would have been
in interviews with him.
He was self-centered,
but he wasn't narcissistic.
It was more like kind of a loner who
doesn't have much else going on
and then would get grandiose
ideas, including delusional ideas.
He made up a whole girlfriend
for his parents for a year.
She didn't exist.
She seemed awfully real
to him at times.
But it's very much to manipulate his parents
so that he could be off and doing what it was
that he intended to do
without their interfering.
In the summer of 1980, Hinckley
read a story about Jodie Foster.
The 18-year-old actress was taking a sabbatical
from Hollywood to attend Yale University.
So, Hinckley told his parents that he was going
back to college... but at Yale, not Texas Tech.
And so he makes up a whole elaborate ruse to
his parents about how he's gonna go to Yale
for a writing class that doesn't exist, and
the whole time he spent stalking Foster.
He finds out where she lives.
He's slipping notes
under her door.
And he's on the phone with her,
and he taped these calls.
Who is this?
We started to yell
at the recorder, "Hang up!
Hang up!"
Because this is what we'd tell our
wife or our daughter, you know?
You hang up right away.
And they're just really
sad and pathetic calls.
He's reaching out to this woman he
idolized and wanted to be part of.
And so he gets in his mind, you know, "If
I get the president of the United States,
she'll love me.
You know, she'll want me.
She'll know who I am."
And so he starts stalking
Jimmy Carter.
It was just a month
before Reagan was elected.
He and President Carter were
campaigning hard for every vote.
In October 1980, John Hinckley gets
within arm's reach of Jimmy Carter
at an event in Dayton, Ohio.
One week later, Hinckley is in Nashville,
Tennessee, still stalking Carter.
When Hinckley leaves, airport police
find several guns in his luggage.
He was arrested, never fingerprinted and
photographed for carrying a weapon.
And the information was never
sent to the Secret Service.
They took the weapons, he paid a
fine, and that was the end of that.
Within days, Hinckley is in Dallas, where
his sister lives, shopping for more guns
at Rocky's Pawn Shop.
He buys two revolvers for $98, including the
one he'll use to shoot President Reagan.
He purchased it legally
at the time.
Caliber .22... It was a very
lightweight, snub-nose handgun.
He had actually gone
to firing ranges.
You know, he had trained
or given himself training.
John Hinckley took
a lot of target practice.
I mean, he took
a lot of target practice.
He never shot at moving targets.
And Jerry Parr is moving
the president
towards
that open limousine door.
On December 8, 1980, John Hinckley's
fragile world begins to crack
when he hears shocking news
from new York City.
The news ripped through the air
in shock waves.
John Lennon shot and killed in the Dakota
apartment building where he lived.
Gunned down in front
of his exclusive
Manhattan apartment building.
The suspect is identified
as Mark David Chapman.
Hinckley idolized Lennon.
That New Year's Eve, he locks himself in his
room at his parents' house, drinks peach brandy,
plays his guitar,
and wallows in his own misery.
♪ Da-da-da ♪
Sometime during the night, Hinckley writes in
his diary, "John Lennon is dead. Forget it.
It's just gonna be insanity.
I still think about Jodie
all the time.
Anything I might do in 1981 would
be solely for Jodie Foster's sake.
I want to tell the world
that I love her."
Valentine's Day, 1981.
John Hinckley, the man who will soon shoot Ronald
Reagan, has been in New Haven for two days
leaving more notes
for Jodie Foster.
On one postcard he writes, "One day,
you and I will occupy the White House.
Please do your best
to remain a virgin.
You are a virgin, aren't you?"
But this time, Hinckley is not
just leaving her notes.
He's contemplating
a violent act.
He had guns with him when he was in New Haven
stalking Jodie Foster, and he was just unsure
what he was doing with it.
Spurned once more by Foster and feeling
suicidal, Hinckley goes to New York City
still carrying the guns
he bought in Dallas.
We talked about the guns
and the whole history with guns.
And he described,
you know, having them with him
when he was in New York.
And he considered killing himself then... kind
of standing on the place where Chapman had been
outside the Dakota.
But Hinckley does not
act on any of his thoughts.
Instead, he goes back
to Evergreen, Colorado,
where his parents live.
He came back, and there was
a lot of friction between him
and his father and his mother about what he was
going to do with his life... get a job or not.
They recognized he had some mental problems,
so they sent him to see a psychiatrist.
Hinckley first saw the
psychiatrist the previous October.
And in one of the first sessions, he tells
the psychiatrist, "I'm kind of... Hey,
I'm really interested
in guns and Jodie Foster.
I'm obsessed
with these two things."
And after that, the psychiatrist never asked
him another question about those two things.
At one point, the psychiatrist, Dr. John
Hopper, had told Hinckley's parents
that their son was simply immature, that he needed
to grow up, get a job, and live on his own.
The last of 15 sessions takes place 4
1/2 half weeks before the shooting.
The mother of the troubled young
man might have kept him home.
The brother and the sister would
have had him institutionalized.
But the family followed
the psychiatrist's advice,
as troubled families will do, and, to
put it mildly, it didn't work out.
His parents actually gave him
an ultimatum.
They were supplying
the funding for his travels.
And they were getting tired
of it.
And they told him emphatically,
in his words, that, you know,
he had to clean up his act and get a job, and
they're cutting off his funds at the end of March.
He was not capable of taking that as a
challenge and then straightening his life out.
He was more capable of drifting off as
a loner into his own fantasy world.
And so, at the end of March, he makes the
decision that he has to do something.
Six days before the shooting, Hinckley flies to Los
Angeles, then boards a bus to Washington, D.C.
From there, he'll go to New Haven and
commit his act of love for Jodie Foster.
He even writes her another note,
telling her to wait for him.
His plan was to shoot Foster,
shoot himself,
or kill both of them in this orgy
of violence... that was his plan.
On his way to Yale,
Hinckley stops off in D.C.
He checks in to the Park Central Hotel, sleeps,
gets up, and goes for a fast-food breakfast.
It was just by chance that
that morning he got up
and read the paper and saw the president was
going to the Hilton to talk to the AFL-CIO.
Saw the president's schedule
on page A-4
of The Washington Star
newspaper, said, you know,
"I'm gonna see how close I can get to
the president with my little gun."
He wrote Foster a note...
takes a cab up
to the Washington Hilton Hotel,
gets there, is behind the rope
line, sees Reagan approaching,
pulls out
his .22-caliber revolver...
He thought something magical was gonna happen that
didn't have anything to do with Ronald Reagan.
You know, it had to do with some union
that he was gonna have with Jodie Foster.
By the spring of 1982, a year after the
presidential assassination attempt,
the four victims are
all healing.
Jim Brady's recovery is
painfully slow, but positive.
Though losing most use of the left side of
his body, he retains his cognitive thinking
and great sense of humor.
Agent Tim McCarthy makes
a full recovery
and continues his career
with the Secret Service.
D.C. Police officer Tom Delahanty
suffered a crippling wound
that eventually forced
his retirement.
President Reagan surprised his doctors and the
nation, healing quickly for a man his age.
As for John W. Hinckley Jr.,
his life story was
a tabloid soap opera played out
for a worldwide audience.
About his alleged assailant,
Mr. Reagan said, "I hope
and pray he can find an answer
to his problem."
Said the president, "He seems to
be a very disturbed young man."
Even Jim Brady was
compassionate.
And he said, well, he didn't
hold any ill will toward him,
but then again he hoped he wouldn't
win the Irish sweepstakes.
Hinckley's motive
seemed simply surreal.
None of this was political.
It was a way to try to force the
recognition that should be granted to him.
In a surprising move,
the judge in the case ordered
Jodie Foster to give
a deposition for the trial.
It took place March 30, 1982, the
first anniversary of the shooting.
By court order, Hinckley was
allowed in the room.
When Foster denied a relationship,
Hinckley became enraged.
He had to be restrained
and removed from the room.
I receive a great deal of unsolicited
mail, but I seldom read it.
I've never met, spoken to, or in any way
associated with one John W. Hinckley.
Last fall, I received several pieces of unsolicited
correspondence signed John W. Hinckley,
or J.W.H.,
and I threw them all away.
John Hinckley's trial
began on May 4, 1982.
His defense... innocent
by reason of insanity.
Under Federal Law at the time,
once the defendant raised
the defense of insanity,
the prosecution had to disprove
the insanity claim beyond
a reasonable doubt.
Professor Richard Bonnie is an
expert on law and psychiatry.
He wrote what is considered a definitive
textbook on the Hinckley trial.
As far as the prosecution was concerned, that the
dominant diagnosis was that this was a person
with a narcissistic personality disorder
that was infatuated with Jodie Foster
and basically what
he was really, really wanted was
to be famous but that he was
in touch with reality.
As far as the defense was concerned, that
he basically had a form of schizophrenia,
a schizophrenic process disorder, that
he was out of touch with reality,
was descending into psychosis,
that he was delusional.
My interpretation of insanity goes
back to the old M'Naghten Rule.
And it's very simply can the individual
differentiate right from wrong?
And clearly, during my interview with John
Hinckley, he clearly understood the difference
between right and wrong.
The prosecution argued that Hinckley
had carefully planned the attack.
The fact that he was able to travel, the
fact that he did look at the schedule,
put that type of effort
into planning this event...
devastator rounds...
That's premeditated activity.
The defense countered with Dr. Will
Carpenter's testimony on schizophrenia.
In general, with illnesses
like schizophrenia,
people can do most things in life in an ordinary
way, so they're not conspicuously crazy.
They don't go into McDonald's
and order watermelons.
Hinckley did not have a lot
of disorganization pathology.
His was much more the reality distortion,
the false beliefs, and his belief in those,
and letting those guide
his life.
It came down to our psychiatrist
versus his psychiatrist.
John W. Hinckley Jr. Has been found not guilty
by reason of insanity on all 13 counts.
I was surprised at the verdict.
I think almost everyone was
surprised by this verdict.
I would characterize it
as astonishment.
I think the reason
it went in that direction is
that the prosecution
basically denied mental illness.
This was a case in which
there was much evidence
in Hinckley's own hand...
in his writings, in his poetry,
in his essays... to suggest that he was, in
fact, degenerating into a psychotic killer
by the time
March of 1981 rolled around.
Expecting a guilty verdict, Hinckley
had prepared a statement...
"From the start, all I wanted
was for someone to love me.
On March 30, 1981, I was asking
my family to take me back,
and I was asking Jodie Foster
to hold me in her heart.
My assassination attempt was
an act of love."
After the verdict, Hinckley was
committed indefinitely
to St. Elizabeth's Hospital
in Washington, D.C.
It wasn't until years later that I was assigned
to the Reagan detail and we had an opportunity
when I was in the limo with the
president to talk about John Hinckley.
His desire was that John Hinckley got
the necessary help that he needed.
And then he said, "But I have to tell
you something... It hurt like hell."
And Reagan had a very good way
of putting things behind him.
He was very good
at kind of separating himself
from bad moments.
And I don't think
it bothered him.
Nancy Reagan, though...
It bothered her.
She was concerned about...
Every time that they would
make mention that John Hinckley
might be released,
she would come to me and say, "Steve, I just
need to make sure that that won't happen."
In 2003, the year before President Reagan died, a
federal judge ruled that Hinckley was no longer
a danger to himself or others
and should be allowed
limited visits to
his mother's home in Virginia.
To this day, the Secret Service
watches Hinckley,
tracking his whereabouts, the people he meets...
even the books he checks out of the library.
Is he dangerous
to other people still?
Will he do this again?
I never had any sense
that there was any deep remorse,
yet I don't think
that he'd be very capable.
He had mental illness at that
time, and there are still issues.
Clearly, I think
that he is where he should be.
In the years
after the assassination attempt,
President Ronald Reagan's
approval rating skyrocketed.
Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall.
He became one of the most popular
presidents in American history.
During Reagan's second term,
Jim and Sarah Brady became
vocal supporters
of gun-control legislation.
Their efforts paid off in 1993 with the signing
of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.
It required federal background checks on
commercial sales of handguns to individuals.
Unfortunately, the Brady Bill came
too late for John W. Hinckley.
Several months after the shooting, his father
asked him what might have stopped him.
Hinckley replied, "Maybe if I'd had to wait
a while to buy a gun, had to fill out forms
or get a permit first or sign in with
the police or anything complicated,
I probably wouldn't
have done it."