"Reagan's Close Call." Newsweek 13 April 1981:31+

The day before the shooting, 25-year-old John Warnock Hinckley Jr., a child of the right gone wrong, arrived at the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Washington--just five long blocks from the White House. For a few moments Hinckley leaned on a pole in the terminal; then he sat down in a blue plastic chair. At about 12:15 p.m. he got into line at the terminal's Burger King. "A Whopper, cheese, no onions, and an order of onion rings," he snapped at waitress Linda Ross, slamming a $5 bill down on the counter. When the waitress asked if the order was to go, he snarled "I said it was for here." He grabbed his change and tray, retreated to a far corner and wolfed down the food. At 1 p.m. he made his way to the Park Central Hotel on Eighteenth Street, two blocks from the White House and less than one block from Secret Service headquarters. He paid $42 for one night's rent on room 312, which had twin beds, ivory wallpaper, a brown carpet and a color TV. He went out again, then hunkered down for the night--and his grim appointment the next day with Ronald Reagan.

While Hinckley cruised the porn district four blocks from the White House, the President was spending a quiet evening in the family quarters at the White House. Next morning he got up, showered, put on a blue suit and tucked a white handkerchief neatly in his pocket. At 8:45 he entered the Oval Office for the day's first briefing with his top aides--White House chief of staff James Baker, deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver and White House counselor Edwin Meese. Richard Allen, the national-security adviser, went over the morning cables. Then his top Congressional lobbyist, Max Friedersdorf, gave him the morning line on Congress. The rest of the day looked to contain nothing more exciting than a meeting with David Rockfeller of Chase Manhattan Bank and dinner with a few Cabinet officers.

Two blocks away, Hinckley got up, dressed and left the hotel. Outside, it was raining. Hinckley went to Kay's Sandwich Shoppe down the street from the Old Executive Office Building, sat on a stool and began to eat his breakfast. Back at room 312, the maid came in. She found Hinckley's clothes packed neatly in a suitcase, a little travel alarm clock and a TV guide--little more. Not long afterward, Hinckley returned. He sat down to compose a love letter to someone he had never met: Jodie Foster, an 18-year-old movie starlet who played a teen-age prostitute in the 1976 film "Taxi Driver". "There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan," he wrote. "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." The signature was equally inflamed: "I love you forever--John Hinckley.

The letter was dated 12:45 p.m. At 1:30, Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan arrived at the White House to escort Reagan to the Washington Hilton Hotel for a speech to 3,500 AFL-CIO union delegates. The two politicians, self-made men of Irish roots and humor, spent the five-minute drive reminiscing about the 1980 New Jersey primary, in which Donovan had played a crucial role for Reagan. Donovan told the President an old New Jersey joke about a local pol demoted to superintendent of Municipal Weights and Measures. After his first day, reporters asked him, "Sir, how many ounces in a pound?" "Hey," he protested. "Give a guy a chance to learn his duties." The President's limousine parked outside the hotel's VIP entrance and Reagan strode in. He worked a reception line, huddled with Donovan, Deaver and Brady in a VIP "holding room." Then he walked into the ballroom and give a conventional little speech that ranged from his budget cuts to the work ethic to violent crime.

Fidgets: Hinckley got ready to make his move. Something after 1:15, when a room maid knocked and found him still in his room, he set off for the Washington Hilton. When he arrived, he took up a positioning front of the curving stone wall that runs from the VIP entrance. "He was very fidgety, agitated," recalled Mike Dodson, a Pinkerton man working in the Agency for International Development across the street who noticed Hinckley as he waited for the President to emerge from the hotel. Reporters and cameramen, also waiting for Reagan, took up stations behind a red-velvet rope. The Secret Service did not screen the press crowd despite the fact that bystanders had made their way into it. A police lieutenant reportedly studied Hinckley for a while--but then looked away.

The leaky security upset Reagan's White House advance men. Rocky Kuonen pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled a diagram, reminding himself to sanitize the press cordon of bystanders before Reagan's next public stop. The precaution came too lake. At 2:25 the President emerged from the VIP entrance into a misty rain. For convenience, his limousine was not parked directly in from of the entrance but 25 feet away so the motorcade could avoid the hotel's curving driveway and a circuitous exit as it pulled away.

As the Presidential party came out, Brady and Deaver swung left, headed for the staff car. Then Reagan stepped forward. Hoping to get in one quick question, Michael Putzel, an AP reporter shouted, "Mr. President, Mr. President," The President smiled and raised his left arm in a cheery wave. At that moment, Hinckley whipped out his gun, dropped to a crouch, took up a cop's professional, double-had grip and opened fire. Reagan froze and went pale. "It was like looking at a person who has seen death reflected in his eyes," said Mickey Crowe, 24, a trembling demonstrator who had come to protest Reagan's pro-nuclear-energy stance. "All I can remember is his expression. It was like a guy saying: 'I'm in a moment of helplessness'."

Shield: Within two seconds, Hinckley emptied his gun, firing six shots in all. The little revolver made a deceptively innocent popping sound. "Firecrackers," thought Kuonen, who had seen heavier fire in Vietnam. At the first pop, Parr, 50 head of the White House Secret Service detail, reached forward and grabbed the startled President. Doubling Reagan over to reduce his target profile, Parr then hunched over him as a human shield and slammed him to the floor of the limousine. Even so, one of Hinckley's shots, caroming off the car's armor, tore a hole in Reagan's suit, pierced his body, traveled serval inches down his side, bounced off a , punctured his left lung and came to rest just 3 inches from his heart. He felt nothing at first. "The car pulled out with the President looking back," said William Middleton, an architect who was standing nearby. "I think it was just the people standing in from of him that saved him."

As the President's motorcade roared down Connecticut Avenue, the radio ("Horsepower") in room W-16, the Secret Service command post at the White House, crackled to life, "Shots fired," reported an agent in "Halfback," the President's follow-up limousine. " 'Rawhide' returning to 'Crown'," he added, signaling that Reagan was on his way back to the White House. "Rawhide not hurt, repeated not hurt," Parr said a few seconds later. In the President's car, Reagan felt his side gingerly. He was having trouble breathing. "It felt like a hammer hit me," Reagan later described the sensation. He began to cough up red blood and agent Parr recognized it as oxygenated blood from the lungs. He directed the driver to change course. Grabbling the car radio, Parr said "'Horsepower.' Parr. Going to George Washington University Hospital. Notify hospital Rawhide en route."

From a window in a building across the street from the Washington Hilton, Wilma Criviski watched as the President's motorcade screeched away, leaving the bodies of three men on the ground. Rushing to a front office, she grabbed a phone, dialed 911 and cried to the emergency dispatcher: "We need an ambulance at the Washington Hilton Hotel; people have been shot in the street." Brady was face down, bleeding into a steel grating and tended to by a Secret Service agent who laid his gun to rest next to Brady's wounded head. Delahanty, a policeman who normally works a different beat but was assigned to Reagan because his guard dog Kirk was sick that day, also lay on the ground groaning in agony. Agent McCarthy lay silent.

The smell of burnt powder filled the air. Alfred Antonucci, 68, a burly, 5-foot 2-inch union representative from Cleveland, tackled Hinckley. Police, hotel security guards and Secret Service men brandishing their weapons also piled on. "There were eight or nine people leaping on this one guy," said Dan Coffey, a mortgage agent. "It seemed like forever before they got him under control." After several minutes of struggling, the officers clapped handcuffs on Hinckley, pulled his coat up over his head as a makeshift straitjacket and hustled him off to metropolitan police headquarters. Three ambulances arrived and hauled away Brady, Delahanty and McCarthy. Looking at the bloody bandages left on the sidewalk, Garnet Chapin, 32, a Reagan advance man during the 1980 campaign who was in town to apply for a job at the Interior Department, said with a groan, "I know it's impossible to completely protect him . . . I was with him from Philly to Flint. Now I'm in Washington and I see this." Tears welled in his eyes. "Damn, damn," he cursed softly.

'Code Room': Within a few minutes the President's motorcade screamed into the emergency entrance of George Washington University Hospital, twelve blocks from the Washington Hilton Hotel. As two Secret Service agents hovered close by, Reagan got out, walked about 15 yards to the emergency room, then staggered and was grabbed by the agents. "His eyes rolled upward and his knees started to buckle, said Roberto Hernandez, 26, a paramedic. I thought he was having a heart attack. "I thought we were losing him." Hernandez took the President by the feet, and the agents hoisted him gently under the arms and carried him--faint but still conscious--to the "code room," a 10-by 20-foot space where the worst emergency cases are treated. "Let's get some oxygen on him," yelled a doctor as the hospital's trauma team swung into action. Hernandez leaned over Reagan and whispered "They'll take care of you, Mr. President."

Another ambulance wailed up to the emergency room and Brady was wheeled into the room next to Reagan. A curtain was drawn between them. A few seconds later a third ambulance pulled up with McCarthy (Delahanty was taken to the "critical-care tower" of the Washington Hospital Center.) McCarthy was lying on his side, clutching his abdomen. "Are you still with us?" asked a colleague. "Oh yeah, I'm still with you," McCarthy said with a grimace. In Chicago McCarthy's mother and sister flicked on their TV, saw the first tapes of the shooting, and wept. When Hinckley began shooting, McCarthy had stepped into the line of fire, perhaps saving Reagan's life.