The demonstrator jumped up.
“He starts giving President Reagan the Nazi salute,” Sullivan says. “He starts yelling ‘Heil Reagan! Heil Reagan!’ The president sees him standing up giving him the Nazi salute. The president was so shocked and hurt, he said to us, ‘Did you see that man giving me the Nazi salute? Why would he do that?’”
While it seemed to be a rhetorical question, Reagan clearly wanted a response.
“Mr. President, he’s out there all the time. He’s a nut,” Sullivan said to Reagan. “That’s all he does. He camps out there; he’s there every day.”
“Oh, okay,” Reagan said.
“That’s just the way he was,” Sullivan says. “Once he realized he was a nut, he was okay with him. He just didn’t want this guy to be a regular citizen. Reagan was just a sincere, down-to-earth gentleman. And I think it hurt his feelings that this guy was giving him the Nazi salute.”
Quite often, Reagan quietly wrote personal checks to people who had written him with hard-luck stories.
“Reagan was famous for firing up air force jets on behalf of children who needed transport for kidney operations,” says Frank J. Kelly, who drafted presidential messages. “These are things you never knew about. He never bragged about it. I hand-carried checks for four thousand or five thousand dollars to people who had written him. He would say, ‘Don’t tell people. I was poor myself.’”
While Reagan liked to look for the best in people, he was not a Boy Scout. On one occasion, Reagan gave a speech at Georgetown University. As the motorcade drove down M Street toward the White House, Reagan noticed a man in a crowd.
“Fellows, look,” Reagan said to his agents. “A guy over there’s giving me the finger, can you believe that?”
Reagan started waving back, smiling.
“We’re going by, and he’s still waving and smiling, and he goes, ‘Hi there, you son of a bitch,’” agent Dennis Chomicki remembers, imitating Reagan’s buttery-smooth delivery.
One late Friday afternoon, Reagan had left the White House for Camp David. Agent Sullivan was working W-16, the Secret Service’s office under the Oval Office.
“A guy came up to the northwest gate carrying a live chicken, demanding to see the president,” Sullivan says. “He said he wanted to do a sacrifice for President Reagan. And he impaled the chicken on the fence of the White House. He took the chicken and stuck him on a point on top.”
Uniformed officers arrested the man, and he was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for observation.
When Reagan was to go to Spokane, Washington, in 1986, Pete Dowling was part of the advance team sent to scope things out. Besides reviewing all known threats, he met with the Spokane police department, the FBI, and other agencies that might have intelligence on possible threats.
One night, the police department called Dowling to report that an older couple staying at a Best Western downtown had found a large paper dinner napkin on the floor of an elevator. The napkin appeared to have writing on it, so they looked closer. The napkin apparently had a diagram of the Spokane Coliseum, where Reagan was going to speak in four days.
“I went to the police department, I got the napkin, and sure enough, it was a diagram of the coliseum,” Dowling recalls. “And it had a legend; it had Xs around the exterior of the coliseum, and then in the legend it said X equals security post. Then it had all of our license plates of the cars we were using. Clearly somebody was conducting surveillance of us.”
At the time, a neo-Nazi group called the Aryan Nations was headquartered at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a drive of about forty-five minutes from Spokane. Among other things, the group objected to the tax system and was threatening to assassinate public officials. Dowling thought the napkin could have originated from the group. He drove to the Best Western and asked the clerk to show him all the sign-in cards.
“He gave me a little wooden box that contained index cards,” Dowling says. “There were four hundred rooms in the hotel, so I started thumbing through the index cards, and when I got to the sixtieth one, bingo. It was the exact handwriting and hand printing that I saw on the napkin.”
Dowling noted the license plate listed on the card. He walked into the parking lot and saw a four-door sedan with the same license plate number. Looking inside, he saw blankets neatly piled in the back and two pillows on top of the blankets. Some books were piled on the floor. Obviously, someone was living in the car. Dowling thought it odd that someone living in a car would be so tidy. He called the police and asked for two backup cars.
“We went up to the room, and I knocked on the door, and the guy said, ‘Who is it?’” Dowling says.
“It’s me, open up,” Dowling replied.
“The idiot opened the door. He was just in his underpants. I grabbed him by his hair, and I pulled him out into the hallway,” Dowling says. “One of the officers grabbed him, and we all went in and did what we call a protective sweep of the room, just to ensure that nobody else was in there armed.”
Dowling noticed a bullet on top of the dresser. Attached to the bullet was a string, and attached to the string was a little white piece of paper.
“Reagan will die,” the paper said.
The suspect gave Dowling permission to search the room but not his car.
“I’m going to be up all night anyway, so to do an application for a search warrant and to bring it to a judge at his home at three o’clock in the morning, that’s no sweat for me,” Dowling said to the man. “Either way, it doesn’t matter.”
“You can search my car,” the man said. “The gun’s in the car.”
It turned out the man had just gotten out of prison after being convicted of bank robbery. While he was in jail, he had had a romantic relationship with another male inmate. The other inmate had just been transferred to another prison, and the suspect heard that his former lover was romantically involved with somebody else.
“He wanted to do something spectacular in the Spokane area so he could go back to jail and be reunited with the other man,” Dowling says.
As Reagan was running for reelection in 1984, a New York state trooper spotted an old Buick sedan going twenty-five miles an hour on the New York State Thruway where the speed limit was sixty-five. The trooper pulled the man over and immediately noticed an array of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition on the floor and front passenger seat.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the officer asked.
“I’m going to kill the people running against Reagan,” the man replied.
The officer arrested the man, who was committed to a mental hospital north of New York City for observation. Because the man had threatened to kill presidential candidates, two Secret Service agents, at the direction of the Secret Service Intelligence Division, were dispatched to interview him. At first, the patient’s psychiatric manager balked at the idea of a law enforcement interview. He then relented as long as the agents removed their guns and handcuffs and did not bring radios or briefcases.
“The man said he was glad to see us,” one of the agents says. “He said he loves the Secret Service and was willing to tell us everything.”
But first, the man asked the agents to pray with him.
“We folded our hands and bowed our heads at the interview table and prayed with the man,” the agent says. “At that moment, the psychiatrist walked in. It’s a wonder he didn’t have us committed.”
When the news broke that Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart was having an affair with Donna Rice, Reagan was returning to the White House from an evening event.