By the third shot, McCarthy spotted a pair of hands gripping a pistol in between the television cameras just eight feet away. McCarthy lunged for the gun and hurled himself on Hinckley as he was still firing.
“As I was going through the air, I remember the desperate feeling: ‘I’ve got to get to him! I’ve got to get to him! I’ve got to stop him!’” McCarthy says.
Crouched in a combat position, Hinckley collapsed as McCarthy landed on his back. While the assailant offered no resistance, McCarthy remembers hearing the fast click, click, click as Hinckley continued squeezing the trigger, even after the .22 caliber revolver’s six shots had been expended. McCarthy had always wondered how he would react when gunfire actually started. Now he knew.
Like McCarthy, President Reagan at first thought he was hearing the sound of firecrackers.
“I was almost to the car when I heard what sounded like two or three firecrackers over to my left—just a small fluttering sound, pop, pop, pop,” Reagan said later. “I turned and said, ‘What the hell’s that?’ Just then, Jerry Parr, the head of our Secret Service unit, grabbed me by the waist and literally hurled me into the back of the limousine. I landed on my face atop the armrest across the backseat, and Jerry jumped on top of me.”
“I remember three quick shots and four more,” Parr tells me. “With Agent Ray Shaddick, I pushed the president down behind another agent who was holding the car door open. Agent McCarthy got hold of Hinckley by leaping through the air. I got the president in the car, and the other agent slammed the door, and we drove off.”
The limo began speeding toward the White House.
“I checked him over and found no blood,” Parr says. “After fifteen or twenty seconds, we were under Dupont Circle moving fast. President Reagan had a napkin from the speech and dabbed his mouth with it. He said, ‘I think I cut the inside of my mouth.’”
Parr noticed that the blood was bright red and frothy. Knowing that to be a danger sign, he ordered the driver to head toward George Washington University Hospital. It was the hospital that had been preselected in the event medical assistance was needed.
It turned out that the president may have been within minutes of death when he arrived at the hospital. Going straight there probably saved his life.
Reagan remembered how, as they neared the hospital, he suddenly found he could barely breathe. “No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get enough air,” he said. “I was frightened and started to panic a little. I just was not able to inhale enough air.”
In fact, Parr says, “I didn’t know he was shot until we got to the hospital. He collapsed as we walked in.”
As he was placed on a gurney Reagan felt excruciating pain near his ribs.
“What worried me most was that I still could not get enough air, even after the doctors placed a breathing tube in my throat,” Reagan said. “Every time I tried to inhale, I seemed to get less air. I remember looking up from the gurney, trying to focus my eyes on the square ceiling tiles, and praying. Then I guess I passed out for a few minutes.”
When Reagan regained consciousness, he became aware of someone holding his hand.
“It was a soft, feminine hand,” he said. “I felt it come up and touch mine and then hold on tight to it. It gave me a wonderful feeling. Even now I find it difficult to explain how reassuring, how wonderful, it felt. It must have been the hand of a nurse kneeling very close to the gurney, but I couldn’t see her. I started asking, ‘Who’s holding my hand? Who’s holding my hand?’”
At one point, Reagan opened his eyes to see his wife, Nancy.
“Honey, I forgot to duck,” he joked.
As luck would have it, that afternoon most of the doctors who practiced at the hospital were attending a meeting only an elevator ride away from the emergency room.
“Within a few minutes after I arrived, the room was full of specialists in virtually every medical field,” Reagan said. “When one of the doctors said they were going to operate on me, I said, ‘I hope you’re a Republican.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Today Mr. President, we’re all Republicans.’ I also remember saying, after one of the nurses asked me how I felt, ‘All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.’” It was the epitaph of fellow actor W. C. Fields.
Surgeons found a bullet that had punctured and collapsed a lung. It was lodged an inch from Reagan’s heart. If he had been wearing a bulletproof vest, the bullet likely would not have penetrated Reagan’s body.
“On several previous occasions when I’d been out in public as president, the Secret Service had made me wear a bulletproof vest under my suit,” Reagan explained later. “That day, even though I was going to speak to some die-hard Democrats who didn’t think much of my economic recovery program, no one had thought my iron underwear would be necessary because my only exposure was to be a thirty-foot walk to the car.”
“Some of my colleagues have said, ‘Well, I would have taken him to the White House because it’s the safest place,’” Parr says. “You take a chance when you take the president to the hospital. If he’s not hurt, then you frighten the nation. But in this case, we were right. And there was a trauma team there that gets a lot of gunshot wounds.”
For Parr, it was a decision he had never wanted to make. He joined the Secret Service in 1962, a year before John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
“We never forgot it,” Parr says. “We never wanted it to happen on our watch. Unfortunately, it almost happened on mine.”
“The agents who got him [Reagan] out of there did everything right,” says former agent William Albracht, who, as a senior instructor at the training center, taught new agents about lessons learned from previous assassination attempts. “The other agents went to the assassin and helped subdue him.”
In retrospect, he says, “Maybe they should have jumped in the follow-up [car] and gone with the protectee instead of staying there and trying to subdue Hinckley Because you have police there to do that job. All agents are always thinking diversion: Is this the primary attack, or are the bad guys trying to get us to commit all our assets and then hit us on the withdrawal? So whether more agents should have gone with Reagan is twenty-twenty hindsight. We teach agents to go with the protectee to make sure there is a successful escape.”
At the hospital, the FBI confiscated Reagan’s authentication card for launching nuclear weapons, saying that all of Reagan’s effects were needed as evidence. Because no guidelines had been worked out for a situation where a president undergoes emergency surgery, it was not clear who could launch a nuclear strike.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution allows the vice president to act for the president only if the president has declared in writing to the Senate and the House that he is disabled and cannot discharge his duties. If the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet agree that the president is unable to discharge his duties, they may make the vice president the acting president. But that would require time.
Vice President George H. W. Bush could have taken it upon himself to launch a strike by communicating with the defense secretary over a secure line. But it was questionable whether he had the legal authority to do so. When Bush became president, his administration drafted a highly detailed, classified plan for immediate transfer of power in the case of serious presidential illness.
Before he shot Reagan, Hinckley had been obsessed with movie star Jodie Foster after seeing her in Taxi Driver. In the 1976 film, a disturbed man plots to assassinate a presidential candidate. The main character, played by Robert DeNiro, was based on Arthur Bremer, who shot Governor George Wallace. After viewing the movie many times, Hinckley began stalking Foster. Just before his attack on Reagan, he wrote to her, “You’ll be proud of me, Jodie. Millions of Americans will love me—us.”