Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [11]
A minister who boarded in Salt Lake City sat next to Hinckley for a day and a night as the bus traveled east. Hinckley told his seatmate that he was on vacation; lying again, he claimed that he was a college graduate and that he ran a record store in Los Angeles. When the minister asked him whether he was a Christian, Hinckley offered no reply. As the miles flowed by, Hinckley revealed few details about his life. He didn’t even tell the minister his last name.
Hinckley slept poorly during the trip; by the time he arrived in Washington on Sunday, March 29, he was exhausted and hungry. He found a hotel, got some food, and spent another restless night.
Now it was Monday morning and he barely had enough energy to get out of bed. He had a little over $129 left, and he had managed to jam the jumbled detritus of his life into two suitcases. A plaid one, stacked neatly on his hotel room’s foldout stand, was stuffed with an army field jacket, a black sports coat, a Best Western road atlas, two pairs of underwear, and some shirts, pants, and jeans. The suitcase also held some of his poems and short stories, as well as several of his favorite books. In addition to The Catcher in the Rye, Hinckley had brought along a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and a book called Strawberry Fields Forever: John Lennon Remembered.
Hinckley’s distress was evident in some of the items he’d carried with him to Washington. Another of the books in the plaid suitcase was Ted Bundy: The Killer Next Door. The suitcase also held a box of ammunition containing six Devastator bullets, each nestled in a foam slot. In his smaller, tan suitcase, he had stashed a gun—an R.G. Industries model RG 14, a .22-caliber double-action revolver that had cost him about $45—and thirty-seven rounds of ammunition. The bags also held a number of tape recordings, magazine clippings, and photographs, artifacts of his obsession with the woman in New Haven.
Just after nine a.m., Hinckley dressed and left the hotel. He wandered through a bookstore and then strolled along bustling K Street. He stopped into a McDonald’s and ate an Egg McMuffin. His thoughts kept returning to a simple, mesmerizing plan: he would take a bus to New Haven and end his life. Everything he had ever experienced was colliding at this singular moment in time. His money was gone. His parents would not have him back. He’d been traveling for weeks, and now he felt sure he was on his final trip.
On his walk back to the hotel, he bought a copy of The Washington Star, the city’s afternoon newspaper. In his room, he flipped through its pages, and his eyes were drawn to page A4: “The President’s Schedule.” He read the schedule without excitement, put down the paper, and headed to the shower.
CHAPTER 2
THE MAN
When President Reagan reached the Oval Office just after 8:50 a.m., he did not remove his suit jacket. He revered the presidency too much to display shirtsleeves in the room that had long been the epicenter of the presidential universe. It had been more than two months since Reagan’s inauguration, but the space looked much as Jimmy Carter had left it on January 20. There was the same large brown oval carpet decorated with blue flowers, the same two striped couches, the same two large armchairs. Two smaller wooden chairs bracketed Reagan’s desk; a polished globe stood near the window. The room’s domed ceiling glowed from lights hidden behind intricate molding, and a portrait of George Washington hung above the fireplace, directly across from the president’s desk.
The desk—which Carter had also used—was known as the Resolute desk because it had been constructed from the timbers of a British warship, H.M.S. Resolute, and given to the United States as a gift in 1880. Reagan, an Anglophile, loved its rugged look and rich history. It had been used by a number