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that had been a flashpoint in World War II and whose ruling communist regime was closely allied with Moscow. Intelligence reports were suggesting that the Soviets might use their military to put down the dissent, and Allen knew there was little the United States could do to stop them. Reagan was not going to start a war over Poland—this was just one step in the long waltz of the Cold War. But before the White House switchboard connected Reagan and Schmidt, Allen advised the president to ask the German chancellor to join him in sending a stern warning to the Soviets that any intervention in Polish affairs would have serious consequences. The national security advisor understood that foreign policy was not a primary focus for the new administration; given the weak economy, Reagan’s first priority was to enact tax cuts and slash spending. But Allen also knew that Reagan’s most important job was keeping the country safe, and that history would ultimately judge his presidency on how he handled the Cold War and confrontations like the one over Poland.

As Allen once told an aide who complained about excessive briefing materials on national security, “This is why he has the chopper, Camp David and Air Force One, a huge fence outside the White House, and all of those damn guards armed with machine guns.”

* * *

WHILE TAKING A shower on the morning of March 30, John Hinckley began to lose faith in his plan to take a bus to New Haven and commit suicide. Instead, he found himself thinking about the newspaper item he’d seen that outlined the president’s schedule for the day. Reagan was to deliver a speech at two p.m. to a trade union at the Washington Hilton. Maybe he should walk over to the hotel with his little .22-caliber revolver. If I can get close enough, he thought, I can end this madness. He fantasized about getting splattered against the wall in a blaze of Secret Service bullets.

As he toweled off, he felt nervous and jittery. He realized that his pulse was racing, so he took some Valium. Putting on dark trousers and a blue-striped collared shirt, he wondered what he should do. His life had been descending in an ever tightening spiral, and now it had brought him to this bleak hotel room. Perhaps going to the Hilton would allow him to break this cycle, though he didn’t quite know how.

Hinckley had been caught in a downward slide for a long time. Born in 1955, he spent his early years in Ardmore, Oklahoma, a bustling oil town where his father, Jack Hinckley, labored long hours repairing wells while his mother, Jo Ann, raised the family’s three children. The Hinckleys moved to Dallas in 1958, and soon Jack Hinckley’s oil company began doing so well that he and his wife purchased an expensive house in the affluent neighborhood of Highland Park. In grade school, John seemed pretty much like any other kid: he enjoyed sports, had a number of friends, and did reasonably well in class. But in junior high school, he began withdrawing from the world; he drifted away from his friends and spent more and more time alone in his room, playing his guitar and listening to Beatles records. In high school, he receded ever further into himself. Often compared unfavorably with his overachieving siblings, he had no close friends and never went out on a date. (Later, his mother said that when he skipped his junior-senior prom it was one of the saddest nights of her life.) He dreamed of becoming a singer and songwriter like John Lennon, and didn’t see the point of higher education. “College isn’t all that important for a musician,” he once told his father.

In the fall of 1973, under pressure from his parents, Hinckley enrolled at Texas Tech, a large university with a sprawling campus in the dusty, hardscrabble city of Lubbock. Soon afterward, his parents relocated to Colorado; his father had grown tired of Dallas and had always wanted to live near the Rocky Mountains. After completing his freshman year at Texas Tech, Hinckley skipped a semester and then returned in the spring of 1975. His new roommate was black, and though Hinckley considered