Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [26]
Then it was Mrs. Reagan’s turn. “Barbara,” she said, “your leader’s going to make remarks as short as yours.” She went on to offer a few words about her many years of volunteering for various causes and closed by saying, “I’m a big believer in volunteer work. I think we may have gotten away from it a bit. It gives you such a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. And you do so much good.”
With that, the women put on their raincoats and headed for their cars. They were both due to attend a lunch at the Georgetown home of Michael Ainsley, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. There they would be joined by the wives of several members of Reagan’s cabinet, among them Catherine Donovan, the spouse of the labor secretary. As it happened, while Mrs. Reagan and Mrs. Donovan were eating lunch in Georgetown, their husbands would also be together, sharing a limousine ride to the president’s speech at the Hilton.
CHAPTER 4
“I’M NOT DANGEROUS”
John Hinckley pulled out a blue pen and a piece of lined yellow paper and sat down in a plain wooden chair, at a plain wooden desk, in front of a bland rectangular mirror in his room at the Park Central Hotel. He meant to declare his feelings, perhaps for the final time, to the woman he loved.
“Dear Jodie,” he began in a tight script that led methodically across the page. “There is a definite probability that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. It is for this very reason that I am writing you this letter now.”
The words were flowing from his heart, but this was more than a love letter. It was also Hinckley’s attempt to retrace and justify his obsession with Jodie Foster and to describe the steps he was willing to take to gain her attention. “As you well know by now, I love you very much,” he wrote. And she did know, because this was not the first time he had reached out to Foster, an eighteen-year-old movie actress who had left Hollywood the previous fall to attend Yale University.
Hinckley had been fixated on the actress since 1976, when he’d first seen Taxi Driver. His obsession had grown with each passing year: Foster seemed so intelligent and so precocious, so unlike any other movie star Hinckley had ever seen or read about. He desperately wanted to meet her, talk to her, run away with her. But any thought of actually getting in touch with her remained a fantasy until May 1980, when he read a People magazine profile that described her decision to leave Hollywood so that she could go to college and earn a degree. By that September, Hinckley had sold off more than $3,500 worth of stock in his father’s oil company to finance an excursion to New Haven.
He told his parents he was taking a writing workshop at Yale. That was a lie; instead, he spent most of his time pursuing Foster. He located her dorm room and left her a dozen of his best poems and letters. Then he got her phone number and somehow summoned the courage to call, even tape-recording the conversations for posterity. He had expected their talks to be magical, but instead they were demoralizing. In a series of halting conversations, Foster—clearly uncomfortable and worried—tried to fend off a pitiable man-boy who was no more confident than a high school freshman struggling to ask a popular girl to the fall dance.
In their first call, Hinckley identified himself as “the person that’s been leaving notes in your box for two days.”
“Am I supposed to know you?” she asked.
“Well, no,” he said.
“No. Oh, well, I don’t … We have, we must not have much in common.”
“Jodie, listen.”
“Yes.”
“I just want to talk to you. Okay?