Assassination attempt on Reagan - 3 April 1981

Our plane was coming in from San Francisco, noseing in through endless layers of cotton wool with the rain streaming against the windows and no land in sight, till we suddenly spun out of a ground mist and hit the runway.

As the brakes roared on and the plane slowed to make the long taxi to the terminal, the captain came on the public address system, he said there was something he wanted to tell us, not by way of sensationalism he said, about something that had happened in mid-afternoon.

I assumed there had been some trouble with the plane, and he had sensibly waited to tell us about it till we were safe and sound. He was mumbling very low into his microphone; I think he didn’t want to sound, as he put it, sensational.

Unfortunately he could hardly be heard. Something about the president and a secretary and then he said it a little more clearly. Two and a half hours ago, an assassination attempt was made on the president and he was now in surgery, in a Washington hospital.It was something he thought we ought to know.

At Kennedy – which used to be Idlewild airport before the assassination of that president, people waited for their baggage and I don’t think the most imaginative or hyped-up reporter could have seen anything different in the behaviour of the people from that of any other day. Maybe there was less jocular small talk, most people looked tired, and patient, perhaps by now we are resigned to atrocity as inventory men get used to seeing dead bodies.

We happened to get possibly the only Chinese cab driver at the airport who spoke little English and had no radio, so it was nearly an hour before we were home and turning on the television and seeing there, almost like a cruel replay of Dallas in 1963, startled secret servicemen, people falling to the ground, and a sudden scrum of men, huddled over a young man.

Fortunately for the country, the anxious hours were blessedly few. The first authoritative spokesman, the man who conducted an evening press conference at the hospital, was one Dr Denis O’Leary, the dean of clinical affairs at George Washington University hospital.

And by great good luck he was one doctor in a thousand in that, he had an immediate air of candour and pleasant authority. He sensed in a flash what sort of language would enlighten people without alarming them, he had humour when it was appropriate to have it, he was responsive to intelligent questions, and courteously non-committal to idiotic questions, and he was able as doctors very rarely are, to translate the abominable jargon of his trade into sensible and even subtle English that any of us could understand.

Of course, the fates were with him; the president had been jaunty about his wound, he had the luck of what Dr O’Leary called fine physiological health a very young 70-year-old, and the bullet had stayed inches away from a fatal point of entry.

Still looking back on it, I think we all owe an enormous debt to Dr O’Leary, he is young enough to come to take for granted, what actually scandalised an older generation – namely the expectation that the press would want to know all the medical details and had a right to have them.

I digress here but, I hope, to the point. This tradition is very new. I remember the shock of the ordinary people of New York when a tabloid daily came out with the headline 20-odd years ago, John Foster Dulles has inoperable cancer.

That was the positive end of the old tradition of reticence which allowed a man, however distinguished, to face the end with his family in privacy and in dignity.

We were already inured to this historic shift in journalistic practice, when President Eisenhower had his heart attack. Day after day in Denver his doctor came before the media and described everything in great detail down to the consistency of the president's bowel movements. And ever since then, a public man hides from the press the symptoms of any afflictions, however mild, at his peril.

Obviously it's become harder and harder for a doctor to instruct a layman in the facts, without leaving little loopholes through which the dumber sort of journalist will fish out lurid inferences. We have come a long way indeed from the day not a hundred years ago, when the President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, could be taken out to sea on a yacht, operated on for cancer of the throat, returned to the White House, convalesced there, and recover and nobody know a thing about it until years later, when he was dead.

So, what Dr O’Leary did on the evening of the wounding of the president was to restore the moral of the country in a decent and authoritative way. He was helped of course, by being able to reply the heartening fact that the president had shown an almost puckish bravery of spirit.

Dr O’Leary deserves the medal of freedom, especially because the scene in the White House where you would properly expect authority to take hold, was a muddle and, for a time, a faintly alarming one. I am afraid the culprit here was General Haig, the secretary of state.

It is quite true that he was, very shortly after the shooting, the senior member of the Cabinet who happened to be on hand. But he at once decided that since the vice president was flying back from Texas he, Mr Haig, was now in charge of the government. Of course he wasn’t, President Reagan was. Until either the president declared himself disabled, unable to continue in office, or the vice president, and the majority of the Cabinet told in writing, the pro-tem president of the Senate and the speaker of the house, that the president was unable to discharge his duties. Then, and then only, the vice president becomes acting president; this is all set forth quite precisely in the 25th amendment to the Constitution.

Suppose that the president dies, and after him or with him, the vice president, the succession then goes to the speaker of the house. He is third in line. But Mr Haig, when all about him might have been losing their heads, rushed on to television with darting eyes and a sweaty forehead. He was nervous and he was dogmatic. He was, he said, in control, in charge.

He could have been in control in a purely practical sense at the moment, but his fatal remark came when he was asked, why, he mentioned the Constitution, and repeated the gaffe, that the secretary of state succeeds after the president and the vice president.Thus showing, as one commentator put it, an incredible lack of understanding of constitutional succession, and, there is another line of succession which has to do with the command structure, of the Pentagon the military.

When Mr Haig got away from his unfortunate performance on television, he went back to what is known in the White House as the situation room a place where crucial military decisions are made, invariably in the presence of the president, who remember, is the commander in chief of all the armed forces.

There, the secretary of defence, Mr Weinberger, felt it his duty to tell Mr Haig that he was not in charge of that structure either, the command passes from the president to the vice president, and then, to the secretary of defence, nobody but Mr Weinberger. All together an acutely unhappy time for Secretary Haig.

But he and the people were put right at once by the chief Washington correspondents of two networks. One of the more stupid, but I suppose inevitable, questions put to Dr O’Leary of all political neutrals was whether or not there was evidence of a conspiracy.

He wouldn’t think of commenting on that, and from what we know and we know a great deal about the life and character of the pathetic John Hinckley, he was no more of a conspirator than the equally pathetic 18-year-old bartender who fired twice on Constitution Hill at the very young Queen Victoria, and missed.

Edward Oxford was his name and he did not have a repeater. Unlike John Hinckley, he did not have the means to spray half a dozen shots in two seconds at several targets. Hinckley, at this time anyway, appears to be a sick and lovesick young man and acting out a fantasy with a girl he had never met and meaning more than anything to make himself important by a violent act.

Inevitably old arguments have been brought up and old morals have been drawn. The campaign for stricter control of hand guns – Washington DC, by the way, has one of the strictest laws, as strict as anything that might be written into a federal law – this campaign takes on new strength, through indignation after every murder or attempted murder of a prominent person. It raged after John Kennedy’s death, and then waned, raged again after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the paralysing of governor George Wallace, the death of Bobby Kennedy, the shooting of John Lennon, in fact, it seems only yesterday, and almost was, that I gave my talk over to the various state laws about hand gun control and the general yearning for a ban on so-called Saturday specials.

But these crusades always fade away not, as many angry people charge, because the rifle lobby is very powerful in Washington, which it is, but because millions of Americans are scared enough of violence on the streets and against their homes, to feel that a law to band handguns would render the citizen helpless against the criminal who will always get a gun somehow.

At any rate there is not likely to be much success in the next crusade, since President Reagan himself is strongly against gun control. His solution was, as governor of California, and still is, compulsory sentences from five to 15 years in jail for anyone committing a crime while in possession of a gun.

I leave the grave and undoubtedly sincere moralising about the sickness of this country, of our time, to others. If violence is, indeed, a special sickness of our age, it is universal and nobody so far, has come up with a cure.

But I will end by reminding you that such characters as John Hinckley seem to be around at all times, especially in a country which offers to a fugitive the escape hatch of a continent. The proper comparison between violence in America is not with any one country, but with the whole of Europe.

On any given day the protective research section of the United States secret service has on file the names of not less than 50,000 persons who have written threatening or obscene letters to the incumbent president. Fifteen hundred new letters are added every month. Repeaters are tracked down, from their letters simply, and the secret service claims an average of 98% of such people apprehended, many of them tried and put away.

John Hinckley, it appears now, was one of the 2% who slipped through the net.

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