Killing Reagan (39 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

 

Afterword

In January 2015, the
Journal of Alzheimer's Disease
published a study examining the press conferences of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Researchers were looking for changes in his vocabulary that might have signaled an early onset of dementia. They found three specific symptoms: Reagan's use of repetitive words increased, as did his habit of substituting “it” or “thing” for specific nouns. Meanwhile, use of unique words declined. The study's authors also noted that trauma and the use of anesthesia can hasten dementia. They specifically mentioned that the 1981 assassination attempt could also have played a pivotal role in Ronald Reagan's decline.

*   *   *

The man who shot Reagan,
John Hinckley Jr
., remains at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, to this day. More than thirty years after being found not guilty of attempting to assassinate the president by reason of insanity, Hinckley may not remain in custody much longer. In December 2013 a federal judge declared he was “not a danger” and authorized unsupervised visits of up to seventeen days at his mother's home in Williamsburg, Virginia. Hinckley is allowed to drive a car but not to talk to the media. The judge requires that he carry a GPS-enabled cell phone in order that they can track his movements. In time, he may become a completely free man, following in the footsteps of attempted presidential assassins Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who were released in 2009 and 2007, respectively. Both women served more than three decades in prison for attempting to kill President Gerald Ford.

*   *   *

In January 2015, prosecutors declined to press additional murder charges in the August 2014 death of Reagan press secretary
James Brady
—despite the fact that Hinckley's bullets were directly responsible for the wounds that ultimately killed Brady at age seventy-three. Brady never fully recovered from the ordeal, spending the second half of his life dealing with constant pain, slurred speech, paralysis, and short-term memory loss. As a result, his wife, Sarah, who sat with Nancy Reagan in the hospital chapel on the day of the assassination attempt, became a ferocious advocate for gun control.
Sarah Brady
died of pneumonia at the age of seventy-three in April 2015, less than a year after her husband passed away.

*   *   *

Tim McCarthy
, the only man in Secret Service history to take a bullet for a president, currently serves as the chief of police in the Chicago suburb of Orland Park. “I'm glad I got to do it,” he told the
Chicago Tribune
in 2011. “I'm glad to do what I was trained to do.”

District of Columbia policeman
Thomas K. Delahanty
, Hinckley's final victim, sued the gun manufacturer whose bullet ended his police career. He also sued John Hinckley, though the courts ruled against him in both cases. Delahanty made cameo appearances in two movies about the assassination attempt but never returned to police work.

*   *   *

As of this writing in August 2015,
Nancy Reagan
still lives in the Bel-Air, California, home she once shared with Ronald Reagan. The former First Lady, who in the words of one reporter “rescued the Reagan presidency,” laid a wreath on his tomb in 2011 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his birth. She has endured her own health problems, including a fractured pelvis in 2008 and broken ribs sustained in a fall four years later. Yet while often confined to a wheelchair and in declining health, Nancy Reagan continues to be an advocate for Alzheimer's research.

*   *   *

The Reagan children remain in the public eye.
Patti Davis
once again posed nude, this time for
More
magazine in 2011, at the age of fifty-eight, and continues to make a living as a freelance writer.

Ron Reagan Jr
. lives in Seattle, where he currently works as an advocate for atheism and for stem cell research. In March 2014, he lost his wife of thirty-three years, Doria Palmieri Reagan, to a progressive neuromuscular disease. Ron Reagan continues to be a liberal advocate, often appearing on cable news programs.

Michael Reagan
is a longtime conservative radio talk show host. He called his adoptive half brother, Ron, an “embarrassment” for suggesting in a book that their father suffered from Alzheimer's disease while serving as president. Michael Reagan's life has not been easy, as he has been involved in a variety of civil lawsuits.

The only child of Ronald Reagan to attempt a political career,
Maureen
, died of melanoma in 2001 at the age of sixty. She is buried at Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Sacramento.

*   *   *

Jodie Foster
not only survived the media scrutiny that came with the Reagan assassination attempt but has thrived. After graduating from Yale in 1985, she went on to a distinguished Hollywood career as an actor, director, and producer. Foster has won two Academy Awards for Best Actress, the first in 1989 for her role in
The Accused
and the second in 1992 for her signature lead role in
The Silence of the Lambs
. John Hinckley was reportedly outraged when Jodie Foster came out as a lesbian in 2013.

*   *   *

Two thousand thirteen was also the year
Margaret Thatcher
died, at age eighty-seven. The former British prime minister was elevated to baroness in 1992 and made a member of the House of Lords after a lifetime as a commoner. Her memory began to fail her in 2000, but it was a series of small strokes in 2002 that led her to withdraw from public life. Her taping of Ronald Reagan's eulogy was the last public speech she ever gave. The ashes of Margaret Hilda Thatcher are interred on the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London, next to those of her husband, Denis, who died in 2003.

*   *   *

James Baker III
, Ronald Reagan's chief of staff during his first term in office, is still active as a political adviser at the age of eighty-five, as is his fellow member of the Reagan troika,
Edwin Meese
. At age eighty-three, Meese lives in Virginia, where he serves on a number of educational boards and public policy think tanks.

*   *   *

Reagan's third adviser,
Michael Deaver
, fell prey to pancreatic cancer on August 18, 2007. Deaver left the Reagan White House after the first term, opening a successful Washington lobbying agency. On March 18, 1987, he was convicted of five counts of perjury during an investigation into his use of insider influence and power with his new firm. His crime was perjuring himself to Congress and a federal grand jury. For that, Deaver was sentenced to three years' probation and fined one hundred thousand dollars. Despite Deaver's request, Ronald Reagan did not extend the offer of a pardon before leaving office. Nancy Reagan did not attend Deaver's funeral, but she issued a statement saying that Deaver was “like a son.” Michael Deaver was sixty-nine years old when he passed away.

Nancy's feelings were obviously not as warm toward
Don Regan
. After the White House chief was fired because of her, Regan turned to landscape painting as a way to pass his days. He was content in his artistic endeavors, often spending as much as ten hours a day painting. Don Regan died of cancer on June 10, 2003. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

*   *   *

Ronald Reagan's first wife,
Jane Wyman
, lived to be ninety years old. After divorcing Reagan, Wyman went on to have one more husband, bandleader Fred Karger, whom she married and divorced twice. By the time of her death in 2007, she had become such a devout Catholic that she was laid to rest in the habit of the Dominican Sisters religious order. Jane Wyman is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.