Killing Reagan Read Free Page A

suicide.
    Bottles of prescription pills cover his nightstand. It will take a few more days to summon his courage, but Hinckley will soon reach for the container labeled “Valium” and gobble a deadly dosage.
    Once again, John Hinckley will fail.
    He will wake up nauseated but alive, vowing to find some new way to impress Jodie Foster.
    Killing himself is not the answer. Clearly, someone else must die.
    *   *   *
    About halfway through the ninety-four-minute debate, Ronald Reagan gets personal. “I talked to a man just briefly there who asked me one simple question,” Reagan says gravely. “‘Do I have reason to hope that I can someday take care of my family again?’”
    Watching from the side of the stage, Nancy Reagan can see that her husband is gaining confidence with every question. This gives her solace, for Nancy was so afraid that her Ronnie would say something foolish that she initially opposed the debate. More than that of any of his advisers, it is Nancy’s opinion that matters most to Reagan. They have been married twenty-eight years, and she has been a driving force behind his run for the presidency. Throughout their marriage he has chosen to address her as Mommy, a term of endearment mocked by some journalists covering Reagan.
    Nancy Reagan wears a size four dress and has thin legs and thick ankles. Her mother was an actress, her adoptive father an esteemed surgeon, and she grew up determined to find fame. 9 She relies on sleeping pills and tranquilizers, and sometimes bursts into tears from stress, but there is steel in her voice when she corrects her husband or sees to it that one of the campaign staff is disciplined. Nancy Reagan professes shock when the press portrays her as the conniving Lady Macbeth, but the description isn’t entirely off the mark. She is by far the more grating half of the Reagan marriage, and she is determined that this election be won at all costs.
    Cheating is not out of the question. Although he does not yet know it, Jimmy Carter’s briefing notes for this debate were recently stolen from the White House and secretly handed over to the Reagan campaign. This, of course, has allowed Reagan to know in advance how Carter will respond to every question. Certainly, no one is pointing to Nancy Reagan as having engineered the theft—indeed, reports of the act will not be leaked to the public for three more years, and the real culprit remains in question. 10 Yet it is well known that, with so much at stake, she doesn’t play nice. To Nancy, gaining access to Carter’s playbook is a windfall to the Reagan campaign, not a crime.
    As the debate continues, Jimmy Carter is not doing himself any favors onstage. “I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy,” Carter says, referring to his thirteen-year-old, “to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms.”
    In the greenroom, Carter’s campaign staff is distraught. While prepping for the debate, Carter told them he planned to use his daughter to make a point. His staff strongly urged him not to.
    â€œIn the end,” Pat Caddell will later recall, “it came down to ‘I’m the president. Fuck you.’”
    It is a huge mistake. That the president of the United States is allowing a teenager to decide what matters most to America in a time of such great crisis is laughable. One journalist will later write that the statement was “Carter at his worst: Weak and silly.”
    But Jimmy Carter does not have that sense. “In the debate itself, it was hard to judge the general demeanor that was projected to the viewers,” Carter will write in his diary tonight. “He [Reagan] has his memorized tapes. He pushes a button, and they come out.” 11
    Carter’s statement is true. Like all veteran actors, Reagan has mastered the art of memorization. Also, while there