Would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr. to be freed after 35 years

[Drew Phipps]

Would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr. to be freed after 35 years

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pub...2Bnational

By Spencer S. Hsu Local July 27 at 8:53 AM

John W. Hinckley, Jr., will be released from a government psychiatric hospital more than 35 years after he attempted to assassinate president Ronald Reagan and shot three others outside the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. Hinckley, 61, no longer poses a danger to himself or others and will be freed to live full-time with his mother in Williamsburg, Va., effective as soon as Aug. 5 subject to dozens of temporary treatment and monitoring conditions, U.S. District Judge Paul L Friedman of Washington wrote. If Hinckley adheres to all restrictions, they could begin to be phased out after 12 to 18 months, removing him from court control for the first time since he was confined to St. Elizabeth's hospital after the shooting, according to the order.

Hinckley lived at hospital full time until the 1990s, when he was permitted supervised visits with family members that gradually have been extended to 17 days a month at the home of his 90-year-old mother in a gated golf course development. "After thirty-four years as an impatient at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, and in view of the foregoing findings, and the successful completion of over 80 ... visits to Williamsburg over the last 10 years, the Court finds that Mr. Hinckley has received the maximum benefits possible in the in-patient setting," Friedman wrote in a 103-page opinion. "The court finds by the preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Hinckley will not be a danger to himself or to others if released on full-time convalescent leave to Williamsburg under the conditions proposed."


If Hinckley relapses or violates the terms of his release, he could be returned to St. Elizabeth's, the judge ordered. The order limits Hinckley to a 50-mile radius of Williamsburg, Va., requires him to turn over information about his mobile phone and vehicles he will be driving, and bars him from accessing social media, uploading any content or erasing any browser history from his computer The ruling ends the institutionalization of the one of the nation's most notorious mental health patients, whose case marked a watershed in the criminal justice system's handling of mental illness and gun violence. His case came at a crossroads of presidential history, violence and celebrity, with extraordinary footage of the attack on the 40th President beamed into the homes of Americans in television news accounts.

Hinckley was 25 when he wounded Reagan, press secretary James Brady, U.S. Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty with six exploding "Devastator" bullets from a .22-caliber pistol. All survived the attack but Brady was left paralyzed by a shot to his head and spent years before his death in 2014 advocating for gun control. Hinckley said he shot Reagan to try to impress Hollywood actor Jodie Foster, an object of his obsession after repeated viewing the film, "Taxi Driver." After an eight-week trial, a federal jury in Washington found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity in June 1982 of all 13-counts against him, setting off a sharp public backlash. The federal government and 38 states subsequently rewrote laws to raise the standard of proof required for the insanity defense, which is now rarely used and is even more rarely successful.


Over the decades, the federal court has received reports on the state of Hinckley's mental health, and the Secret Service continued to watch him closely as he spent more time outside the hospital, tracking him on more than 200 occasions in 2013 and 2014, according to information presented in court last year. Since 2003, Hinckley's longtime attorney, Barry Wm. Levine has argued to lift Hinckley's confinement citing evaluations by St. Elizabeth's officials that he no longer posed a threat.


Hinckley and his family are under court orders not to speak with reporters but Levine said Wednesday that the judge's finding that Hinckley is not dangerous "should give great comfort to a concerned citizenry that the mental health system and the judicial system worked and worked well." "Mr. Hinckley recognizes that what he did was horrific. But it's crucial to understand that what he did was not an act of evil. It was an act caused by mental illness," Levine said. "He is profoundly sorry and he wishes he could take back that day, but he can't. And he has lived for decades recognizing the pain he caused his victims, their families, and the nation."


In his Wednesday order, Friedman, a 1994 Clinton appointee, continued many restrictions already in place for Hinckley's short stays at home and imposed others that all parties have agreed to for his release. Hinckley is to continue therapy in Williamsburg, return once a month for outpatient treatment in Washington, and volunteer or work three times a week. He must stay out of contact with the media, his victims, their families, the U.S. president, members of Congress and Foster. He must abstain from alcohol and cannot possess a weapon. During a hearing in the spring of 2015 over Hinckley's mental health, the psychiatrist Patterson said "the notoriety-fame issue is one that is part of [Hinckley's] pa*thol*ogy."


In Wednesday's action, Friedman ordered Hinckley to give authorities access to his email account, barred him from setting up or posting on social media accounts such as on Facebook. Like his mother, Hinckley's siblings, Scott B. Hinckley and Diane Hinckley Sims have pledged their full support in court filings and testimony. His mother has $500,000 in savings and home equity, enough to pay for about four or five years of Hinckley's living and medical costs at their current rate, or longer if he qualified for federal or state insurance or disability benefits or if his therapy needs decrease. Hinckley spends his time in Williamsburg volunteering at a local mental hospital and as a church groundskeeper, taking his mother to Ruby Tuesday and for scenic drives, looking at music sites, and unsuccessfully seeking work at a Starbucks and Subway shop, according to testimony and court filings last year. Hinckley also has made a female friend whose parents have met Hinckley's mother, and with whom Hinckley was at least "somewhat compatible," his brother told a court. Sims, Hinckley's sister, has called the relationship platonic.


Over time and amid setbacks it has been Friedman, who took over the case in 2001, who oversaw the lengthy process of re-integrating Hinckley into society, permitting slowly expanding trips under the close eye of federal prosecutors and wary neighbors. In the most recent step to ease Hinckley into independent living, the court in December 2013 allowed Hinckley to spend the majority of each month at his mother's home across from the 13th hole in the golf development. Hinckley has been required to abide by a prearranged itinerary, carry a trackable phone, and log daily activities, including unsupervised walks and short trips to places where he was expected.


On March 20, 2015, hospital officials recommended Hinckle's full-time release. Prosecutors did not oppose it outright, but sought tighter monitoring and reporting requirements and contingency planning for his family's support, warning than having "no plan B" could lead to a relapse. Assistant U.S. Attorney Colleen M. Kennedy argued over seven days of hearings that Hinckley should "have no expectation of privacy" regarding his use of the internet or wireless devices. Prosecutors insisted that Hinckley, who plays the guitar, paints and expressed an interest in photography, not publicly display or perform his work. Friedman barred Hinckley from performing music in public, or from exhibiting or publishing any material without explicit approval from his treatment team. The judge's new order also did not require Hinckley to wear an ankle-monitoring device, sticking to a position the judge took last year when he sided with hospital officials who "adamantly" opposed such a tracker, calling it "stigmatizing... for no reason" given Hinckley's low risk of flight.


To experts, Hinckley's case continues to be an outlier, a "one-off", said Joel A. Dvoskin, past president of the American Psychology-Law Society. The son of a wealthy oil and gas executive raised mainly in Dallas, Hinckley struggled with emotional problems in high school and eventually dropped out of Texas Tech University to become a songwriter in Los Angeles. By 1981, he had bought an arsenal of weapons and stalked Foster, then a student at Yale, after watching her in "Taxi Driver' at least 15 times. "Jodie, I'm asking you now to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance, with this historic deed to gain your respect and love," Hinckley wrote in a letter found by police in his Washington hotel room after the 1981 attempted assassination of Reagan.


Early in his stay, Hinckley's diagnosing physicians at St. Elizabeth's Hospital found there was no doubt that he was delusional and in the grips of a raging narcissistic personality disorder, according to court records, but said that he did not present classic or stereotypical signs of schizophrenia. Yet Hinckley continues to personify and perpetuate popular misconceptions of mental illness and of links to gun violence, said Ron Honberg, senior policy advisor for the National Alliance on Mental Illness warned, "The generalizations that have been made regarding Mr. Hinckley are almost always wrong. He's a pretty unique case in every respect," said Dvoskin, now a criminal justice expert at the University of Arizona. "What John Hinckley did, and the response to it, had a horrible effect on increasing the stigma of mental illness, and the false belief that people with mental illnesses are presumptively dangerous."

[Peter Lemkin]

And then, whoever in the Secret Service -- the Secret Service helped to set-up Reagan too. Reagan was told not to wear his vest that day -- his protective vest. I'll bet he wore it after that. They did not call the procedure with the limousine. He should have come out the door and gone directly into the limousine. That's how he arrived.
He came, the Secret Service formed two rows on either side of the back door, they opened the back door and he goes in. When you hire a limousine, they don't go to the house down the street, they come to your door. When you're the president, they'll move it six inches to make sure that it's in the right place. It was in the right place when he arrived. He got out and went in through the phalanx of the two rows of agents. He's safe into the VIP entrance.
He comes out the same exit and where's the car?' It is nowhere near the door. It's 40-50 feet down the pavement. So, he's got to walk out into the open. What's supposed to happen? The Secret Service is supposed to surround him like a diamond and protect him. One guy goes forward, McCarthy, to open the door for him. The rest don't surround him. They all file out like a line of ducks off to the right and they leave Reagan walking in the open with Brady and these other guys. Then, the shooting happens.
The damage that was done there once the shooting started was quite extensive. Brady was hit which literally took a large chunk of his brain and knocked him on to the ground. A black cop was nicked in the neck, a big beefy cop, and he spun and hit the ground hard by the shot. McCarthy, 160 pounds, was lifted by the shot, that hit him in the groin at the back door of the car, and thrown through the air to the front bumper of the car. He himself says that was no 22.
All of the early press reports said that Hinkley was firing a 38 and that is much more consistent with these kinds of reactions. A 22 will hurt you, enter you and do damage inside you, but it's not going to knock you over. A 38 is a much larger caliber of bullet. Hinkley purchased a 38 at a pawn shop on Elm Street in Dallas -- the same street where Kennedy was assassinated.

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[TD="bgcolor: #e7ffe7"]The problem was that Reagan didn't get back to G.W.U. until after Brady was there, like a good 15-to-20 minutes later before Reagan finally shows up and does walk in. They finally start dealing with him because he does have a collapsed lung but he isn't shot to the extent that he can't move. . . . But it is very significant, I think, that Reagan was taken somewhere else and then turned around. I think the timing of the turn around relates to a huge fight that they later admitted broke out in the situation room at the White House in the emergency between the Reagan loyalists and the Bush loyalists in the administration. . . . There are different loyalties. That was clear in a number of instances.
One was when Bush helped to get Haig appointed as Secretary of State. The entire Cabinet staff underneath him was already pre-appointed and he wasn't allowed to pick or choose any of them, or fire any of them. So it was like he was a figure head put up at the head of this agency that he wasn't really allowed to run. Then just a few days before the shooting of Reagan, there was a switch where Bush replaced Haig as the head of an emergency preparedness committee or unit that they had at the White House. The press was asking Bush right after he was appointed in place of Haig -- this was just three days before the shooting -- `What constitutes an emergency for the purpose of this special office?' And Bush said, "The president will know it when he sees it." I think he meant that he -- Reagan -- would know it when he saw it lying on the ground dying.
This I believe was a coup. The black box disappeared for several hours. . . There was that kind of transition-of-power going on -- who was actually going to control things and there were switch-overs about the Strategic Air Command bomber pilots, again, not having code books aboard on March 31, 81 like they didn't on November 22, 63. This was a classic transition-of-power situation.

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All of this was to give us an early signal that this is one of their jobs. But at the same time none of Hinkley's bullets hit Reagan and that was clear from Reagan's lack of this kind of reaction. Reagan gets to the car still standing. He is pushed into the car by McCarthy. He's got some pain in his rib, which he thinks McCarthy caused by pushing him in and eventually coughs up a little blood. But even when he finally gets down to G.W. [George Washington University] Hospital, he is still standing when comes in and walks into the hospital and they put him on the gurney. He's not at all in the same shape as everyone else that's hit by Hinkley's 38.
Then the official story changes after three or four hours and Hinkley supposedly had a 22. I went through the ABC footage and you can actually see the replacement of the 22 and the pick-up of the 38 by a Secret Service agent.
Ratcliffe:
How do you mean `see the replacement?' -- you can see it in watching the replay?
Judge:
In watching the footage, you can see a Secret Service agent at the outer edge of the crew. There's a group that have sort of tackled Hinkley and they're taking him in and you can see the gun is on the ground. Hinkley's 38 is on the ground at the edge of the that crowd near the retaining wall. The Secret Service agent kind of sidles over to the wall, takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, kneels down, like crouches, and lifts the gun up and puts it in his pocket.
Meanwhile, a DC cop in a slick yellow raincoat comes to the outer edge of the crowd -- this is after they already have Hinkley subdued -- and for no apparent reason he comes to the edge of the crowd and puts his hand out. He's a motorcycle cop.
That motorcycle rentinue did not leave with Reagan's limousine when he did leave. He has no escort when he goes. That is not explainable either, especially if there has just been an assassination attempt -- why he would be put out there without escort. But he does, he goes without anybody.
This cop comes over, off of his motorcycle, spreads his arms and kind of moves back and forth in front of -- at the edge of the crowd. He's not serving any purpose but he's there and after a moment the camera pans back and you can see at his feet, this 22, as if he's dropped it. One of his hands goes in towards the center of his coat and then comes out and right after that, as the camera is panning all around, it pans right between his feet, and you can see this 22 that becomes the official weapon.
There is also a weapon near Brady's head that one of the Secret Service guys drops. That's how they explain the 38, saying that it was a confusion because it was really the Secret Service guy's gun. I believe, Hinkley was firing a 38. Hinkley damaged everybody but Reagan, also put holes in the car and the building across the street. But he only had six rounds and each one of those is explained and then a seventh round has to explain the wound in Reagan.
Reagan's wound is so minimal that it doesn't match either a 22 or a 38. It is described as a little thin razor line when they finally get his clothes off. They think he's having a heart attack -- actually his lung had collapsed because of the thing penetrating him. Then finally a nurse sees a little line of blood underneath his left arm pit. She determines that something has gone in but it's a little razor cut. They know what a bullet hole looks there in the emergency room at G.W.U.. They get them all the time.
They do poke around until they finally find this thing in the x-ray. They try three times to get it out and finally pull it out and it is a little disc, a flattened disc, that was described as `thin as a dime' and `razor-edged.' This fits the profile of these aerodynamic discs that are used by the intelligence agencies in weapons that the Church Committee showed during the time that they did their testimony. They are fired with a CO2 (carbon dioxide) cartridge, so they are relatively silent. They just make a little puff. They have an accuracy up to a great length. They can be fired out of a regular gun or even out of these little tubes with the CO2 cartridge at the back. They also can be loaded with toxins.
One of the uses they had for them was making them out of plastic and filling them with shellfish toxin which goes in and makes a razor split in the skin which wouldn't be noticed during an autopsy. The x-ray won't pull up the plastic and the shellfish toxin, once it gets into any part of the bloodstream, will cause a heart attack within 30 seconds. Very lethal -- several milligrams of the shellfish toxin is enough of a dose. Whether this thing had a poison load in it or not, who knows? But it didn't immediately kill him so if it did have such a load, it didn't work. It didn't shoot off.
It bounced off of his rib. It would have cut into his aorta but bounced on his rib and missed the aorta by a quarter of an inch and went into the lung instead. But they did finally get it out. The lung was collapsed from it but they got him stabilized.
Meanwhile, all night, there were people trying to move him back to the Bethesda. Because when the car takes off from the Hilton where the shooting happens, they're screaming `Rawhide is okay' into the radio. Rawhide is the code name for Reagan. They're radioing back according to McCarthy, `Rawhide is okay, Rawhide is okay.' But I don't think he is supposed to be okay. I think he was supposed to have been killed there and they've got a problem.
So the car goes up to Connecticut Avenue and if they were going to go to G.W.U. Hospital, they needed to either go straight across down Florida to 21st and then (it's close) around a little traffic circle. Or they could have gone left further down to M Street and then turned across M to 21st.
McCarthy's story is that they went under the bridge at M Street and then he coughed up some blood and then they realized he'd been hit and they said `get to the nearest hospital.' But they still didn't even turn on M, which they could have easily done. They went all the way down to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue -- four or five more blocks. Then they turned to the right from 17th over to 21st and then cameback up to 21st until they hit G.W.U. Hospital, which is going along three sides of a triangle instead of just cutting across. So if you're in a hurry -- the president's in an emergency -- you take the quickest route.
But what McCarthy says in his book is that when the car went up to Connecticut Avenue, that they went right and went toward the White House. If you turn right on Connecticut off of T, where they were, you're not going towards the White House, you're headed north toward Bethesda Hospital and out Connecticut Ave.
That was confirmed for me later when ABC News had on the doctor who was the head of the trauma room after they had the press conference with the doctors. The head of the trauma room was there with the news anchor. The newscaster said `I understand that there were people that wanted to move President Reagan out to Bethesda Naval Hospital after he had come into your trauma room.' And the doctor said, `Yes, there were people.' There were reports that it was Secret Service up to as late as 6 a.m. the next morning, insisting to move him. But in fact, he wasn't moved and it was because this trauma room doctor said, `When someone comes into my trauma room in that condition, I don't care who they are -- President of the United States or not -- they are not going to be moved.' He doesn't understand that he saved Reagan's life.
If they had gotten Reagan to Bethesda, they could have finished the job there and then done the same phony autopsy they did on John F. Kennedy at Bethesda Hospital. But instead, this trauma room doctor intervened and kept Reagan there and then Reagan recovered in relatively safety and security.

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[TD="bgcolor: #e7ffe7"]The patterns are always the same. You have a patsy that takes the blame. You have a second gunman that never comes to light. And you have an ascendance of power. That's what I think happened after that point: that Reagan was basically allowed to function but Bush was President.
That dynamic is born out by other instances including the Contragate scandal where the Tower Commission determined in testimony of all the top people, McFarland and the people at the highest levels, that one day, July 15, 1985 was this day they all name as the key day when the President of the United States signs a Finding allowing the shipment of TOE missiles to Israel . . . I went back and looked that day up -- that all of them had named in the Tower Report -- to see what Reagan was supposedly doing that day. Because Reagan later said that he could not remember signing that. In fact, on July 15, 1985 Reagan was in an eight-hour prostate operation all day and Bush was acting President of the United States for those eight hours.
It was clear to me that Bush had signed the Finding. That it was a covert operation that Reagan didn't know anything about and wasn't allowed to know anything about. When the stuff started to break, they had to then shred the signed papers and get Oliver North and the boys in there to do the shredding because it would have shown Bush's signature all over it. Bush was actually calling the shots for Contragate.

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There was a strange incident that Mae Brussell noticed that they brought blood in to him. First, it is unusual for them to bring blood because the Secret Service already knows when they travel to a city what hospital has blood and what the closest one is. They make sure that the hospitals nearby where the president travels, and those DC hospitals, have enough blood of his type in storage. It was unusual, first, that they didn't have enough and secondly, this vehicle that arrived to bring the blood wasn't anything formal from the pictures. It looked like some kind of a van where somebody had painted a red cross on the back of it but it clearly was not an official vehicle. Mae thought that tainted blood might've been brought in and caused Reagan problems later with cancer or other things.
Generally, his care there was certainly better than what would have happened to him. Interestingly enough, when the ABC News Anchor asked the doctor this and he said, `In my trauma room, they are going to stay there and we're not going to move him.' The response of the news anchor was, `No matter how much the Navy yells?' The doctor said, `That's right. No matter how much the Navy yells.' The question that we have to ask, `What is the Navy yelling about moving the president for after he's been shot?'
Meanwhile, Brady, who's lying on the ground, and still on the ground five minutes after Reagan takes off, ends up getting to G.W.U. before Reagan does. Reagan's on his way to Bethesda. Brady, who takes five extra minutes to even get the ambulance in to load him, gets to G.W.U. and is taken in on a stretcher surrounded by Secret Service agents. That became confused with Reagan. In the first hour, they said Reagan was shot, he wasn't shot, he was dead, he wasn't dead, Brady was shot, he wasn't shot, he was dead, he wasn't dead. The stories went back and forth on the news about who had been shot and who was alive or dead. Nothing was clear. And then that Reagan had gone in to the hospital on a stretcher and then another story that Reagan had walked in on his own.
The problem was that Reagan didn't get back to G.W.U. until after Brady was there, like a good 15-to-20 minutes later before Reagan finally shows up and does walk in. They finally start dealing with him because he does have a collapsed lung but he isn't shot to the extent that he can't move. But that's what confused the story as to what condition Reagan was in. At first, I wondered if they were buying time or what was happening.
But it is very significant, I think, that Reagan was taken somewhere else and then turned around. I think the timing of the turn around relates to a huge fight that they later admitted broke out in the situation room at the White House in the emergency between the Reagan loyalists and the Bush loyalists in the administration.
There was a clear split along those lines because Reagan represents the southern California (what they used to call) `Irish Mob Money' out there and the southern rim economy -- the military-industrial complex and Bush is somewhat of a cross-over coming out of Yale and the upper class schools but also having his money in the south. There are different loyalties. That was clear in a number of instances.
One was when Bush helped to get Haig appointed as Secretary of State. The entire Cabinet staff underneath him was already pre-appointed and he wasn't allowed to pick or choose any of them, or fire any of them. So it was like he was a figure head put up at the head of this agency that he wasn't really allowed to run. Then just a few days before the shooting of Reagan, there was a switch where Bush replaced Haig as the head of an emergency preparedness committee or unit that they had at the White House. The press was asking Bush right after he was appointed in place of Haig -- this was just three days before the shooting -- `What constitutes an emergency for the purpose of this special office?' And Bush said, "The president will know it when he sees it." I think he meant that he -- Reagan -- would know it when he saw it lying on the ground dying.
This I believe was a coup. The black box disappeared for several hours. There was an attempt to get the card that activated the black box by the Secret Service and Rodriguez -- the guy that was carrying it, that took it away from the President as he wasn't supposed to do -- came back three hours later to get the activating card that the FBI had taken out of the pants they had cut off of Reagan in the emergency room. The FBI guy said `I'd better call the Director.' Sessions was down in this big fight that they were having in the situation room and Sessions told him `no -- hold onto the card.'
There was that kind of transition-of-power going on -- who was actually going to control things and there were switch-overs about the Strategic Air Command bomber pilots, again, not having code books aboard on March 31, 81 like they didn't on November 22, 63. This was a classic transition-of-power situation.
I think, the loyalists won the concession that Reagan will be allowed to stay alive but Bush would come into power and at that point Haig emerged from the situation room to the press and said, his famous quote, "Gentlemen, I am in charge here until the Vice-President returns." That meant two things: number one, that they were going extra constitutional -- beyond twenty-fifth amendment, a military take-over and Haig in this office of preparedness, prior to Bush and basically he's taking charge. The press were questioning What does this mean? It's not the twenty-fifth amendment which goes to the Speaker of the House or the Vice-President. What's happening that Haig can come up and say this?
What they don't understand is all that Constitution stuff is pushed aside once they declare National Emergencies. Then they go into FEMA and they have whole other orders of succession that have to do more with the military and the Pentagon than with any of the civilian sector.
So Haig is jumping into that breech. Haig has his own strange progress up the chain-of-command and at one point jumps over literally hundreds of other people that were in line to be promoted when Califono moves him up into these high positions to take over the White House for the removal of Richard Nixon. So Haig is part of their larger game.
The second thing Haig is saying is `until the Vice-President returns.' Bush is said to be in a jovial mood on a flight between (of all places) Fort Worth and Dallas when he gets the news. There is no indication that his joviality diminished. He says that he'll come back in a few hours. There is no rush to get back on his part. Again this lack of any emergency response indicates to me that the thing is planned, they knew it was going to happen, the only thing that didn't work out right was that Reagan actually survived the shooting and survived this small disc going in under his arm.
They've got a patsy. But Hinkley, instead of being taken under civilian custody or even federal custody -- he is in a military district in DC but he is also in several federal districts -- he's whisked off to Quantico Marine Base and that's where he is held for questioning. I think that that was part of his debriefing and deprogramming. But he's not taken under civilian control, he's taken under military custody.
Then he's moved from there for psychiatric evaluation to Fort Butner, South Carolina, which was the first prison that was developed where the cells (and the blueprints) were called labs. It was the first mind-control experimentation prison in the country. He spends his time down there. Again with a group of psychiatrists that are interlinked with other assassinations and then he is eventually brought to court and declared not guilty by reason of insanity for the assassination attempt.

[Peter Lemkin]

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[TD]John Chancellor, eyebrows raised, informed the viewers of NBC Nightly News that the brother of the man who tried to kill the president was acquainted with the son of the man who would have become president if the attack had been successful.As a matter of fact, Chancellor said in a bewildered tone, Scott Hinckley and Neil Bush had been scheduled to have dinner together at the home of the vice president's son the very next night. And, of course, the engagement had been canceled. . . Then a peculiar thing happened: The story vanished. To this day, it has never been reported in the New York Times, Washington Post or many other metropolitan newspapers, never again mentioned by any of the television news networks, and never noted in news magazines except for a brief mention in Newsweek, which lumped it with two ludicrous conspiracy scenarios as if the Bush-Hinckley connection didn't deserve some sort of explanation.
But many other significant facts concerning the Bush and Hinckley families have remained unexplored and unexplained, in addition to other matters related to the assassination. For example: Neil Bush, a landman for Amoco Oil, told Denver reporters he had met Scott Hinckley at a surprise party at the Bush home January 23, 1981, which was approximately three weeks after the U.S. Department of Energy had begun what was termed a "routine audit" of the books of the Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, the Hinckley oil company. In an incredible coincidence, on the morning of March 30, three representatives of the U.S. Department of Energy told Scott Hinckley, Vanderbilt's vice president of operations, that auditors had uncovered evidence of pricing violations on crude oil sold by the company from 1977 through 1980. The auditors announced that the federal government was considering a penalty of two million dollars. Scott Hinckley reportedly requested "several hours to come up with an explanation" of the serious overcharges. The meeting ended a little more than an hour before John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan.
Although John Hinckley Sr. was characterized repeatedly by the national news media as "a strong supporter of President Reagan," no record has been found of contributions to Reagan. To the contrary, in addition to money given to Bush, a fellow Texas oilman, as far back as 1970, the senior Hinckley raised funds for Bush's unsuccessful campaign to wrest the nomination from Reagan. Furthermore, he and Scott Hinckley separately contributed to John Connally in late 1979 when Connally was leading the campaign to stop Reagan from gaining the 1980 presidential nomination. The Bush and Hinckley families, of course, would do better under a Bush presidency than it would under President Reagan. Available evidence at the time made clear many other connections between the Bush and Hinckley families. Reported "coincidences" involving the Hinckleys and the family of H.L. Hunt also remained unexplored. Even the official government line admitted that the Bush and Hinckley families "maintained social ties." The deeply troubled Hinckley oil company obviously would fare better under a president Bush.
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[Rolf Zaeschmar]

Here are some of the main anomalies(some already mentioned) of the assassination attempt on Reagan:


--Hinckley was under psychiatric treatment for depression.

--The San Francisco Chronicle reported that John Hinckley was a former member of the National Socialist(Nazi) Party of America. He was expelled for being so violent that his fellow-Nazis suspected him of being a government agent. They said "he wanted to shoot people and blow things up."

--Judy Woodruff, reporting for NBC News Special Reports, immediately after the assassination attempt, insisted that at least one shot came from an overhang over Reagan's limousine. Woodruff later reported that the shot came from a Secret Service agent who was stationed on the overhang, which one researcher dubbed "the Bushy Knoll." According to this researcher, if a sniper were positioned on the "Bushy Knoll," he would have had a clear shot at Reagan along the exact angle at which the bullet entered his body.

--Reagan's limousine was not parked right in front of the entrance, as it should have been and normally was, but was parked 30 feet further away, which caused Reagan to be exposed as he walked to the car.

--In the video of this event, Reagan waves to supporters across the street from the hotel exit, who have been kept back behind the police lines. Yet Hinckley was allowed to get very close to the president:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_assa...on_attempt
"While the Secret Service extensively screened those attending the president's speech, in a "colossal mistake" the agency allowed an unscreened group to stand within 15 feet of him, behind a rope line...."

--White House correspondent Sarah McClendon reported that Reagan's Secret Service retinue wasn't in its "usual tight formation" around Reagan in front of the Hilton.

--In his memoirs, President Reagan said he felt nothing at the time of the shooting, but felt a great amount of pain when his secret service agent jumped on top of him in the limo a second later, causing him to initially think the agent had broken a rib. Because of this, some have suggested this agent was the one who fired the near fatal bullet to Reagan's chest. As it was, the armored door of the President's limo stood between Hinckley and his target, which forced the researchers to conclude the bullet had ricocheted from the door frame, or the roof, into Reagan.

--Though the President's limo took off immediately for the five minute ride to the hospital, and the other three wounded were bundled into ambulances five minutes later, two of the three wounded arrived at George Washington University Hospital 15 minutes before the President. What happened in those 20 missing minutes? The Secret Service would only say, "We got lost."

--The Vice-President's son, Neil Bush, was supposed to have had dinner in Denver with Scott Hinckley, John Hinckley's brother, the evening that John went on his shooting rampage. John Hinckley's father was described as a 'supporter of Ronald Reagan,' yet he was in reality a long-time contributer to the political career of George Bush, Reagan's rival in the race for the Republican nomination for President.

--Just like Lee Harvey Oswald, Hinckley seemed to have a 'double' who mirrored his own actions. He was named Edward Richardson, and is supposed to have had a strong resemblance to Hinckley. Richardson traced Hinckley's path from Connecticut to Colorado, writing demented love letters to actress Jodie Foster, just like Hinckley. A week after Hinckley's infamous attack, Richardson was arrested in New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal with a .32 caliber revolver, after threatening the lives of both Reagan and Foster.

--Missing evidence? Hinckley's parents' memoir refers to some penciled notes by Hinckley which were found during a search of his cell and which "could sound bad." These notes "described an imaginary conspiracy--either with the political left or the political right [...] to assassinate the President." Hinckley's lawyers said that the notes were too absurd to be taken seriously, and they have been suppressed.




A poem written by Hinckley, 1981:

Pretend you are a virgin on fire
An outcast in the midst of madness
The scion of something unthinkable
Satan's long lost illegitimate son
A solitary weed among carnations
The last living shit on earth
Regardless of everyone's friends
I plot revenge in the dark
I plot escape from this asylum
Regardless of Disneyland
I follow the example of perverts
I follow the long lost swine

[Peter Lemkin]

Here are some of the main anomalies(some already mentioned) of the assassination attempt on Reagan:


--Hinckley was under psychiatric treatment for depression.

--The San Francisco Chronicle reported that John Hinckley was a former member of the National Socialist(Nazi) Party of America. He was expelled for being so violent that his fellow-Nazis suspected him of being a government agent. They said "he wanted to shoot people and blow things up."

--Judy Woodruff, reporting for NBC News Special Reports, immediately after the assassination attempt, insisted that at least one shot came from an overhang over Reagan's limousine. Woodruff later reported that the shot came from a Secret Service agent who was stationed on the overhang, which one researcher dubbed "the Bushy Knoll." According to this researcher, if a sniper were positioned on the "Bushy Knoll," he would have had a clear shot at Reagan along the exact angle at which the bullet entered his body.

--Reagan's limousine was not parked right in front of the entrance, as it should have been and normally was, but was parked 30 feet further away, which caused Reagan to be exposed as he walked to the car.

--In the video of this event, Reagan waves to supporters across the street from the hotel exit, who have been kept back behind the police lines. Yet Hinckley was allowed to get very close to the president:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_assa...on_attempt
"While the Secret Service extensively screened those attending the president's speech, in a "colossal mistake" the agency allowed an unscreened group to stand within 15 feet of him, behind a rope line...."

--White House correspondent Sarah McClendon reported that Reagan's Secret Service retinue wasn't in its "usual tight formation" around Reagan in front of the Hilton.

--In his memoirs, President Reagan said he felt nothing at the time of the shooting, but felt a great amount of pain when his secret service agent jumped on top of him in the limo a second later, causing him to initially think the agent had broken a rib. Because of this, some have suggested this agent was the one who fired the near fatal bullet to Reagan's chest. As it was, the armored door of the President's limo stood between Hinckley and his target, which forced the researchers to conclude the bullet had ricocheted from the door frame, or the roof, into Reagan.

--Though the President's limo took off immediately for the five minute ride to the hospital, and the other three wounded were bundled into ambulances five minutes later, two of the three wounded arrived at George Washington University Hospital 15 minutes before the President. What happened in those 20 missing minutes? The Secret Service would only say, "We got lost."

--The Vice-President's son, Neil Bush, was supposed to have had dinner in Denver with Scott Hinckley, John Hinckley's brother, the evening that John went on his shooting rampage. John Hinckley's father was described as a 'supporter of Ronald Reagan,' yet he was in reality a long-time contributer to the political career of George Bush, Reagan's rival in the race for the Republican nomination for President.

--Just like Lee Harvey Oswald, Hinckley seemed to have a 'double' who mirrored his own actions. He was named Edward Richardson, and is supposed to have had a strong resemblance to Hinckley. Richardson traced Hinckley's path from Connecticut to Colorado, writing demented love letters to actress Jodie Foster, just like Hinckley. A week after Hinckley's infamous attack, Richardson was arrested in New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal with a .32 caliber revolver, after threatening the lives of both Reagan and Foster.

--Missing evidence? Hinckley's parents' memoir refers to some penciled notes by Hinckley which were found during a search of his cell and which "could sound bad." These notes "described an imaginary conspiracy--either with the political left or the political right [...] to assassinate the President." Hinckley's lawyers said that the notes were too absurd to be taken seriously, and they have been suppressed.




A poem written by Hinckley, 1981:

Pretend you are a virgin on fire
An outcast in the midst of madness
The scion of something unthinkable
Satan's long lost illegitimate son
A solitary weed among carnations
The last living shit on earth
Regardless of everyone's friends
I plot revenge in the dark
I plot escape from this asylum
Regardless of Disneyland
I follow the example of perverts
I follow the long lost swine

Good summary, thanks. It was NOT as presented - i.e., the official version was not fully the truth, as is usual in Deep Political Events. For the MSM and most Americans however this shooting was as advertised. Ha!

[Dawn Meredith]

Wow. It was pretty clear to me in the aftermath that this was a Bush plot, but all the details are incredibly damning. Keeping up with true history is a full time job. No wonder so few are interested and accept entertainment as news. That poem is chilling. I wonder if he will give any interviews. Or if he even knows anything of the truth to say. Did not know about the double.

Dawn

[Joseph McBride]

John W. Hinckley Jr. also worked as a volunteer in George W. Bush's
unsuccessful 1978 House campaign.