if they were to sit down with me face to face i could show them with their own documents and counter what they have been saying and they don't want to do that. >> more tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q & a. this monday watch american history tv in primetime on c-span 3 with a look at the 34th president dwight david eisenhower. at 8:00 p.m. architect frank gehry on the eisenhower memorial. then the president's granddaughter susan expressing opposition to the memorial.

at 10:30 p.m. a film about the president produced by the u.s. army. on march 31, 1981 a would be assassin fired six shots at president ronald reagan outside the washington hilton hotel two miles from the white house. "washington post" reporter del wilbur author of "rawhide down the near assassination of ronald reagan" met us on the sidewalk where the shooting took place to tell his story of that day. >> ronald reagan was leaving this hotel after delivering a speech to the afl-cio. reagan, a longtime union man himself, was kind of excited to give this speech. he actually rewrote it by hand. [ applause ] ♪ about 2:25, 2:26, 2:27 he emerges from this entrance behind this area.

this is new. they built it after the shooting. it's a bunker, and if you'll look over here, you'll see the entrance, a door, a steel door. where the president emerged and left. they built this actually, this entrance, especially for the president. when they built this hotel in the 1960s, they built this wonderful grand ballroom, and they knew that for vips they will want their secure special entrance, they built it right here, ease of access for limousines. what's interesting about this, if you look up here, you'll see the driveway, the curving driveway, the architect didn't consult the secret service in building the entrance. they realized the secret service if they came up this way and stopped here and kept driving up, if they left the limo here for the president to come and go, it would get stuck on the curb because it was so hulhulki. and if a cop don't get the car

started and they often stalled out back then they couldn't get away and they could get trapped up there in an attack. what they'd have to do is leave the president here, back the limousine around, back it up and park it right around here. this sidewalk is smaller than it was then, but right about where the curb is, they backed the limousine up like this, so the limousine is facing out towards "t" street, this is "t" street, the limousine is facing this way, the back door is open. what's cool about the back door. this is a lincoln continental, armored lincoln continental, about 13,000 pounds. you know, they would stop a tank rifle's round or something, this was a '72 lincoln, and they stopped making the backwards doors in the late '60s, i don't know why they had the backward opening door, the agents called them suicide doors, and the reason they did, if they ever left them open when they drove, they would rip them off, they wouldn't close, they had to make sure the doors were always closed. so they park right here. this is a risk, by doing it this way, the president would be out

in the open. around 2:00, 1:30, about that time, john hinckley, a troubled 25-year-old from evergreen, colorado, who's obsessed with jodie foster, we all know, infamously obsessed with jodie foster. hinkley's a really strange character. i tried to write him in the most balanced way possible. people differ whether he was insane at that moment, the jury decided that he was. he had an obsession with jodie foster and it had started a few years earlier, 1976 he saw the movie "taxi driver" and he fantasized by jodie foster. his life began to mirror travis bickle, the main character in "taxi driver." it's a violent film, the taxi driver, former army vet, who wants to kill a presidential candidate to impress a woman he admires. so he starts focusing on jodie foster who played a prostitute in that movie and over time he becomes more and more obsessive, in his mind he wants to impress her. he thinks, the only way i can

impress her would be to shoot the president of the united states. he hangs out at blair house in the transition period, stalking the president-elect. he actually stalked carter. in october he was -- in october, 1980, he was in dayton, ohio, and he got within arm's reach of the president. but he didn't bring his guns with him. he left them in his luggage at the bus station and he regretted that, and so he'd been stalking presidents and stuff. there he was with reagan, right there. he's actually in l.a. he takes a bus across country. he arrives the day before the shooting, and at that moment in the documents i read and the people that have interviewed him, the doctors, the psychiatrists, the psychological reports, he hasn't made up his mind to shoot or kill the president, he doesn't know the president is in town. but he wants to take a bus from d.c. to new haven to get foster, and he's envisioning killing himself, killing her, killing both of them in this orgy of violence. he eats breakfast and he buys a

copy of "the washington star" newspaper. he flips it open and page a-4, there's the president's schedule. he is at the hilton. i'll take my little gun, the 0.22 caliber and see how close i can get. he writes a letter to her from the old park plaza central hotel in washington, no longer there, it gets torn down. a lot of history in this day gets torn down, you will find. he's waiting in the rope line, about 15 feet past where the open door is for the limousine. he has a .22 caliber gun in his pocket. he's loaded with devastator bullets which are tipped with led azide. it's an explosive, a high

explosive, so they blow up when they hit things. so, he's sitting there, waiting, waiting, waiting, reagan comes out. he want believe he's this close. he's 15 feet from the president, another agent right there, he pulls out his gun and he envisions himself dying in a burst of gunfire, suicide by cop or secret service agent and he starts shooting. >> four shots. >> shots fired. shots fired. there are some injuries. >> mr. president -- >> there's a wealth of documentary material from this day that explains what happened. there's a lot of video. three networks shot video of it. there's still photographs. the best -- there's two groups of really great still photographs. one was taken by ron edmonds, the white house photographer for a.p. it was his fourth day. he was around here somewhere. he shoots over the limousine and he has great shots of parr throwing reagan into the car. then you have the white house photographer who is trailing reagan in this area, and he's

shooting pictures that way. and by doing -- using those two pictures you get a sense of what happened. you watch the video, and it's all two dimensional, and the fbi reports i dug up, they laid it out with tape and measurements and stuff, that was very helpful. i've come here a few times, but coming here is kind of difficult, because if you notice this thing wasn't here that day. they built after to protect the president. and then you have the little gardening area is new, and i'm told they put that in actually to keep spectators away from the wall where hinkley was and the sidewalk is shorter. and he's right here and he sees reagan right about there. >> where is reagan? >> reagan is right about where you're standing right there. >> so, this far away. >> yeah. that's about 15 feet.

they say it's 15 feet. they've measured it and reagan was 15 feet away when the shots were fired. if you go to any basketball court in the country and you get on the free-throw line and you look at it, you know, it's just the distance of a free throw, that's how close he was. that's 15 feet. the secret service did -- there are a lot of great reports they did on this. they interviewed all the agents there and witnesses. i foia'd those and i got those, so i was able to know what everyone said they did, and that usually kind of matched up with what the video and the pictures showed. that was helpful. it was also helpful to get into their heads of what was happening. i interviewed them all, too, and i also got some fbi reports, for example, there's a great fbi report no one has seen reagan's fbi interview shortly after the shooting, he gave an interview to the fbi agent. that was sealed. i got it unsealed through my foia process. and reagan said he was coming out here and he saw the reporters, but he wasn't going to talk to the press, and you can infer from that that the reason he didn't want to talk to the press, he kind of made some

stumbles and they wanted to keep him more on message in that period before, so he wasn't going to answer impromptu questions, it wasn't worth it to me. he said if hinkley had just waited, he was going to climb on the running board of the limousine and raise himself up and wave to a group of 200 spectators across the street. his back would have been to hinkley as he waved. but hinkley didn't wait. he started shooting. it's 2:27 p.m. and we know it's 2:27 p.m. because the moment the gunfire ends, secret service agent calls on the radio to the headquarters, the secret service headquarters at the white house, and an agent there looks up at their clock and finds out -- and notes it's exactly 2:27 p.m. he shoots six shots. the first one hits jim brady, the press secretary, in the head, the second one hits tom delahanty, a d.c. police officer, who had turned around

to check on the president's progress and he falls down and says, "i'm hit." the path to the president is clear, he has an effective range of 20 to 30 feet. he's done target practice and he can hit stationary targets 20 to 30 feet. jerry parr, reagan's lead secret service agent, meanwhile, in 0.4 oh of a second, i have timed it out, but it's difficult. he's grabbed the president of the united states the moment he hears the gunfire, thrusts him behind tim mccarthy who is another secret service agent who swiveled his body and takes a bullet in the chest. the first bullet hits brady, the second hits delahanty, the third one flies over reagan's head and lodges in a window of that building across the street. they've recovered it and there's a cool photo of the bullet hole in the windows. the fourth one hits mccarthy who is turned like this to take the bullet. he's not wearing a bulletproof vest. hits him right in the chest and spinning him around. he's credited with saving the president's life at that moment. he hits the bulletproof window just as you can see the

president flashing behind it. and the sixth one cracks across the parking lot. parr gets him in the limo. they slam the door shut. the driver of the limo, former army veteran, you know, real stressful job driving the president, he said not because you're worried about situations like this, but you're worried about dropping the president off the wrong entrance. it's hugely embarrassing. you never live it down. it's stressful, waiting and and waiting and he can hear the open shots from the open door, shuts the door, he's worried because he's seen his buddy fall to the ground and he didn't want to run over tim mccarthy with a 13,000-pound armored limousine, it would kill him. they drive away and head out this way towards connecticut avenue at that moment. what they didn't know is hinkly's final shot, the sixth one had ricocheted off the back quarter panel of the limousine. they recovered the black paint and it matches the

limousine, as reagan diving, it hits him right here in the side, right about here, and lodges an inch from his heart. >> we're going to get into a taxi and follow the ride of the limousine. do you think this is roughly the way it was parked? it's roughly pretty close. it was out there towards "t" street and the rear door, the rear part of the limo was almost touching the sidewalk. remember, the sidewalk is smaller here than it actually was, so right about here is probably where the door was. all right, so you're going to go out here and you'll make a left down connecticut and then you'll make a right on continue connecticut down 17th street and then make a right on pennsylvania. can you do that? >> so, paint us the picture inside the limo while we're driving. >> the agent, jerry parr, looks out the window and sees there's

a pock mark on that door and window. he also notices the three guys down on the sidewalk as they pull away. he props reagan up in the seat you're in. reagan's kind of like this, like a tired basketball player and he runs his body -- inside his coat pocket, coat and his hands through his hair to check to see if there's any blood. there's no blood. he feels pretty good, he tells the driver to tell on his radio, because parr lost his radio. he lost his transponder. he can't use his radio to tell everyone what they are doing. so he tells the driver to use the microphone here to radio down to head quarters that either heading back to the white house. actually they used the code word crown. and he takes the radio from -- he says rawhide is okay. rawhide is okay, rawhide is ronald reagan's code name. that's where i got the title of the book from. >> rawhide is okay. follow-up, rawhide is okay.

>> roger. >> you want to go to hospital or back to the white house? >> we're going to crown. >> okay. >> back to the white house. back to the white house. rawhide is okay. >> so, they're heading back now towards the white house. and drew is flying, the driver of the limousine, hurtling down connecticut avenue. it's closed to traffic. there want to be traffic here in 1981 on march 30th because they've closed the streets for the limousine's expected ride back. at about -- as they're driving around, the limousine is alone, they have no support. they've left the motorcade behind. the follow-up cars, armored car with two guys brandishing uzis is following behind and another agent gets up here them, too. police cars are starting to follow up and the police motorcycles are getting ahead of the limousine, as they're going through right about, jerry parr

realizes that something's wrong with the president, he's saying he's having trouble breathing. "i'm having trouble breathing, i don't know." is it your heart? reagan said, i don't think so and he starts dabbing blood from his lips and it's bright and frothy blood. from parr's training he knows that means it's oxygenated and it's not good. he can go to the hospital and if reagan's not hurt, that could set off a major economic crisis. this is what's going through his mind. these are heavy questions, he says, do you know what, i can't risk it. i got to go to the hospital which had no agents at it. there's no security at it. there could have been other assassins waiting for the president there. he makes the call. they go to the hospital. they get on the hospital and saying we're going to george washington, the emergency room, let's get there fast. and parr even gets on the radio and says let's hustle. >> go ahead, drew.

>> en route. >> roger, we want to go to the emergency room george washington. >> that's a roger. >> going to george washington fast. >> roger. [ inaudible ] >> get an ambulance. i mean, get the -- >> you copy? g.w.? >> made the call. >> let's hustle. >> because he can't say on the radio reagan's hurt. they don't use the name. they know people in the staff and news media can be listening to the open radio communications and hence they use the code names. they abandon crown, the white house, go to the hospital. now, at about this time marian gordon who is an unsung hero. she's one of the few female agents in the secret service, she devised the motorcade, she drove the routes to the hilton, to the hospital, the white house, and wanted to make sure the routes were clear, no blockages.

they wanted to make sure they knew where everyone was going. drew had driven a motorcade to the hilton not too long before that and he knew the routes, he didn't have to practice them. he already knew them. and marian gordon realizes she doesn't have a radio to communicate to the police cars. do you know what, she's in the front right seat of the spare limousine, armored limousine, and she goes do you know what, the cops are going to keep going to the white house because they don't know where we're going. they think we're going to the white house. we better get up in front of the presidential limousine right so she tells the driver, now, you better get in front of the presidential limousine, because he's going to lose his police escort and we cannot have -- she didn't want drew unrue to get -- there's a lot going on and she wanted to be a battering ram. they didn't know what was going on in the world. they don't know if there's other people working to get him. she needs to make sure if there's a car going in front of

the limousine, she has to take the hit, not the president. and the president's condition, he's having a hard time breathing. he said he felt like someone hit him in the back with a hammer. he felt so bad. struggling and struggling to breathe. this is a hard pivot to make because it's an angled street. meanwhile, the police cars get going. i got the d.c. police tape, they weren't that helpful. they are amazing. you can hear a guy going, donald bell, who is a sergeant, in one of the lead cars, my god, they turned to the hospital, they turned to the hospital. and they start going this way. they are heading towards the circle and drew unrue asked jerry parr, do we want to go the wrong way around the circle to get there faster, he said we want to go the wrong way around the circle and jerry is no, no, he didn't want to hit oncoming traffic. it would be too dangerous. the old hospital looks like an

old world war ii bunker. it's really ugly. it's gone now. that's the new hospital. that's where my two sons were born. at the new hospital. they are going around the circle. that was the old hospital. this one opened in 2002, they tore the old building down in 2003. they pull into the emergency room and reagan, they drive up. the limo pulls up, parr jumps out. reagan indicates to parr that, i want to get out on my own. i don't need to get carried. he comes out. and reagan -- parr goes he wants to be a cowboy, you know. but reagan gets up, walks out, hitches up his pants even to get them right, walks to the door, everyone follows him, and the agent has scouted ahead of them. the medical crews are getting there and the nurse is asking how he's doing. he looks ashen. he doesn't look good. he collapses. bam, just falls on the ground. he knees hit the ground and they catch him, suddenly a whole

hoard of people carrying him to the trauma bay. they threw him on a gurney, the nurses, paramedic, a doctor who initially treated him all thought he's going to die. he looked that bad. this guy's dead. this is a nightmare. their hands are shaking. this is the president of the united states. we have to save him. they start doing the medical protocols. throwing in ivs and throwing in -- they're getting long lines into him. you know, someone is, you know, got an oxygen mask on him to give him air because you got to stabilize someone's blood pressure really fast to prevent shock, which will kill you. a nurse can't get his blood pressure. she can't hear it. she has to get it palpably. he feels his brachial artery to feel if the blood pressure is. she counts 60. anything below 90 is shock. he's in a lot of trouble. they don't know he's been shot. they think maybe he's had a heart attack. maybe jerry parr and others say they think he broke a rib. when they came hurtling into the limousine, he landed on the

transom, you know, for the transition. it's clearly going bad. jerry parr is praying, please let this guy live. he's thinking back to kennedy. not another one. we can't lose another one. this is a crazy. they throw the ivs they are following all the proper protocols which had really only come into existence the last ten years, reagan is lucky. not only did the secret service ramp up their training and save his life, but at the same time this hospital -- not this one, but that hospital only became a certified level one trauma center two years before reagan was shot, and years before that emergency medicine was the backwater of the medical establishment and they'd only begun to realize how to treat people who are victims of trauma and save them, and what they come to realize, you have to treat first and diagnose later. don't worry about diagnosing. don't try to fix stuff, wonder what's broken. no, stabilize, stop the bleeding and then fix what's wrong. they are doing that. going through a checklist.

there is no doctor telling people what to do. everyone knows what they have to do at that second. if you have to think, you make mistakes, it takes too much time. everyone does it. reagan's blood pressure goes up, he begins to be stabilized. you know, a doctor comes in and realizes -- they roll him over. they're trying to feel what's wrong. they can't hear breath sounds in his left lung. a surgical intern -- well, the anesthesia intern at that moment comes in, you know, and he'd been milling about, even put the oxygen mask on reagan's face, and he's a vietnam veteran, and he'd been shot in vietnam, he was in a helicopter and almost died. they roll him over, he looks down, hey, that's a bullet hole. a tiny flat slit right here, because the bullet had flattened remember and hit him like a buzz saw and then it goes in and tumbles through and tears some arteries and that's why he's bleeding. he said, oh, man, he must be filling with blood. or air. and so they get a chest tube. dr. joe giordano who had

established the trauma unit here and made the emergency room what it is today and what it was then. takes over and inserts the chest tube. blood starts pouring out. blood just keeps coming. that's when they're like uh-oh. usually in 85% of gunshot victims in the chest, chest tubes stop the bleeding. why? you drain the blood, the lung reexpands, and it puts pressure on the bleeding arteries and capillaries. they cut off. but it's still coming and the blood won't stop. this is starting to concern them. they get ben aaron who was working across the street. he comes over. he's the chief thoracic surgeon at the hospital. realizes, you know, we have to take this guy to surgery. we have to fix him. at 2:57 p.m., a lot of doctors took notes and i used them to build the timeline. not a half hour since he'd been shot, exactly a half hour, they wheel him to the o.r. and this is where reagan delivers his best lines before being wheeled to the o.r. he sees his wife, nancy reagan. he reprises the line that jack

dempsey uses. he said, honey, i forgot to duck. and he really said it. doctors heard him say it. i have notes that they said it. people always wondered did he say that stuff, he said everything. it wasn't made up by republicans or his administration, he said this stuff. he sees jim baker and ed meese who had rushed here to talk to him and he sees mike deaver. the three top aides and they are known as troika. he says, who's minding the store? you know, he's cracking jokes. here's a guy, you know, whatever. they wheel him to the o.r. here's reagan going to the operating room. he believes the role of a president is his role to play. it's a role. would he pass up a great operating room moment? could he pass up a good operating room moment? in his mind? i can't get in his head. he leans up on his shoulder, takes off the oxygen mask and says i hope you're all republicans to all the doctors. joe giordano who set up the

system that saved reagan's life the third time this day says, mr. president, today we are all republicans. that's ironic because he's about as liberal as they come. the nurses and doctors suspect when he was in the o.r. he knew things were very tense. he needed them -- he knew he needed them to act normally and professionally and he needed to reduce the tension in the room. that's why he did that. he was in the hospital until april 11th, 12 day after the shooting, and 13 days total. and when he was in the operating room, you know, he went through surgery, ben aaron retrieved the bullet and i interviewed how routine the hospital tried to keep things during his surgery, you know, aaron, by the books, former military man, wanted to ensure his own team was there, his normal team, so they even had a 31-year-old surgical intern with him, and that 31-year-old surgical intern, david adelberg, reached into the

president's chest and pulled the president's beating heart aside with his own hand to give ben aaron more room to hunt for the bullet. think about it, a 31-year-old, the president's beating heart in your hand. that's a powerful moment. anyway, they find the bullet. they stitch up the bleeding and stop the bleeding and stitch him up and send him to the recovery room where he regales the world with hilarious liners that he wrote by hand. they are written by hand, and the reagan foundation let me read the notes. 1991, the tenth anniversary of the shooting, you know, reagan came here for an anniversary event and to support the brady bill for gun control which was a big deal for reagan to do that, and they named the -- they named the emergency room the ronald reagan institute of emergency medicine. >> obviously they must have changed some procedures. did they do anything wrong that day? >> what's really interesting to me about that whole thing in the '70s the secret service is realizing that the world -- there are a lot of political assassinations. we lost bobby kennedy in 1968,

martin luther king, kennedy in '63. not a lot changed in the training culture. in the '70s a bunch of agents in l.a. trained better how to react when they're shot, how to react in a split second, and they adopted this kind of training to improve how quickly they react, so the secret service agents react almost instantaneously to the gunfire, if you look at kennedy and george wallace, they were debacles. kennedy's shot in the neck and the driver just keeps driving straight. no evasive maneuvers at all. they weren't trained to act without thinking. that's interesting. they were prepared. but yet they walk out like this. inside meanwhile they checked everybody who went in. they had bomb-sniffing dogs check the speech before they went in. they checked the names of everyone that came in contact with the president. and yet they let an unscreened rope line 15 feet from the president out in the open and the guy has a gun. and so there's this incongruity, something going on with the secret service where they are prepared for the worst but

don't try to prevent the worst, and that's something after it's done you have bunkers like this. when the president visits the hotel that, let's say, doesn't have a garage that he can pull into or this kind of thing, what they do is they build a tent. and so they did that. they also use magnetometers everywhere. jerry parr, funny story. they started installing metal detectors at the white house after this happened. they seed an inordinate amount of guns from old ladies in the south who came to visit the white house. they took those kind of stretches. and in the last 30 years no president has been shot at. there are things that make us concerned about the safety, the socialites from virginia that snuck into the white house that shook obama's hands, they didn' have weapons, but what if he had been a jujitsu master, and the guy threw his shoes at bush in iraq. we don't know what could have been in those. and in georgia there was a grenade that landed pretty close to bush. and they've done a good job at