next weekend is the 50th anniversary of bloody sunday when voting rights advocates were met with violence from alabama state troopers. american history tv will be live from selma next saturday and sunday. and each night at 8:00 eastern we will show highlights. here is congressman john lewis one of the leaders of the march reflecting 50 years later. john lewis: one of the great moments of hope, will marching from selma to montgomery, after bloody sunday and the reaction of people around the nation and around the world. demonstrations and more than 80 cities. on almost every major college campus in america. saying it is going to work out it is going to be all right. president lyndon johnson, eight

days after bloody sunday, speaking to the nation and i think gave one of the most meaningful speeches any american president has given in modern times. he said and we shall overcome. that was hope. that said it all. >> join american history tv next saturday and sunday for live coverage from selma, alabama. and it 8:00 eastern each day highlights of our coverage. >> on march 30, 1981i would be assassin hired six shots at present ronald reagan outside the hilton hotel two miles from the white house. washington post reporter, del wilbur matus 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 long-time union man was kind of excited to give this speech. he actually rewrote it by hand. [ applause ] >> at 2:25, 2:26, 2:27, he emerges from this entrance behind this area, this is new, they built this after the shooting. it's a bunker, and if you look inside over here, you'll see the entrance, the 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'll want their own security special interests, so they built it right here, ease of access for limousines. what's interesting about it is, if you look uphere and see the curving driveway, the architects

didn't consult the secret service in building the entrance. so they realized, the secret service, if they came up this way, stopped here and kept driving up, if they just kept the limo here for the president to come and go, the limousine would get stuck up there in the curves because it was so sloping and also there was police car stationed up there to keep people from coming down. by doing that if the cop didn'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. so what any would have to do is they would 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 curve is, they would back the limousine up like this. so the limousine is facing out towards t street. the limousine is facing this way. the back door is open. now what's cool about the back door is this is a lincoln continental, armored lincoln continental. about 13,000 pounds, it would stop a tank rifle round or something. this was a 1972 lincoln.

they stopped making those backward doors in the late 1960s. i haven't figured out why they would have the backward-opening doors, but the agents called them suicide doors. if they ever left them open when they drove, they would rip them off. they had to make sure the doors were always closed. this had an attendant risk right? by doing this, the president would be out in the open. at around 2:00, 1:30, about that time, john hinckley, a deranged troubled 25-year-old from evergreen, colorado, who was obsessed with jodie foster, we all know, infamously obsessed with jodie foster. hinckley is a really strange character and i tried to write him in the most balanced way possible. people differ on whether he was really 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, in 1976, he saw the movie "taxi driver" and

began to fantasize about jodie foster. his life began to mirror travis bickell. a very violent film where bickell is a taxi driver, a 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, it becomes more and more obsessive. he realizes in his mind that he wants to impress her. he thinks the only way he could impress her would be to shoot the president of the united states. he hangs out at the blair house during the transition in 1980, stalking the president. watching the president-elect. he actually stalked carter. in october 1980, he was in dayton, ohio and he got within arm's reach of the president, he didn't bring his guns with him. he left them in the luggage at the bus station. he regretted that. so he had been stalking presidents and stuff. and there he was with reagan.

right there. and he was like, he comes, he's actually in l.a. he takes a bus across country. he arrives the day before the shooting. and at that moment, the documents i read and the people who have interviewed him, the doctors, psychiatrists psychological reports, he hasn't made up his mind to kill, shoot the president, he doesn't even 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 himself, killing himself, killing her, in this orgy of violence. he's at the park central hotel and he buy as copy of the "washington star" newspaper and he flip it is open, on page a-4, there's the president's schedule and there he is at the hilton. he said i'm going to take my little gun, my .22-caliber and go up there and see how close i can get and what could happen. he writes her a letter at 12:45 p.m. at the old park plaza hotel, park central hotel in downtown washington.

this day gets torn down, you'll find. he's waiting right over there behind a rope line. hinckley pulls out his gun and he envisions himself dying in a burst of gunfire, suicide by cop, suicide by secret service agent. and he starts shooting. >> shots fired, shots fired. >> mr. president -- [ gunshots ] >> there's a wealth of documentary material from this day that explains what happened. three networks shot video of it. still photographs, two really great still photographs, one was taken by ron edmonds, it was his fourth day as white house photographer for the a.p. he shoots over the limousine and he has the great shots of par 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's happening. you watch the video, but it's still all two-dimensional. in the fbi reports that i dug up from this, there's some great diagrams that map out where everything is. they laid it out with tape measurements and stuff. that was very helpful. and i've come here few times. but coming here is kind of difficult. because if you notice, this thing obviously wasn't here that day. they built after the protective, 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 hinckley was. and the sidewalk is shorter. he's like 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, about 15 feet. they say 15 fweet, they measured it and reagan was 15 feet from hinckley when the shots were fired. if you go to a basketball court, any basketball court in the country and you get on the free-throw line and you look at it, you're, it's just the distance of a free throw, that's how close he was, that's 15 feet. he also got the secret service did, there are a lot of great reports they did on this. they interviewed all the agents who were there that day and a lot of witnesses. i forwarded those and got those. i was able to know what everyone said they did. that usually kind of matched up with what the video and the pictures showed. that was helpful. but it was helpful to get in their heads of what was happening. i interviewed them all, too. and i also got some fbi reports. there's a great fbi report, no one has seen reagan's fbi interview shortly after the shooting. that was sealed. i got it unsealed through my foia process. and reagan was coming out.

he said he was coming out here and he saw the reporters, but he wasn't going it talk to the press. and you can infer from that, is 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 during that period before. so he wasn't going to answer any impromptu questions, it wasn't worth it to him. he also said, if hinckley had only waited, because he was going to get on, he was going to climb onto the running board of the limousine, raise himself up and wave to about a group of about 200 spectators across the street. his back would have been to hinckley as he waved. but hinckley didn't wait. hinckley started shooting. it is 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, notes it's exactly 2:27 p.m. so he shoots, six shots. the first one hits jim braidy, the press secretary, in the

head, he falls down. the second one hits tom delahany, a d.c. police officer. who had turned around to check the president's progress. and he turns around and shouts i'm hit. now the path to the president is clear, it's wide open. he has an effective range of 20 to 30 feet. he's done target practice and can hit stationary targets at 20 to 30 feet. jerry parr, the lead secret service agent, in .4 of a second. i've tried to time it it's very difficult. in .4 of a second, has grabbed the president of the united states, thrust him behind tim mccarthy, another secret service agent who swivelled his body and takes a bullet in the chest. the first bullet hits braidy the second one hits delanaty and the third one complies over rag -- the third one flies over ronald reagan's head and lodges in a window across the street. the fourth one hits mccarthy who is turned like this to take the bullet. he's not wearing a bullet-proof chest. just as they're behind him, jerry park credits tim mccarthy

for helping save the president's life. the next bullet hits the armored limo window. so the bulletproof window. just as you see the president flashing behind it, with jerry parr pushing him in the limousine. and the sixth one cracks across the parking lot. no one knows where that went. and then jerry parr gets him in the limo, someone slams the door shut. and the driver of the limo, a former army veteran, real stressful job driving the president. he said not because you're worried about situations like this. but you're always worried about dropping off the president at the wrong entrance. it's hugely stressful. he's waiting, he could hear the shots through the open door. if the door would have been closed he wouldn't have been able to hear the shots because it's so heavily plated. he shuts the door, he's got to get out of here. in his mind, he's worried because he saw his buddy, tim mccarthy fall to the ground and he didn't want to run over mccarthy with a 13,000-pound limousine. it would probably kill him. so they head straight up connecticut avenue. hinckley's final shot, the sixth

one had ricochetted off the back quarter panel of the limousine. the match it to the bullet. and as reagan's diving it hits him right here in this side, right around here. and lodges an inch from his heart. >> we're going to get in the taxi and follow the ride of the limousine. and do you think this is roughly the way it was parked? >> this is roughly pretty close, it was this direction, like this. 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. you're going to go out here and make a left down connecticut and 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 here. >> so jerry parr, the agent looks out the window and sees there's a pock mark on that window.

your window. and he also notices the three guys down on the sidewalk. he says, this is bad. he props reagan up in the seat you're in. he props him up. reagan is kind of like this. like a tired basketball player. and he runs his body, inside his coat, and his hands through his hair to check to see if there's any blood. and there's no blood, he feels pretty good and he tells the driver to tell his radio because jerry parr has lost his radio. it busted off in the melee and he lost his transponder, so he can't use his radio to tell everyone what they're doing. so he tells the driver to use the microphone to radio down to headquarters that they're heading back to the white house. they use the code word, crown. and he takes the radio from drew and says, rawhide is ok. rawhide is ok. rawhide is ronald reagan's code name. that's where i got the title of the book from. >> rawhide is ok. follow-up rawhide is ok.

[ inaudible ] >> you want to go to hospital or back to the white house? >> we're going to crown. back to the white house, back to the white house. rawhide is ok. >> so they're heading back now towards the white house. and drew is flying, the driver is just hurtling down connecticut avenue. it's closed to traffic, there wouldn't be here in 1981, march 30th, because they closed the streets for the limousine's expected ride back. as they're driving along now remember the limousine is alone. they have no support. they've left the motorcade behind. the follow-up car, the armored follow-up car with two guys brand issuing uzis finally catches up behind them. and they're going along. and the police cars are starting to now follow up and the police motorcycles are getting ahead of the limousine.

as they're going through, right about here, jerry parr realizes that something is wrong with the president. because he's having trouble breathing, he says he's having trouble breathing, i don't know. he said what's wrong, is it a heart attack, is it your heart? and president reagan starts dabbing blood from his lips and from parr's training he knows that's oxygen from his lungs, that isn't good. so jerry parr has to make a call. this guy is struggling, they have a medical facility at the white house, it's the most secure place in the world. he doesn't know if it's world war iii, or he can go to the hospital. or if he goes to the hospital and reagan is not hurt, this could set off a major economic crisis. he says you know what, i can't risk it. i got to go to the hospital. which by the way, had no agents at it there was no security. there could have been other assassins in the city waiting for the president there. he makes that call and they head to the hospital. they're going to go to the hospital. so they get on the radio and say, we're going to george washington emergency room. and parr gets on the radio and says, let's hustle.

>> go ahead, drew. >> roger, we want to go to the emergency room of george washington. >> that's a roger. >> go to george washington fast. >> roger. >> get an ambulance. horsepower, shaddick. we've made the call. horsepower, horsepower. let's hustle. >> he can't say on the radio they don't use reagan's name. they know people, assassins and news media could be listening to the open radio communications, so they used code names. so they abandoned the crown. the white house, to go to the hospital. now at about this time, marian gordon, who is kind of an unsung hero of the day, one of the few female agents in the secret service, she devised the motorcade that day and the

routes. and she even drove the routes to the hilton and to the hospital and to the whus. -- and to the white house. she wanted do make sure that everyone knew where they were going. the limo driver knew all the routes. he didn't have it practice them. they're heading down and marian gordon realizes she doesn't have a radio to communicate with the police cars that are in front. and she's in the front right seat of the spare limousine. the armored limousine. she said, these cars, these 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. so she tells the driver, you better get in front of that presidential limousine. because if he's going to lose his police escort in a few seconds and we cannot have, she didn't want drew to get, there's a lot going on in this car, he has a lot to do. she doesn't want him to have to think about how to get to the hospital and she wanted to be a battering ram. they didn't know what was going

on in the world as i've said before. they don't know if enter are other people working to get him. so she needs to make sure if there's a car that gets in front of the limousine. she has to take the hit, not the president. meanwhile, the president, his condition seems to have having a harder time breathing and reagan himself said it felt like someone hit him with a hammer. struggling to breathe. so here it's interesting, right? they're driving down here and the spare limousine is in front. and it's a hard pivot to make. because it's an angled street. and meanwhile, the police cars keep going. i've gotten the d.c. police tapes. they're amazing, you can hear a guy going, donald bell, who is a sergeant, one of the lead cars goes, my god, they've turned to the hospital. they've turned to the hospital. they start going this way. they're going along, heading towards the circle. and the driver asked jerry parr, do we want to go the wrong way around the circle to get there faster. we want to go the wrong way around the circle and jerry is like no, no, no. we want to go around. jerry didn't want to hit any oncoming traffic. the old hospital is at 22nd.

it's a big, world war ii-era bunker building, really ugly. there's the new hospital. that's where my two sons were born, at that hospital. they run around the circle that's where the old hospital was. this is the new hospital. they built this one in 2000. this one opened in 2002. they tore the old building down in 2003. they pull in. to 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 a hand out. i don't need to be carried. and reagan, parr says, he wants to be a cowboy. you know. so reagan gets up, walks out. he hitches up his pants, even, to get them right. he walks to the door, everyone follows him. an agent has scouted ahead of them. the medical crews are just get dlg and the emergency crews ask him how he's doing. he looks really ashen. he doesn't look very good. he collapses, bam, he falls to the ground. his knees hit the ground, and ray shallic and jerry parr catch him.

the nurses, nurses, paramedic, a doctor who initially treat him all thought he was going to die, he looked that bad. they thought, this guy's dead. their hands are shaking. they start instantly doing the medical protocols to save his life. they're throwing in ivs, getting long lines on him. someone has got an oxygen mask on him to give him air. you have to stabilize someone's blood pressure really fast he'll go into shock, it will kill you. a nurse can't feel his blood pressure. she has to palpate the brachial artery. and she registers 60. anything below 90 is in shock. jerry parr and some others tell the nurse, we think he broke a rib in the limousine. when they came hurtling in the limousine. he landed on the transom, the transmission, and jerry parr suspects he broke a rib and punctured a lung. jerry parr is praying, please let this guy live.

he's thinking back to kennedy. they throw the ivs, they're following all the proper protocols which had really only come into existence the last ten years. reagan really is lucky. not only did the secret service ramp up their training to save his life. but at the same time that hospital only became a certified level one trauma hospital two years before reagan was shot. and even before that, emergency medicine was the backwater of the medical establishment and they had only just begun to realize how to treat victims of trauma and save them. what they had begun to realize is you have to treat first and diagnose later. don't worry about diagnosing. don't try to fix stanley cup. -- don't try to fix stuff. you stabilize it, get the blood pressure up. don't let them go into shock. stabilize, stop the bleeding and then fix what's wrong. they're doing now, going crazy, there's no doctor ordering

people what to do. everyone knows exactly what they have to do at that second. because if you have to think you make mistakes, if you have to think, 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, realizes you know, they roll him over, trying to feel what's wrong. they can't hear any breath sounds in his left lung. they roll him over, a surgical intern, i guess he was an anesthesia intern at that moment comes in and he had been milling about. he put the oxygen mask on reagan's face until someone else came. he's a vet nan veteran. -- a vietnam veteran. he had been shot in vietnam. he was rescued in a rice paddy. they roll him over and he looks down and says, hey, that's a bullet hole. it's a little slit. the bullet had flattened and hit him like a buzz saw. it tumbles through and tears up some arteries. oh, man, he must be filling with blood. and or air. so they get a chest tube. dr. joe giordano, who had established a trauma umtnit and made the emergency room today what it is then.

takes over and inserts a chest tube. blood starts pouring out. blood just keeps coming and they're like, uh-oh. usually in 85% of gunshot victims in the chest, chest tubes stop the bleeding. way? -- why? you drain the blood, the lung reexpands. but it's still coming. it's still coming. the blood won't stop. this is starting to concern them. they gent bent ben aaron, the chief thoracic surgeon at the hospital. realizes we have to take this guy to surgery. at 2:57 p.m., a doctor took notes and i used the notes to build a timeline, not even a half-hour after he had been shot, they start wheeling him to the o.r. and this is where reagan delivers some of his best lines just before being delivered to the o.r. he sees his wife. and he reprizes a line that jack dempsey used in his world championship, "honey, i forgot to duck." he really said it.

people always wonder, did he really say is that stuff? these weren't made up by republicans or his administration. he said this stuff. then as he's wheeled to the o.r., he says jim baker and ed meese who had rushed here to talk to him. and he sees mike deaver, these are his three top aides and he's, who's minding the store? he's cracking jokes. so they wheel him to the o.r. here's reagan going into the operating room. he believes the role of president is his role to play. it's a role that would he pass up a great operating-room moment? couldn't pass up a good operating room moment. 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 the doctors. joe giordano who set up the trauma unit, who saved reagan's life the third time this day says, mr. president, today we're all

republicans, that's ironic because joe giordano is about as liberal as they come. the doctors and nurses suspect that when he was in the o.r., 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 for 11, until april 11th. 12 days after the shooting. and 13 days total. and when he was in the operating room, he went through surgery, ben aaron retrieved the bullet. and i interviewed, fascinating how routine the hospital tried to keep things. during his surgery, aaron, a very by-the-books, former military man, wanted to insure his own team was there, his normal team. even had a 31-year-old surgical intern with him. and the 31-year-old surgical intern, david reached into the president's chest and pulled the president's beating heart aside with his hand to give ben aaron more room to find the bullet. think of that 31-year-old, the

president's heart in his hand, that's a powerful moment. they find the bullet, stop the bleeding, stitch him up, send him to the recovery room. regales the room with one-liners he had written by hand. the 1991, the 10th anniversary of the shooting. reagan came here for an anniversary event and to support the brady bill for gun control. which was a big deal for reagan. and they named the emergency room the ronald reagan institute of emergency medicine. in the 1970's the secret service is realizing that the world, there are lot of political say as nations, we lost bobby kennedy, kennedy, and not a lot changed in their training culture. in the '70s, a bunch of agents out in l.a. started training better. how to react in a split-second. and they adopt this kind of training to improve how quickly they react. so the secret service agents like jerry parr, tim macarthur react almost instantaneously to

gunfire. if you look at what happened to kennedy and george wallace, they were debacles. kennedy was shot in the neck and the driver keeps driving straight. no evasive maneuvers at all. that's interesting, they're prepared. but yet they let him walk out like this. inside they had bomb-sniffing dogs check the speech before they went in they checked the names with everyone who came in contact with the president. but yet they let an unscreened rope line, 15 feet from the president wide open and the guy has a gun. so there's this incongruity irreconcilable something going on with the secret service where they're prepared for the worst, but they don't try to prevent the worst. and that's something it's done -- something after it's done, you have bunkers like this. when the president visits a hotel that doesn't have a garage they can pull into or this kind of thing, what they do is they they build a tent. so they did that. they also used magnetometers.

jerry parr seized an inordinate amount of guns from old ladies from the south who came to visit the white house. if you look at the last 30 years, no president has been shot at. there are things that make us concerned about their safety. the socialites from virginia who snuck into the white house and shook obama's hand. they didn't have weapons. but you don't know what if the guy had been a karate master or done something to kill the president. the guy who threw his shoes at bush in iraq. and then in georgia, the country of georgia, someone threw a grenade that landed pretty close to bush. what is amazing to me is that in mid march, you know, two weeks before the shooting, there's a poll that showed reagan had the lowest approval rating of any president at that time in the first term. now it's 59% approval rating, which is really low for a president in his honeymoon

period. when we think back, crushed carter in a landslide, everyone loved ronald reagan, but it's not true. he had controversial policies, stuff about el salvador coming up. he wanted to cut spending, lower taxes and those were controversial things at the time, increase defense spending. people were unsure about him. he gets shot. he performs amazingly this day. people begin to separate the man they admire from the politics as a leader and he gets a lot accomplished after this moment in the next year. and it also forms a bond between him at the public. lou cannon who may be probably the most esteemed reagan biographer told me that what this day did, they really, reagan's character under fire and his heroism, he cracked jokes in the emergency room, he cracked jokes in the o.r., he cracked jokes after, kind of laughing at death. and people saw this on tv. it was a real-live event. the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle. people were drawn to their televisions across the country and they felt like it was their aunt or their uncle or their