John Hinckley Jr. never really goes away, but he chooses his moments to step into the spotlight. After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on the campaign trail two years ago, Mr. Hinckley did an interview with Erin Burnett on CNN, claiming to be a changed man, to have regrets about that March day in 1981 when he tried to assassinate my father, Ronald Reagan. Now, just before the release of the movie “The Brink of War,” about the 1986 Reykjavik meeting between my father and Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr. Hinckley was back out in public, talking about how he put his past behind him.
His latest podcast appearance was apparently big news; I heard about it on the “Today” show and have since seen it mentioned a number of other places. It’s quite something: In a particularly creepy moment, he offered good wishes to Jodie Foster, whom he said at the time of the shooting that the carnage was meant to impress. I shudder to think what other bookings he’s got lined up.
I first wrote about Mr. Hinckley in 2000 for Time magazine, when his lawyer Barry Levine tried to get him released for unsupervised visits from the hospital to which a judge had sent him. Mr. Levine tried to convince me that Mr. Hinckley was probably in remission from his narcissistic personality disorder. The request fell apart, but it was later revived and approved.
For a while, pretty much every time Mr. Hinckley was granted more freedom, I would publish something reminding people of the horror of that day. Of the fact that my father almost died; that James Brady’s life was irrevocably damaged after being shot in the head; that Thomas Delahanty, who was shot in the neck, had to retire from the police force; that Timothy McCarthy, a Secret Service agent who was shot in the chest, lives with the scars of that day.
Mr. Hinckley didn’t wait for a clear shot; he just kept pulling the trigger, and in the process wounded three other people. I want people to visualize that. I want people to remember that during this man’s hospitalization, which ended in 2016, he was writing to Ted Bundy and sought the address of Charles Manson. With the help of his lawyers, he has worked the system for decades and does not seem to be planning to stop.
Because I suspect his timing for this latest reappearance had to do with the release of the film about my father, let me draw my own link between the shooting and that historic meeting with Mr. Gorbachev. Mr. Hinckley’s bullet landed an inch from my father’s heart. He believed God saved his life for a reason: to try to make the world safer and more peaceful. As he recovered, he wrote to Leonid Brezhnev, to no avail. Mr. Gorbachev’s ascent renewed my father’s hope.
Shortly after the shooting, he said that he believed his healing depended on his willingness to forgive John Hinckley, whom he called “a misguided young man.” My father was more spiritually advanced than I am. I do believe in forgiveness, but I make exceptions. I also believe that people can change; I just don’t think John Hinckley is one of those people.
Forty-five years is a long time ago. Many people today were too young to remember that day, or weren’t even born yet. But it lives on, because it is a part of history. It shouldn’t be rewritten as the consequence of one man’s troubles, as Mr. Hinckley is trying to do. It shouldn’t be papered over with bizarre statements of cheery good will. That’s not contrition; that’s self-promotion.
What happened that day in 1981 was a cold, calculated plan to kill. James Brady’s family lost years with the man they loved, who was never the same after his skull was shattered. Mr. Hinckley is now a free man. Mr. Brady’s children will never be free from what he did. None of us who lived through that time will be.
Patti Davis is the author of “Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory and the America We Once Knew.”
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