Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton Hotel. Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy is on the far right.
Photo: Corbis via Getty Images
Before Saturday’s shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, the last time there was an assassination attempt on a president or former president was in 1981. On March 30, Ronald Reagan was headed to his limousine after addressing the AFL-CIO at the Washington, D.C., Hilton Hotel when John Hinckley opened fire. Tim McCarthy, the Secret Service agent who took a bullet in the chest protecting Reagan that day, had been dreading yesterday’s news.
“Well, I’m sorry to say, but it was probably going to happen,” he said on Sunday morning. “I was hoping against hope it wouldn’t happen, but here we are back here again.”
Reagan was gravely injured. James Brady, the White House press secretary, was shot in the head, leaving him partially paralyzed and with slurred speech. (After spending the rest of his life crusading for gun control, Brady died in 2014, his death ruled a homicide resulting from his injury.) Police Officer Thomas Delahanty was shot in the neck and survived.
Secret Service agents surround Donald Trump moments after he was wounded in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The motive of Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, is unknown, but McCarthy couldn’t help wondering about his state of mind. “If you go back and take a look at John Hinckley, he was mentally ill. We go back to Squeaky Fromme, Sara Jane Moore — can’t say much about Lee Harvey Oswald — but most of these other people had mental issues that were at least part of or had something to do with the motive.” McCarthy compared them to mass shooters as well, noting that “almost all of them have significant mental issues.”
After leaving the Secret Service in 1993, McCarthy spent 27 years as the police chief of Orland Park, Illinois, before retiring. He talked about yesterday’s assassination attempt from the detached perspective of the security consultant that he is today rather than reliving the emotions of the 31-year-old agent who was wounded in the line of duty. At the time, McCarthy thrust himself into the line of fire as Hinckley emptied a revolver at Reagan and another agent, Jerry Parr, shoved the president into his limousine. As he did, one of Hinckley’s bullets ricocheted off the limousine’s armor and hit Reagan in the back, going into his lung.
Watching yesterday’s video, McCarthy praised the Secret Service agents who ran onstage immediately to cover Trump. “Now I’m sure they would have liked President Trump to have been a little bit more cooperative,” he said with a chuckle, referring to Trump’s defiant fist shake as he exited the stage. “He reached out to reassure his followers, the country, and the world that he was okay, so that worked out.”
Unlike Hinckley, who fired from ground level about 20 feet from the president, Crooks was positioned on a rooftop 400 feet away. “The obvious question is going to be — it doesn’t take a security expert — to ask why that building wasn’t covered better than it was,” McCarthy said.
