When John W. Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton Hotel more than 35 years ago, he shot three others, including a Secret Service agent named Timothy McCarthy who took a bullet in the chest for the president.
Today many know him as the police chief of Orland Park, where he has worked for more than two decades. In March, McCarthy was named the State Police Chief’s Chief of the Year.
A federal judge has ruled that Hinckley, 61, no longer poses a danger to himself or others and will be released from a government psychiatric hospital to live with his mother in Williamsburg, Va., as soon as Aug. 5 under dozens of temporary treatment and monitoring conditions.
McCarthy said Wednesday he only learned of Hinckley’s release after being deluged with calls from local and national media seeking his reaction.
The chief said he wasn’t fully familiar with terms of Hinckley’s release, but said, “if he follows them I suppose it will provide some measure of safety.”
He said he was a bit perturbed that he didn’t get a notification, and while he understands Hinckley can’t have contact with the families of Reagan or Jim Brady, the president’s press secretary who was severely wounded in the assassination attempt, he assumed that also extended to himself and his family.
“Nobody’s contacted me in 35 years for my opinion as to whether he should be released or not,” McCarthy, who spent a total of 22 years with the Secret Service, said.
He said he understands that Hinckley’s release comes after evaluation by experts and that “I hope they’re right” in believing Hinckley is suitable to be allowed to have nearly unfettered access to the public.
“They are the so-called experts, and if they are not right, it could be catastrophic,” McCarthy said.
While the Secret Service will, under a condition of Hinckley’s release, still be able to monitor his whereabouts, McCarthy said he did not know to what extent the Service would keep tabs on him or what level of resources would be devoted to monitoring his movements and whether it would be around-the-clock.
“How long can you do that?” he wondered. “Any 24-7 surveillance is very intense (as far as cost and manpower).”
Over the years, McCarthy has spoken fondly of Reagan and his wife Nancy, who died earlier this year, but has said little about Hinckley.
In a 2011 interview with the Tribune, he told a reporter that, “most of the agents that have been in that situation have done what they were supposed to do,” and that he was glad to do it. He and other agents were ready — they had done the same thing hundreds of times in training drills.
“No agent thinks it will happen to them,” he said. “If you stopped to think about it you probably wouldn’t do it. It’s not a rational act.”
At 2:27 p.m. on March 30, 1981, as Reagan walked to his limousine outside the Hilton, Hinckley stepped from the crowd and aimed a .22 caliber pistol at the president.
Hinckley fired, hitting Brady first and D.C. Police Officer Thomas Delahanty second. McCarthy crouched in front of Reagan and took the third shot. The fifth shot ricocheted off the limo and hit Reagan under the arm, moments after Secret Service agent Jerry Parr pulled him inside the limo, which rushed to George Washington Hospital, where Reagan nearly died. McCarthy was in critical condition, but returned to the Secret Service just months later, despite the urging of friends who told him to return a hometown hero and run for Congress.
At the time of the assassination try, McCarthy had been with the Secret Service for nine years and was 32 years old at the time.
The president had addressed the Building and Construction Workers Union of the AFL-CIO, speaking at a union convention at the hotel.
“We just about got to the car and everyone is yelling ‘Mr. President, Mr. President,’ like they always do,” McCarthy said Wednesday.
He said agents had not been notified that the president would briefly walk a rope line, greeting onlookers, and McCarthy said he was quickly scanning the crowd for any signs of a potential threat.
“All of a sudden, John Hinckley pushed himself forward” and began shooting, McCarthy said. “I turned toward the direction the shots were coming from.”
The third round Hinckley fired struck McCarthy in the right chest, knocking him to the ground, severely wounded.
McCarthy said he spent a little more than three months recuperating, and returned to the Secret Service and the president’s security detail.
“I went right back,” he said.
Parr, who died last year of congestive heart failure at 85, in a previous interview suggested that if not for McCarthy stopping the path of that third round from Hinckley’s gun, Reagan’s wounds could have been much more serious.
“If (Tim’s) not there, I’m sure that either I or the president would have been hit (by the third shot) that day,” he said in the interview. “The only thing between the president and this guy was McCarthy’s big Irish body.”
McCarthy downplays the notion that bravery had much to do with what he did that day, but rather instinct. He credited the training he received as an agent, drilled into him through repetition and simulations of responding to a threat or attack.
“The theory is cover and evacuate,” he said, of agents trained to use their body as a shield for safeguarding whoever they’re assigned to protect. “It was training. No more than that.”
McCarthy spent his last four years with the Secret Service as special agent in charge of the Chicago division, and after leaving the Secret Service, McCarthy worked in the private sector for a period before taking the job of top police administrator in Orland Park in 1994.
He said he kept in touch with the president and Nancy Reagan, exchanging occasional phone calls, cards and letters. McCarthy said he and his wife twice visited the president’s wife in California as the president’s health deteriorated, and they both attended the funerals of the president and Mrs. Reagan.
mmccall@tribpub.com, mnolan@tribpub.com
@MatthewMcCall_, @mnolan_j
