Ronald Reagan’s Daughter Says John Hinckley Jr.’s Assassination Attempt ‘Shouldn’t Be Papered Over’

Screenshot; Scott Stewart, AP File Photo

President Ronald Reagan’s daughter recounted John Hinckley Jr.’s “cold, calculated plan to kill” her dad and slammed the would-be assassin’s recent podcast appearance — in which he said he wished actress Jodie Foster well.

In an op-ed for The New York Times Saturday, Patti Davis noted she’d heard of Hinckley’s appearance on The Mark Joseph Show podcast this week, and called it “particularly creepy.”

Hinckley infamously opened fire on Reagan and his security team as they left the Hilton Hotel in Washington D.C. on March 30, 1981 after an event — in a bizarre bid to “impress” Foster, who at the time was an immense Hollywood star.

The shooting left Reagan hospitalized for 12 days and several others, including then-Press Secretary James Brady, partially paralyzed and brain damaged when one of Hinckley’s bullets struck him in the head.

Davis, 73, called out the timing of Hinckley’s podcast appearance and linked it to the release of a new film called “The Brink of War,” about Reagan’s 1986 meeting with Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

“I shudder to think what other bookings he’s got lined up,” she wrote.

Davis went on to recount the devastation wreaked by Hinckley attempt to murder her father:

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.

Davis noted many people today are “too young” to remember the assassination attempt 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,” she wrote.

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