On March 30, 1981, President Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. while exiting the Washington Hilton. Reagan had just delivered a speech to members of the AFL-CIO trade union when Hinckley fired six shots from a .22 caliber revolver from just 15 feet away. What should have been a routine movement from the hotel to the presidential limousine almost ended in tragedy.

In less than two seconds, Hinckley managed to breach the security line and severely wound four people, including the President. The first shot struck White House Press Secretary James Brady in the forehead, critically injuring him. The second round hit D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty in the back of the neck, causing him to collapse on the sidewalk, while the third shot missed the president and hit a window across the street. Agent Tim McCarthy, who bravely spread himself in front of Reagan, was hit in the chest by the fourth bullet before Hinckley’s fifth round hit the window of the armored limo.

Jerry Parr, the agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Detail, reacted at the sound of the first shot by grabbing Reagan and shoving him head-first into the open rear door of the presidential limousine.

At first, no one realized the President had been shot. It wasn’t until Parr noticed bright, frothy blood on Reagan’s lips—a classic sign of a lung injury—that they headed directly for the hospital. While Reagan and Parr were initially unaware, the bullet from Hinckley’s sixth and final shot had ricocheted off the limousine and struck Reagan under his left arm, where it punctured his lung and stopped less than an inch from his heart. As he was rushed into the operating room, the President attempted to defuse the gravity of the situation with humor, saying to the doctors, “Please tell me you’re all Republicans.”

The surgeons were able to remove the bullet and, after twelve days in the hospital, Reagan ultimately made a full recovery. Brady miraculously survived, but suffered permanent brain damage and partial paralysis. The two other men wounded in the attack, Officer Thomas Delahanty and Agent Tim McCarthy, also made full recoveries.

Back at the White House, the atmosphere dissolved into a mix of confusion and paranoia. Fearing the assassination attempt might be the opening salvo of a larger Soviet offensive, the administration struggled to find its footing as the crisis unfolded. Vice President George Bush, who was currently on a trip to Texas, was largely unreachable due to the lack of secure communications aboard Air Force Two. When the press corps demanded to know who was running the government, Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes only heightened the anxiety by admitting he couldn’t answer the question.

Seizing the moment, Secretary of State Alexander Haig attempted to project stability but instead triggered a constitutional controversy. He famously declared to the press briefing room, “As of now, I am in control here,” a claim that ignored the legal line of succession, which placed him behind both the Vice President and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. This period of high-stakes improvisation finally ended once Bush landed back in Washington and restored a sense of order to the West Wing.

After firing his sixth shot, Hinckley was quickly subdued by agents and arrested. Less than two hours later, the FBI raided his room at the Park Central Hotel. It was there, among his possessions, that they discovered Hinckley’s motive was not political but instead stemmed from a personal obsession with the actress Jodie Foster. Evidence indicated that he had no animosity toward Reagan, who was simply a “stand-in” for a twisted romantic gesture—a theory was later supported by the discovery that Hinckley had also stalked President Carter months earlier.

In June 1982, a jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity and committed him to a secure psychiatric facility indefinitely. No longer deemed a threat to society, he was released in 2016.

The Reagan assassination attempt marked the ninth such attack on a U.S. President since the Civil War and was a sobering reminder of the persistent threat of violence directed at the office. Today, the security failures that allowed Hinckley to get within point-blank range of the President are virtually unthinkable. The Secret Service now employs a vastly more sophisticated system of “preventive layers,” ensuring that no unauthorized individual, especially one carrying a weapon, could breach the perimeter.

The most visible symbol of this evolution is the presidential limousine. Known as “The Beast,” the current vehicle is a rolling fortress designed to withstand ballistic, explosive, and chemical attacks. Beyond the hardware, the Secret Service has also revolutionized its tactical protocols by ensuring agents are hyper-vigilant regarding sightlines and “choke points” during every presidential movement.

While no security detail can ever be truly impenetrable, the standards of protection today are unprecedented, making the vulnerabilities of 1981 a relic of the past.

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Today, presidents are used to live news coverage, viral video segments, and cable television hot takes. But have you ever wondered where it all started?

In January 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first POTUS to televise his press conferences. As it turns out, the decision was born almost out of desperation.

Changing the Ground Rules

Soon after taking office, Eisenhower and his press secretary, James Hagerty, sought to eliminate what they perceived as the media’s distortion of the president’s remarks. Their first major attempt came in late 1953 when Hagerty moved Eisenhower’s press conferences from “off the record” to “on the record.” Prior to this, journalists could not quote a President directly without explicit permission. When that permission was not obtained or sought, the press would simply turn to paraphrasing the remarks with various degrees of accuracy. By allowing journalists to quote freely, the White House hoped to end the “creative liberties” they believed reporters were taking with the president’s words.

The change didn’t end Eisenhower’s frustrations. Just months later, after the New York Times and Washington Post reported on his March 3, 1954, remarks regarding Senator Joseph McCarthy, Eisenhower was once again incensed over the reporting. Frustrated by the lack of control, Hagerty released of the full audio of Eisenhower’s comments to radio and television. “To hell with the slanted reporters,” he wrote in his diary. “We’ll go directly to the people who can hear exactly what the President said without reading warped and slanted stories.”1

Bypassing the Gatekeepers

The war over control of the president’s words culminated on January 19, 1955, when Hagerty allowed television cameras to film Eisenhower’s entire press conference. Startled by the decision, print journalists in the press corps claimed it was a form of censorship because the footage was not broadcast live. The criticism soon faded when the networks began airing the footage in full without any editing by the White House.

And just like that, the presidency walked through a door and never looked back. By introducing cameras, Hagerty transformed the press conference from an informal working session into a national event. He also used this strategy to stage the first televised Cabinet meeting and to orchestrate the president’s appearances from the hospital after Eisenhower’s heart attack.

By rewriting the rules, Eisenhower and Hagerty redefined the relationship between journalism, public relations, and the executive branch. From then on, presidents were no longer addressing only the press. They were addressing the nation.

Pre-Order my new photo book!

POTUS: Icons, Artifacts and History That Shaped the American Presidency will be published on November 17th by Abrams Books! This 400+ page photo book takes readers inside the archives—and lives—of modern American presidents dating back to the 1929 presidency of Herbert Hoover. For the last five years, I’ve been photographing hundreds of artifacts housed within the network of presidential libraries run by the National Archives. My goal was to explore the processes, personalities, and history that shaped the most powerful office on Earth.

Using striking photography along with short historical narratives and anecdotes that bring each artifact to life, the book takes you on a tour of hundreds of iconic objects and documents—some of which have rarely, if ever, been seen by the public.

Barack Obama’s Blackberry smartphone. Franklin Roosevelt’s lucky fedora. The safety plug of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The telephone used by Richard Nixon to speak with the Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Dwight Eisenhower’s written orders to Allied troops on D-day and the note he prepared in case the invasion failed. These are just a handful of the visually stunning objects, memos, notes, memorabilia and mementoes that stand as reminders of events that shed light on who the presidents really were―especially when the cameras weren’t rolling―or that, quite literally, shaped the world as we know it.

You can pre-order the book or learn more at:

https://www.potusphotobook.com

And, here’s a short book trailer:

I hope you enjoy the book and can’t wait to hear what your favorite artifacts are!

More to come.

-Peter

With Iran back in the news, it feels like the right time to share some of the objects and documents I found at the Eisenhower and Carter presidential libraries that shed some light on the origins of the conflict.

The root of U.S. conflict with Iran can be traced back to the Eisenhower presidency, when the CIA orchestrated the 1953 coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power. But it was President Carter who presided over the chapter that is still being written today.

In 1979, amid the chaos of the Islamic Revolution and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iranian students took 66 Americans hostage in protest of the Carter administration’s decision to allow the Shah entry into the United States for medical treatment. What was supposed to be a short-lived protest quickly morphed into a far-reaching power play by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Carter attempted to resolve the crisis peacefully. In a letter to the Ayatollah, he promised to dispatch former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and former U.S. Ambassador to Iran, William Miller, in the hope of negotiating a settlement. The mission collapsed when Iran’s leaders refused to receive Clark and Miller, denounced them as spies, and barred them from entering the country. Khomeini’s unwillingness to negotiate through traditional diplomatic channels foreshadowed the long standoff ahead, one that would result in 52 of the hostages being held in captivity for 444 days.

Over the coming year, Carter tried in vain to pressure the Iranians into releasing the hostages by freezing assets and imposing economic sanctions. An aborted rescue attempt ended tragically when a U.S. aircraft collided with a helicopter carrying members of the Army’s elite Delta Force during a refueling operation in the Iranian desert. The situation soon appeared intractable, and the crisis came to define the final stretch of Carter’s presidency—ultimately contributing to his defeat in the 1980 election.

Carter’s earlier decision to seize Iranian assets and impose sanctions ultimately proved prescient. In late 1980, the measures brought currency-starved Iran to the negotiating table after the start of the Iran-Iraq war. But it would be the election of another president, and a secret promise of arms sales, that ultimately freed the hostages.

I’ll cover how the crisis ended in another post.

You can learn a lot about people by looking at the things they save. Personal effects speak to their personality. Keepsakes and mementos mark formative events. Scribbled notes or a box of saved letters can clue us into their state of mind. Taken together, these artifacts help us better understand the life someone led.

For the past five years, I’ve been searching for those very things, not in the attic of a loved one, but inside the archives of the American presidency—specifically at more than a dozen presidential libraries operated by the National Archives.

Barack Obama’s Blackberry smartphone. Franklin Roosevelt’s lucky fedora. The safety plug of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The telephone used by Richard Nixon to speak with the Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Dwight Eisenhower’s written orders to Allied troops on D-day and the note he prepared in case the invasion failed. The reading copy of the speech Ronald Reagan famously delivered at the foot of the Berlin Wall.

These artifacts are only a fraction of what I found. In total, I carefully photographed more than 1,000 objects and documents left behind by modern presidents, from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama. Each of those images tells a story. Some reveal who these presidents were when the cameras weren’t rolling. Others mark moments that literally shaped the world. Many are so steeped in history that you can almost picture the president holding them in their hands.

This newsletter and my forthcoming book (stay tuned!) are where I’ll be sharing how these artifacts, and the history they represent, shaped the American presidency in ways that continue to effect our lives today.

More to come.

-Peter

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