Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency

On March 30, 1981, just seventy days into his presidency, Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest outside the Washington Hilton. The bullet came within inches of his heart. His recovery was presented to the public as swift and complete. The full story, as O'Reilly and Dugard tell it, is considerably more complicated. In Killing Reagan, they trace the full arc of Reagan's extraordinary life, from the golden days of Hollywood, where he found both fame and personal heartbreak, through the California governor's mansion, and into the White House where he presided over an economic boom and watched the Iron Curtain fall. But the assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr. haunts the narrative throughout. The wound was far more serious than the White House acknowledged, and the question O'Reilly and Dugard press, carefully and with extensive documentation, is whether the trauma of that day fundamentally altered the man who survived it, and what that alteration meant for a presidency that still had seven years to run. Told with the same propulsive narrative energy as their previous books, Killing Reagan is a portrait of a great man operating in violent times, and of the hidden costs that violence exacted on a leader the nation believed it knew.