woah

There are long-standing rumors and conjectures about the attempt on President Reagan's life on March 30, 1981. Those rumors have always swirled around Reagan's Vice President, George H. W. Bush, and the supposed close ties between the Bush and Hinckley families. If you are interested in that topic, then save your time searching through countless Internet sites, most of them extremely biased in one way or another, and read this concisely written book.

I say concisely written, because this book, at fewer than 100 pages, is exactly that. There is no long biography of either GHW Bush or Ronald Reagan, as that would needlessly repeat information available elsewhere. Where details are necessary, however, they are provided. For example, it tells you quite about about the Hinckley family, including the fact that the modern day Bushes and Hinckleys share a common ancestor in Samuel Hinckley (1652-1698). In modern times, there was some sort of personal and/or business relationship between one of GHW Bush's sons and John Hinckley Jr.'s brother.

The means, motive and opportunity for GHW Bush to try to remove his boss and former rival, Ronald Reagan are well presented. For further background on GHW Bush, I highly recommend Webster Tarpley's "Unauthorized Biography of George Bush" George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography , still in print and also available in html format for free on Tarpley's website. Further reading that will go even farther to convince you that GHW Bush is capable of commissioning a murder is in Daniel Hopsicker's "Barry and the Boys" Barry & 'the Boys': The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History .

Why would someone like John Hinckley Jr. be used as an assassin? First, of all, the author explains that Hinckley was not intended to be an assassin, but a patsy, with a professional assassin performing the actual wet work. Second, Hinckley's background as a prototypical MKUltra patsy/assassin is explored in great detail, as are confounding parallels with another mind-controlled patsy/assassin, Mark David Chapman. The author links the assassination of John Lennon with the attempts on the lives of both Reagan and John Paul II's in very interesting ways. Mr. Mercado uses charts on occasion to make the relationships he moots seem even more obvious to the reader. Mr. Mercado details Hinckley's and Chapman's affiliations with World Vision International, an NGO with long standing connections with CIA. (No, we're definitely not in Kansas any more.)

There are implications that lead to the present day (March, 2018 as I write this). The Ronald Reagan who won the 1980 election and the Ronald Reagan who continued to live after the shooting represented two very different political wings of American politics, not just Republican politics. If you were around then, you may remember only a dispute about economic policy, with Bush calling Reagan's policies "voodoo economics". Largely forgotten is Reagan's disagreement with Bush, having to do with the latter's membership in the Trilateral Commission. In other words, Reagan was a conservative Republican, opposed to globalization. Once Bush basically took over the Reagan presidency (a move no longer in dispute among astute historians), along came the Amnesty Bill; Iran Contra with the associated drug running; and the Savings and Loan scandal, followed by the bailout of those corrupt institutions. As the author writes, "Reagan may have won the election, but it was the Trilateral Commission, George Bush and the CIA who won control of the Presidency." A rather facile comparison could be made between the two Donald Trumps, the one who won the election, and the other being the current tenant of the White House. (This is my comparison, not the author's.)

I'm saving the two best things for last, features that make this a five star book. Mr. Mercado shows definitively that Hinckley could not possibly have fired the bullet that was eventually removed from President Reagan. The small disk could not have come from Hinckley's gun, and that's not just from the forensic evidence. From page 3: '... NBC reporter Judy Woodruff, who witnessed the shooting, reported, “at least one of the bullets” came from a man “stationed overhead near the roof of the hotel” and resembled “Secret Service”'. Mr. Mercado lists several anomalous events surrounding Reagan's exit from the hotel and walk to the limousine, all of which show irregularities with normal Secret Service protocol.

The other winning feature for me is the author's source documentation. As I was reading, I began to fault the author for his lack of footnotes, but when I reached the end, there were four pages of URL links and other references to supporting documents, including documents from the Journal of the American Medical Association and George Washington Hospital, where the President's life was saved. There is even a link to view the Reagan Xrays, one showing the small disk lodged one half inch from his heart. There are also numerous reports about John Hinckley Jr. Though he is under loose supervision, he is basically a free man today.

This book tells a remarkable story, revealing an important and pivotal part of American history that has been swept under the proverbial rug. Life is a mystery unless you know your (real) history.

This rabbit hole might deserve its own post eh? wanna write something up fren? I'll nom it for a sticky