When Taxi Driver released in 1976, John Hinckley Jr – the man who shot and wounded US President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981 – was a student at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas. He was lonely, friendless and miserable. FBI’s description of him after his arrest has a very brief record of his friends: “none”.

John was a misfit in the classroom too. He wanted to be a singer and writer but was stuck in a business course. Every time he thought he would flunk a course, he withdrew from it (after failing to get a degree in six years, he finally dropped out in 1979).

Needless to say, John wasn’t making much progress at Texas Tech. He shifted to Los Angeles for a while, and while there saw Taxi Driver. He watched it again and again and again, altogether 16 times. By the time he came home to Evergreen, Colorado, for the holidays that year he was John Hinckley Jr in name only. Inside, he had transformed into Travis Bickle, the character played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. John was madly, obsessively in love with Jodie Foster. And his fixation started a string of capers that nearly resulted in the death of a US president.

Long before Trump, a man shot at Reagan to win Jodie Foster’s heart© Provided by The Times of India

Divorced from reality

In their 1985 book Breaking Points, John’s parents Jack and JoAnne Hinckley have described in detail how he lost touch with reality.

They were surprised and delighted when he called to tell them he finally had a girlfriend, Lynn Collins, who wanted to be an actress. John was so shy he would flee to his room everytime neighbours visited. He wouldn’t even play his guitar for his parents. And yet, he told them he had charmed Lynn at a laundromat.

It was too good to be true, as the FBI found out in its investigation. Lynn was a creation of John’s mind. She was his equivalent of Travis’s rich girlfriend in Taxi Driver. She was, perhaps, the first of many tales he wove over the next 5 years.

That 1976 winter when John came home, he asked his mother if she had seen Taxi Driver. She hadn’t, so she couldn’t guess his new wardrobe was inspired by Travis. More than style, John was hooked on Travis’s ideas. One of them was to ‘rescue’ Jodie from a ‘degenerate’ society, and the other to try and assassinate a president.

Jodie was the bigger obsession. In the Washington hotel room where John had stayed the day of the attempted assassination, FBI found a picture of President and Mrs Reagan. On it, John had written Jodie and he would occupy the White House one day. They also found a picture of Napoleon, under which he had written, “Napoleon and Josephine. John and Jodie.”

Peach Brandy

On New Year’s Eve in 1980, John had sat alone in his room at his parents’ house and recorded this message on his cassette recorder: “Anything that I might do in 1981 would be solely for Jodie Foster’s sake. I want to tell the world in some way that I worship and idolise her.”

He recorded it after refusing his father’s offer of champagne and asking for peach brandy instead. Yes, peach brandy – the drink that Travis soaked his bread in for breakfast.

Long before Trump, a man shot at Reagan to win Jodie Foster’s heart© Provided by The Times of India

But months before this declaration he had started making secret trips to New Haven in Connecticut where an 18-year-old Jodie had enrolled at Yale University in autumn of 1980. He called her at her dorm and recorded two of their conversations. Unknown to her, he stalked her on the campus, and is believed to have followed her around with a pistol with the idea that her murder followed by his suicide would link them in death.

His other plan was to kidnap Jodie, then hijack a plane and demand that the two of them “be installed in the White House”. He even wrote a note to the FBI threatening to kidnap her.

John was also slipping notes and letters under Jodie’s dormitory door. The first set came in September. The second in October or November (Jodie wasn’t sure), and the last on March 6, 1981. A note in it read: “Jodie Foster, love, just wait. I will rescue you very soon. Please cooperate.”

When she appeared to testify at John’s trial, Jodie said she had immediately recognised it as the type of letter Travis had sent to Iris in Taxi Driver.

John Travis

By March 1981, John had morphed into Travis completely. When his parents refused to let him stay at home – hoping he would take charge of his life – he signed the register at a motel as “J Travis”. John Travis.

The day he shot Reagan, John was supposed to be in Hollywood, talking to his music industry contacts. His mother had put him on a plane to California herself. So, how did he land up in Washington, DC?

It was his Jodie obsession again. He had boarded a coast-to-coast Greyhound bus from Hollywood to New Haven. After travelling for 4 days, he had arrived in Washington, DC, and stopped for the night. By chance he read Reagan’s itinerary in a newspaper and decided to kill him, to impress Jodie.

Yes, there was no political angle or animosity. John had in fact been pleased when Reagen won the presidential race a few months earlier. “Maybe there’s hope for this country yet,” he had told his father.

It didn’t matter to him which president he shot as long as he could be famous. In October 1980 he had been arrested with 3 guns at Nashville airport on a day when then President Jimmy Carter was present in the city. Nobody suspected what he was up to, so he was released with a paltry $62.5 fine.

Reagan unfortunately became a casualty of John’s Jodie fixation. FBI found a letter John had left behind for Jodie in his Washington hotel room in the afternoon of March 30, 1981:

“Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you, whether it be in total obscurity or whatever. I will admit to you that the reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you.”

Although John shot and injured the president and 3 others in plain sight from 15 feet away (6 shots in 1.7 seconds, according to the FBI), the jury held him not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He was sent to a psychiatric institution but it took them a while to recalibrate his sense of reality. In that time he managed to send a 4-page letter to The New York Times that, among other things, said:

“The shooting outside the Washington Hilton Hotel was the greatest love offering in the world…. At one time Miss Foster was a star and I was the insignificant fan. Now everything is changed. I am Napoleon and she is Josephine. I am Romeo and she is Juliet…. I may be in prison and she may be making a movie in Paris or Hollywood but Jodie and I will always be together, in life and in death.”