wrestled to the ground. One of the bullets hits Reagan’s press
secretary, James Brady, in the head. A second bullet hits a
police officer, Thomas Delahanty, in the back. A third hits
Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy in the chest, and a
fourth ricochets off the limousine and pierces Reagan’s lung,
missing his heart by inches. The puzzle of the Hinckley
shooting, of course, is how he managed to get at Reagan so
easily. Presidents are surrounded by bodyguards, and
bodyguards are supposed to be on the lookout for people like
John Hinckley. The kind of people who typically stand outside
a hotel on a cold spring day waiting for a glimpse of their
President are well-wishers, and the job of the bodyguard is to
scan the crowd and look for the person who doesn’t fit, the one
who doesn’t wish well at all. Part of what bodyguards have to
do is read faces. They have to mind-read. So why didn’t they
read Hinckley’s mind? The answer is obvious if you watch the
video — and it’s the second critical cause of mind-blindnesss:
there is no time.
Gavin de Becker, who runs a security firm in Los Angeles
and is the author of the book The Gift of Fear, says that the
central fact in protection is the amount of “white space,” which
is what he calls the distance between the target and any