“I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?” — President Donald Trump
“One hand fired and another hand guided the bullet.” — Pope John Paul II
“Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” — President Donald Trump
“Whatever time I have left belongs to the Big Fella Upstairs.” — President Ronald Reagan
“In the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences.” — Pope John Paul II
Two months ago, I was invited to give a talk — presented in full below — at an international conference on the achievements of President Ronald Reagan put on by the Peter Pazmany Catholic University in Budapest. Looking down the list of other contributors and their topics, I had the usual annoying feeling that there was nothing left of any significance for me to say. Then I noticed that none of the other speakers had chosen topics that would touch naturally on one of the most remarkable things about Reagan — namely, the extreme unlikelihood in the liberal 1970s that such a firm conservative would ever be elected president in the first place. Yet today, Reagan’s rise and successful presidency seem an almost inevitable response to the rising stagflation and Soviet menace of those years.
Once that thought had struck me, I was quickly driven to the realization that exactly the same was also true of Reagan’s two great allies in those years. Both Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II were equally out of step with the trends and tendencies in their respective institutions — a demoralized and directionless Tory Party and a Catholic Church that was seeking its own détente with the Soviet empire. Yet all three arrived in power within two years of each other — and then in the blink of a historical eye they were all the victims of assassination attempts. It seemed to be too odd to be true, but it had all happened in reality.
I had found my topic — that of Providence in History. I had touched on that lightly in my 2007 book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, and when I returned to its pages, I discovered in the chapter on the three failed attempts to assassinate my three heroes that I had uncovered a more unsettling set of coincidences than I had realized when doing the research and writing. I said so in the lecture to the Peter Pazmany students, who, whether they agreed or not, seemed to find it interesting. And I thought: “Not a bad performance — a pity that it’s too lacking in topicality to interest anyone.”
Then the attempted assassination of former president Trump took place on Sunday. If you look at the five quotations at the head of this introduction, you will see that three of them are the words of Ronald Reagan and John Paul II about how and why they survived and the lessons they drew, and the other two quotations are from Donald Trump on exactly the same topics.
Whether these are coincidences or the designs, I don’t know. But we may all get some clues on that mystery from how President Trump responds to them and how his quest for a second presidency turns out.
* * *
June 5, 2024
When my book on Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II appeared in 2006, two reviews suggested that it was perhaps an example of providential history — namely, an attempt to demonstrate that the achievements of my three protagonists were a fulfillment of God’s purposes in history. In Charles Moore’s friendly Telegraph review the suggestion was a dispassionate one; the Financial Times reviewer was dismissive, plainly regarding thought any idea of providentialism as simply absurd.
Did I have a providential motive in writing the book? Not at all. But I did include in it a brief discussion of providential history which, as I argued, would always be a difficult trap for the historian. Even from a believer’s standpoint, God works in history through both human actions and natural events like avalanches and earthquakes. God’s purposes therefore have to be inferred from actions and events and there will always be human motives or natural causes to explain them.
Also, there are well-known problems with providential history. The Holocaust, for example, has prompted both Christians and Jews to ask how God’s plan can encompass the murder of millions of innocents. The Lisbon earthquake provoked Voltaire to ask how God could allow the impersonal evil of nature to deliver the same tragic results. Christian theodicy has answers to these questions that may or may not satisfy anguished hearts. But they are not questions that the historian can fruitfully consider. Miracles are beyond the historian’s professional capacity. If an assassin’s bullet went in a certain direction, we must assume that it was because his aim and the laws of physics pushed it in that direction.
That said, some coincidences in history do provoke non-historical speculation. In everyday language, they make the hairs at the back of your head stand up. For instance: The fact that two of the United States’ Founding Fathers — each somewhat antagonistic to the other, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams — died on the same day, and that day was the Fourth of July, does seem eerie, if pleasantly so. A less pleasant coincidence is that János Kádár died on the same day that Hungary’s top court declared the execution of Imre Nagy to be judicial murder. It’s natural for the Christian moralist to react to such news with the phrase “God is not mocked” even if God is mocked, without apparent risk, on countless similar occasions.
What might tempt us to a providential view of the lives and careers of Reagan, Thatcher, and the pope? Well, consider the following train of events.
They all entered office within a few months of each other at an extremely dangerous time in history for their countries and the West which was threatened by a growing Soviet threat, serious economic decline, and the collapse of both national and civilizational morale.
None of them was the kind of progressive person whom the world in the 1970s expected to rise in their respective institutions: In the book, I observed that the pope seemed too Catholic, Mrs. Thatcher too conservative, and Governor Reagan too American to get their respective top jobs. Yet against the odds, they all did. And all at the same time. Only 26 months separated the elections of John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher began her premiership halfway between the other two dates. Then, fewer than three months (to be precise, 70 days) separated Reagan’s inauguration and the attempt on his life by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981. A mere 43 days later, John Paul II narrowly survived an attempted assassination on May 13. Not until three years later, however, did Thatcher escape unharmed when an IRA bomb intended to kill her exploded in the Grand Hotel in Brighton on October 12, 1984, killing five people and wounding many others, including her close friend and ally Norman Tebbit.
Except for that delay, there is an almost cinematic neatness about this series of assassination attempts. In a movie like The Omen or The Exorcist, they would be readily explained as the forces of Satan seeking to destroy the apostles of hope before they could do too much good. This eerie impression is reinforced by the narrowness of the escape of all three intended victims. Assassinations have sometimes altered the course of history; the First World War arose from one. On these occasions, it was the failure of assassinations that may have altered history.
The would-be assassin, Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Ağca, was only 20 feet away from the pope when he fired his semi-automatic pistol. His aim was true. He hit the pope twice, once in the abdomen and once on the elbow, and the pope immediately fell backward into the arms of his secretary. Though Ağca was promptly seized by nearby pilgrims and handed over to the police, he must have felt that he had succeeded in his murderous aim.
Yet John Paul had been extraordinarily lucky. Ağca’s bullet missed his abdominal artery, his spinal column, and every major nerve cluster when it passed through his body. It did so by a millimeter or two. It was probably deflected from its original course by striking the pope’s finger (which it broke), thus missing the vital organs that it otherwise would have been damaged. The result of the bullet’s diversion was that the pope was not killed on the spot, did not bleed to death in the ambulance, and did not suffer serious paralysis — all of which would have happened if the bullet had taken a slightly different course and probably even its original course. Both the pope’s doctors and his secretary (into whose arms he had fallen when the bullet struck) agreed that this was ”miraculous.”
The pope himself put the same point more fully a few years later: “One hand fired and another hand guided the bullet.”
In their account of the attempted assassination of John Paul II, journalists Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi remark in passing of the bullet’s trajectory: “Like the bullet that almost killed Ronald Reagan, it had passed a few millimeters from the central aorta.” In fact, the attempted assassination of Reagan on March 30, 1981, by a deranged young man, John Hinckley, came even closer to success than Ağca’s shooting of the pope.
Hinckley’s bullet was a .22-caliber slug intended to explode in Reagan’s body. But when it hit the presidential limousine’s bulletproof surface, it was shaped by the impact into a small, flat disc. In that form, it had ricocheted through the hairline crack in the limousine door and entered Reagan’s body under his arm as he was being flung into the limo. If the bullet had been its original shape, it would have passed quickly through his body, wreaking maximum damage and probably killing him even if it had not exploded. But as a flat disc, it turned over slowly in the president’s flesh, meeting maximum resistance, hit a rib, was diverted, and rolled slowly toward his heart, halting about an inch away from it. Even then, his life was at risk. The doctors did not know for some time that he had been shot or even why his life signs were all collapsing, and the almost invisible wound — a narrow slit — might have escaped their notice longer than it did.
Like John Paul, Reagan came within an inch of death. Unlike the pope, however, he walked into the hospital and started cracking jokes. We have been misled by that gallantry ever since. But the reality is that both men almost died and each had the same explanation for his survival: “One hand fired and another hand guided the bullet.”
In the early morning of October 12, 1984, Margaret Thatcher was in the prime-ministerial suite of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, completing her speech for the annual Tory conference later that day. They wrapped up the final version of the speech at about 2:40 in the morning. The rewritten passages were handed to the secretaries across the hall to type up. The prime minister briefly used the bathroom. At 2:54 a.m., as her principal civil-servant adviser, Robin Butler, was putting away the papers, they heard a “loud thud” followed by the sound of falling masonry. A bomb had exploded in the Grand Hotel itself, placed there three weeks before by IRA terrorists pretending to be tourists and detonated by a sophisticated timing device. Her bathroom was badly wrecked when the bomb exploded and later it too collapsed into the rubble that had killed five people. She had been in that bathroom only six or seven minutes before the explosion. If the bomb had detonated then, she would have been killed or seriously injured. That margin was enough to save her from even a scratch. All the same, she had had a phenomenally narrow escape. Unlike Reagan and the pope, she had not taken a bullet, had not been rushed to the hospital, had not struggled against a series of injuries and secondary infections.
Now, non-providential historians will naturally assume that the triple survival of president, pope, and prime minister were happy accidents even if they were accidents that acted as catalysts in the process that ended the Cold War to the benefit of the West. But what the historian should legitimately conclude and what the survivor of an attempted assassination may believe are two very different things. And what the survivor believes may then inspire him to undertake historical actions of the first importance.
We must therefore ask two questions here: What did Reagan, Thatcher, and the pope believe about their extraordinary close survival from the assassination attempts? And did their beliefs inspire them to particular actions that changed history?
John Paul and Reagan have told us very plainly: They believed that God had spared them for some great purpose which would now determine their future lives. Mrs. Thatcher did not believe that. I know that because I directly asked her if she thought that God has preserved her for some great purpose, she replied simply “No.” Nor, as far as others can judge, did her survival at Brighton seem to change her. It gave her no greater sense of historical destiny, no messianic conviction, no feeling that God had spared her for great things.
Her explanation when I pressed her was a humble one. She seemed to think that it would be vainglorious to believe so. This should not surprise us. Her religious upbringing, which shaped her throughout her premiership, was a very practical Methodist one. It encouraged good works more than introspection and concern for others before oneself. Her first actions after the bombing reflected this: She prayed, she visited the injured to see how she could help them, and she got on with work.
She even worked a little miracle of her own at the Royal Sussex Hospital where the wounded were being treated. She heard that John Wakeham, a cabinet minister and friend, was in danger of losing both his legs, crushed in the bombing. She spent hours on the phone tracking down a world-class specialist in the treatment of crush injuries from El Salvador. He turned out to be on a sabbatical and was visiting the very hospital where she was. Wakeham’s legs were saved.
In other words, she thought more in terms of trying to do what the God of her Methodist upbringing wanted rather than in terms of God having a special purpose for her. The lesson she drew from her survival she expressed a few hours later in the speech she insisted on giving to the Conservative Party conference: “The fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.”
Reagan and Pope John Paul drew more personal lessons. The pope believed in particular that his devotion to Our Lady of Fatima had helped spare his life. A young pilgrim in St. Peter’s Square held up an image of the Virgin Mary, and the pope, leaning forward to see it better just at the moment Ağca fired, may have ensured that the bullet missed the exact point on his body where it was aimed. Ağca launched his attack, moreover, on the anniversary of Our Lady’s appearance in Fatima, Portugal.
On the following anniversary the pope went to Fatima to give thanks to God and Mary for his deliverance. While there, he expressed the view that “in the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences.”
Reagan was changed within moments of his shooting. On regaining consciousness briefly, he prayed for his assassin (and later offered to see him if the doctors thought that would help Hinkley; they advised against). While still in the hospital, he told his daughter Maureen that God had spared his life for a purpose. When he returned to the White House on April 11, 1981, he wrote in his journal that night: “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve Him in every way I can.” Four days later, he asked staffer Michael Deaver to arrange a meeting with a senior cleric. Deaver invited New York’s Cardinal Cooke to the White House. After a meeting in the private quarters upstairs, the weakened president told the cardinal, “I have decided that whatever time I have left is left for Him.” And in public, the president said exactly the same thing in more Reaganesque terms: “Whatever time I have left belongs to the Big Fella Upstairs.”
In terms of policy, that did not mean any great change of direction. The policies he pursued after the shooting, in particular the domestic tax-cut program and the defense buildup, had been clearly foreshadowed both in the campaign and in the four years of radio broadcasts and speeches in which Reagan had laid out his basic philosophy of governing. These went ahead unchanged.
But an important first effect of Reagan’s heroic survival was his greater clout with Congress. His behavior on the day of the shooting had become the stuff of legend, He had been shot, had lost a large amount of blood, and was experiencing acute chest pains from a collapsed lung when he forced himself to get up out of the car and walk into the hospital. He awoke at one point to find a nurse holding his hand. “Does Nancy know about us?” he asked. Even though he was barely conscious, his main concern was to reassure both the country and those around him that all was well.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, quoting Hemingway, said in the Senate, his actions showed “grace under pressure.” They had a powerful political impact. David Broder in the Washington Post predicted two days later, “As long as people remember the hospitalized president joshing his doctors — and they will remember — no critic will be able to portray Reagan as a cruel or callow or heartless man.” He was right: Reagan’s political invulnerability lasted five years, until Iran–Contra. Initially, that brought him not only a standing ovation when he addressed both houses two weeks after leaving the hospital but also the defection of 63 Democrats to support his Program of Economic Recovery, which passed the Democrat-controlled House by a margin of 253 to 176. A still more important effect, however, was Reagan’s greater determination to pursue the policies he favored and, no less vital, to articulate the moral arguments behind them against all opposition.
He thought he knew the great purpose for which God had spared him. It was to hasten the collapse of Communism. He had always opposed it and had criticized the Western policies that propped it up. Now, however, he began to speak of its imminent demise as both a practical possibility and an indisputably worthwhile goal. That did not mean, as many critics and the Soviet themselves speculated, war or nuclear confrontation with Moscow. Reagan intended to compete the Soviets into bankruptcy until they were ready to make the compromises that signaled a genuine peace. He began by offering them a chance to avoid even that competition. He drafted a personal letter to Leonid Brezhnev to propose a genuine detente in which the peoples of both the Soviet Union and the United States would work together for the mutual benefit of their peoples. As the Soviets later admitted, they underestimated the significance of this offer and returned a piece of diplomatic agitprop.
From that point onward, Reagan carried out the strategy of economic and military competition intensified by rhetorical honesty. America’s military buildup was the most visible expression of that strategy. But Reagan’s rhetorical honesty about the nature of Communism and the Soviet Union was almost as important — and it excited plenty of opposition among liberals in the United States and Europe. Reagan’s prediction in his 1982 Westminster speech to the British parliament that Communism was destined to be shortly “on the ash-heap of history,” and his description of the Soviet Union as “an evil empire” in his 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals struck conventional diplomats as pointless provocations with no constructive purpose. Yet we now know that those speeches had a vital effect in weakening Soviet morale and encouraging dissidents throughout the Soviet bloc. And Reagan ploughed on with this defiant truth-telling — believing that if he had been spared by God for some great purpose, that surely did not include sugarcoating the truth about totalitarianism. When poor deluded John Hinckley pulled the trigger that day, he inflicted a mortal wound on the Soviet Union.
Moreover, Reagan had two allies whose determination to bring Communism to a peaceful end was the equal of his own and came equipped with their signature qualities of religious faith and economic liberty. All in all, the end result of all three attempted assassination was, first, to inspire the John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher to continue their battles for freedom and against tyranny with even more determination than before, and second, to elevate all three of them in the minds of people all over the world, including the communist countries, as brave and far-sighted leaders in government, faith, and all things serious.
And finally, what role does Providence play in human history? It is hard to say because, in the end, there may not be much practical difference between God protecting and safeguarding statesmen who are doing His will and statesmen who believe that God has saved them to do His will and feel a prudent obligation to respond.