The Spider Who Saved a President

Kimberly Parr
5 min readFeb 4, 2022

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President Ronald Reagan just before he was shot in an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981 (Source: Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library via Wikipedia Commons)

Forty-one years ago, John Hinckley shot and wounded four men outside the Washington Hilton Hotel while trying to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. My father, Jerry Parr, was the Secret Service agent standing behind the president when Hinckley opened fire. He heaved Reagan head-first into the waiting limousine while agent Tim McCarthy reflexively widened his stance, taking a bullet to the liver. Three seconds after the first shot was fired, the limo peeled out.

Hours would pass before the world learned that the president had been much closer to death than first reported. What most people didn’t know was that Reagan’s fate had hinged on a snap decision by a man with blue-collar roots, an unusual nickname, and the memory of a B film from childhood.

Danger from anywhere, anytime

Jerry Parr grew up in Miami during the Great Depression, the only child of two alcoholics, both high school dropouts. They loved their son, and each other, but couldn’t live together. By the time he was 12, his mother had been married three times to unstable or violent men. My grandfather, Oliver Parr, was a World War I veteran who’d wake up during thunderstorms screaming, “Shells! Shells!” The second husband, Everett, kicked Dad in the face, giving him a scar he carried for life.

Husband #3, Jack, would snap and go berserk, flipping over tables, smashing furniture, and threatening to kill my grandmother. Dad began sleeping with a knife under his pillow in case he had to kill Jack first.

Dad didn’t know it, but he was quickly learning that danger could come from anywhere, anytime. It was a lesson that would serve him well as a lineman for Florida Power & Light where he managed to survive several near-death experiences. The guys on the bull gang started calling him Spider because of his fast reflexes, lean physique, and ability to quickly scale poles.

Lineman “Spider” at work for Florida Power & Light

By the time he sat down with a recruiter from the Secret Service, Dad had been a pallbearer at funerals for eight linemen. When asked why he wanted to be an agent, he said, “Well, it’s safer than what I’ve been doing!” He reported for duty in the fall of 1962. At 32, he was the most senior rookie in the field office.

Bullets, blood and a snap decision

By 1981, Dad was 50 and head of the Presidential Protective Division at the White House. He no longer had the reflexes of his youth but was still fast enough to save Reagan from being shot in the head that day outside the Hilton.

As the limo raced back to the White House, Dad examined the president for bullet wounds. He ran his hands under Reagan’s jacket, along his sides and through his hair, looking for blood. No blood. The president himself did not believe he’d been hit. Dad radioed, “Rawhide is okay”, using the Secret Service code name for the president.

But then bright red, frothy blood suddenly appeared on Reagan’s lips. Dad knew instantly this was oxygenated blood from a lung injury. Maybe he had broken the president’s ribs and punctured a lung when he threw him onto the floor of the limo.

For a split-second, he weighed the consequences of diverting the motorcade to a hospital. If the assassination attempt was a coordinated attack, the well-protected White House was the safest place to be. Yet here was a 70-year-old president with a possible lung injury, turning ashen, fighting to breathe. The trauma center at George Washington University Hospital was a mile away.

“Go to George Washington, fast!” he told the driver.

A barely detectable pulse

No one knew it at the time, but the sixth and final bullet had ricocheted off the armored car through the gap between the door and the frame. It flattened to the size of a dime before slicing into the president’s left armpit, tearing through his left lung, bouncing off a rib, and lodging an inch from his heart. The wound itself was only a tiny slit, but internally, Reagan was hemorrhaging massive amounts of blood.

By the time he arrived at GW Hospital, the president’s pulse was barely detectable. Surgical teams managed to stabilize him and remove the bullet in a grueling, three-hour operation. Despite suffering a devastating traumatic injury and losing nearly half his blood volume, Reagan survived.

Dad’s snap decision to divert the motorcade from the White House to the hospital, which seemed so risky at the time, was widely credited with saving the president’s life.

Was Jerry Parr destined to save Ronald Reagan?

Secret Service agent Jerry Parr and President Ronald Reagan
Jerry Parr and Ronald Reagan (source: Official White House photo provided by the Parr family)

Jerry Parr didn’t have the kind of upbringing suited to an elite special agent charged with protecting heads of state, working at the White House, traveling the world. He wasn’t destined to become a gentle and dedicated family man, married to the same woman for 57 years. But he did have two parents who each loved him unconditionally and tried to keep him safe. They didn’t always succeed, but Dad never blamed them. He said his parents’ love sustained him through hard times and gave him the confidence to break away from his life script.

He never broke away completely, however. After Dad died in 2015, I came across his old hard hat from his lineman days. He had held onto it long after he left the name Spider behind, a memento of the days when danger came from a snapped guy-wire instead of a gun.

In 1939, Dad’s father took him to the Tower Theater in Miami to see the film Code of the Secret Service starring Ronald Reagan as agent Brass Bancroft. For a nine-year-old boy, Brass was the epitome of a hero: strong, brave, dashing. Forty-two years later, that boy was the agent standing next to the actor from that film, now in the plum role of President of the United States. Only this time, the bullets and blood were real.

Several weeks after the assassination attempt, Dad asked the president, “Did you know you were an agent of your own destiny?” He told Reagan about the movie he saw as a boy in Miami and how, against all odds, it inspired him to become a Secret Service agent.

Reagan laughed. “That was the cheapest film I ever made.”

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Kimberly Parr
Kimberly Parr

Written by Kimberly Parr

Civil Servant by day, Crime Writer by night. I like my cases cold and old. Check out my website at IceColdCases.com

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