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Example research essay topic: President Ronald Reagan Washington D C - 2,163 words

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John Hinkley, Junior John Warlock Hinkley, Junior, was born on May 29, 1955, in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in a large, wealthy and very religious family. He has been the youngest among three children of the Hinkley's. Sir John W. Hinkley, his father, had a great career growth and occupied a position of President and Chairman of the Vanderbilt Energy Corporation. He devoted himself to his oil and gas business, while his wife, Joann Moore Hinckley, became a diligent housekeeper and dedicated herself to their children. The elder brother, Scott Hinkley, followed his fathers footsteps: he graduated from Vanderbilt University, started working for fathers corporation and soon became a Vice-President of Vanderbilt Energy.

A daughter, Diane, has been a very friendly and sociable girl. She demonstrated incredible success in high school and became a graduate of SMU in Dallas. But, unlikely to his siblings, John Junior has been very introverted, shy and silent child. Since his earliest ages, he has been close only with his mother and very dependent upon her. In 1959 the Hinkley's moved to Dallas, Texas, where John Junior started attending elementary school. He began discovering principles and rules of social life, willingly participated football and basketball trainings, and even received a title of the best basketball player of his team.

When John was in the sixth class, the family moved again, this time to a luxury apartment of a suburb of Highland Park. In his high school times John started getting more and more selfish and isolated. He cut up his relations with the friends from school football team and used to spend the most of time alone at home, watching TV or listening to music. He became a huge fanatic of The Beatles, started playing guitar and writing own songs. Especially he liked John Lennon, a symbol of rebellion and social revolutions of his generation, and there were other public personalities, who were truly adored by this young sensitive man. In 1973, after finishing high school, John Hinkley entered Technical University in Lubbock, Texas, department of Business Administration.

First year of his study was not very successful, Hinkley did not feel like studying boring economic subjects, so he moved to Dallas and began living with the family of his sister Diana. For about one year he had been trying to get a decent job or fix his life somehow, but faced only frustrations and failures. That is why he decided to be back to his University and join the spring semester of 1975. One more year of staying in Texas Tech. did not bring any moral satisfaction or progress in study, and in April 1976 John Hinkley left Texas and went to California in order to try his chances in Hollywood. He cherished a dream to be a songwriter, he had a lot of own compositions, but his disadvantage was lack of musical education.

So, he rented an apartment in Hollywood and started his search of own destiny. And fate did not keep him to waiting for long. In summer 1976 Hinkley watched a newly released Hollywood movie of Martin Scorsese Taxi Driver, which incredibly influenced the young mans mind and predefined his dramatic destiny. In the movie, a psychotic former Vietnam War soldier, who works as a taxi driver, Travis Bickle, played by Robert DeNiro, falls in love with Betsy, who works as a supporter of a political candidate in his campaign. To attract attention of that woman on himself, he decides to make an attempt to assassinate the politician she works for, but he fails. After that Bickle switches over to another character, a 12 -year old prostitute Iris, brilliantly performed by young Jodie Foster.

He decides to kill her pimp and liberate the young girl, and in this way to become her hero. This movie stunned Hinckley and drastically changed the concept of his life. That summer, he watched Taxi Driver about 15 times. It seemed like he had found some clues in that movie, which could help him to fight with his frustrations and depression, which could give color to his life.

Besides, he felt incredible fascination with pretty Jodie Foster. Hinkley learnt that the screenwriter of the movie, Paul Schrader, based the character of Travis Bickle on a real-life personality, Arthur Bremer, who also planned to assassinate a celebrity, George Wallace, in order to gain some fame and public attention. Hinkley started associating himself with Bickle, started developing features of his character, copying his style of dress, manners and habits, like drinking fruit brandy or writing a diary. Besides, he became really obsessed with guns and started gathering his weapon collection.

But still his letters to home were filled with despair and misery; he cried about broken dreams and misfortune, about deceiving Hollywood's opportunities, and asked for financial support. He used to write about his relationships with a girl named Lynn Collins, who proved to be actually a fake person and whose portrayal was inspired by one of the main characters of the movie, Bickle's first love Betsy. In September 1976 Hinkley left California, discouraged and upset, and went to his parents, who lived in a residence in Evergreen, Colorado. He found a job as a bus driver in a small restaurant.

But some months had not elapsed when he resurrected his musical ambitions and ran to Hollywood again. He tried to make a living and to catch a chance to show his talent, but all the efforts were in vain, and at the beginning of 1977 he returned to Tech. University, again depressed and dejected. Trying to make changes in his miserable existence and find some purpose in his life, he changed his department in University and started learning English literature, but it was not inspiring for him.

He rarely visited classes, spending the majority of time on his own. He ignored his study together with the concern of his parents about his future occupation. In August, 1979, he bought his first real gun, a thirty-eight caliber pistol, and started practicing target-shooting. During the fall 1979, he played Russian roulette two times. A self-made picture of Hinkley, made in 1980, shows him holding his gun aiming to his temple.

At those times he started having serious tranquilizers and antidepressants to fix his mental condition. In May 1980 Hinkley learnt from an article of People magazine, that young Jodie Foster, a star of Taxi Driver, entered Yale University in New Heaven, Connecticut. He wrote a hopeful letter to his parents, saying that hed found his new devotion: writing, and so he wanted to join writing course in Yale. The Hinkley's granted him $ 3, 600 as an exchange to his promise to work hard at the course and receive a good job.

Therefore, in September 1980, John Hinkley moved to Connecticut, looking forward to be close to his beloved lady. But, being extremely shy and introverted, Hinkley could not get courage to approach Jodie and to start a conversation. He tried to set contact by leaving letters and poems in her mailbox, or talking by phone. But he did not believe that the relations can result in something worthy, unless he will not offer some crazy act. He thought about hijacking a plane or committing suicide right in front of her. But his obsession with Foster was very deep and passionate, so, like his hero from the movie, he decided to gain her love and affection by assassinating a celebrity.

And, as Bickle had tried, he decided to attempt assassination of a politician, namely, American President. Starting from autumn 1980 Hinkley began stalking the President Jimmy Carter. He followed Carter to the cities of his evection al campaigns, like Washington D. C.

or Columbus, spending all the money for plane tickets and guns. He had two rifles and three handguns, which he used to keep in his room, but when he traveled to Nashville, he was arrested in the airport for illegal bearing of firearms. Security officers detected the guns, confiscated them and fined Hinkley for 62. 50 USD. Having no money anymore, Hinkley went home, where he found disappointment of the parents with his useless adventures and never ending depression.

In order to examine mental condition of their youngest son, the Hinkley's arranged a meeting with psychiatrist John Hopper in Colorado. As John Junior had been already having serious antidepressants and medicines, Hopper did not find any serious reasons to worry for mental health of the young man and attributed the reasons of such long-termed depressions to his emotional instability and frustrations in life. Besides, he recommended forcing him towards financial and psychological independence from parents. Patents followed the advice and insisted on Johns looking for a job. Hinkley expressed concern about his future and began traveling around the cities, pretending that he is looking for some business to do. In real he has been creating new plans on his assassination dreams.

He started following a newly elected President Ronald Reagan, completing in his mind the details of Reagan's elimination. In the end of March 1981 Hinkley went to Hollywood for one day, where on March 29 he reserved a ticket for Greyhound Bus to Washington D. C. , collected his guns and wrote a long letter to Jodie Foster, in which he admitted his love and passion to her and described the details of future assassination attempt as a historical deed. On March 30, 1981, at about 2: 30 p. m. , standing in the crowd of journalists and observers John Hinckley Jr.

fired six shots from his Rohm R 6 - 14 revolver L 731332 into President Ronald Reagan, who had just stepped out of the Hilton Hotel in Washington D. C. after delivering a speech at AFL-CIO conference. Hinkley's Devastator bullets seriously wounded Reagan in his lungs (fortunately, he survived after a surgery at George Washington University Hospital), his press secretary James Brady, FBI agent Timothy McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. Hinkley did not try to flee and was arrested on the spot by police. Upon the arrest he told that the reason of his act was a desire to postpone Academy Awards ceremony, which had been planned for the next night.

The trial seemed to be very hard business for Hinkley's lawyer, Vince Fuller, because there were numerous witnesses and video recordings of the assassination. So, the only good way was trying to prove Hinkley's insanity. After numerous psychiatric evaluations the results proved to be the following: all governmental specialists, like Doctor Park Dietz, found Hinkley legally sane and suffering from personality disorders, but all the reports of defense specialists, like Doctors William Carpenter and David Bear, who found out Hinkley's sheer symptoms of schizophrenia, declared him to be insane. In the fall 1981, during his imprisonment when waiting for a trial, Hinkley undertook two attempts of suicide, one was overdose of antidepressants, and the other was an attempt of hanging himself to his cell window. Therefore, mental problems of Hinkley became evident.

His trial started on May 4, 1982, almost a year after the assassination itself. Hearings and testimony took one and half month, and on June 21, 1982, after three days of jurys debates, John Hinkley Junior was announced not guilty by reason of insanity. This verdict caused serious resonance in public opinion, and numerous protests against using of insanity defense took place all around the country. National Government and the governments of many states launched changes in their laws, resulting in considerable restrictions and limitations of using pleas for insanity in the majority of cases, moreover, in three states insanity defense was abolished.

After the trial John Hinkley Junior was taken to St. Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital in Washington, D. C. , where he is sentenced to stay till the end of his life. After first years of hard depressions and repeated attempts to suicide, in the end of 90 th his mental health started getting better.

In 1999 he received a right of supervised visits in the hospital. Later on in April 2000 doctors allowed him to have unsupervised releases from the hospital premises and receive visitors outside at hospital territories. But very soon a smuggled book about Jodie Foster was found in his room, though it had been strongly prohibited for Hinkley to receive information about her, and it ended with the withdrawal of the right of receiving visitors for him. Recently only parents are allowed to see him in his hospital room. Bibliography: John Hinkley. (1999 - 2000).

The American Experience. Retrieved February 24, 2005 from the World Wide Web: < web > John Hinkley Jr. Biography (n. d). University of Missouri, Kansas City. Retrieved February 24, 2005 from the World Wide Web: < web > John Hinkley Junior. (2005, February 16).

Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 24, 2005 on the World Wide Web: < web > The Trial of John Hinkley. (n. d. ). School of Law. University of Pittsburg.

Retrieved February 24, 2005 from the World Wide Web: < web >


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Research essay sample on President Ronald Reagan Washington D C

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