Reagan wanted to meet attacker

It would be a remarkable moment, the President face to face with the man who tried to assassinate him. ‘‘I had the feeling he really wanted to do it,’’ said Roger Peele, then head of psychiatry at St. Elizabeth’s.

But Reagan wanted to know what Hinckley’s caretakers thought. Peele found himself on the phone with the President, who called from Air Force One.

‘‘He said he only wanted to do what was in Mr. Hinckley’s best interests,’’ Peele recalled in an interview. The psychiatrist joked that the President should join the treatment team. ‘‘He laughed,’’ Peele said. Then the conversation turned serious. Peele said a meeting would be unwise. ‘‘I was concerned that it would diminish Hinckley’s sense of responsibility,’’ he said.

Peele, now 73 and chief psychiatrist for the suburban Montgomery County, MD, health department, first recounted the conversation with Reagan in a letter on Friday in The Washington Post. Hinckley had tried take the President’s life in a bid to impress actress Jodie Foster, a sign of his narcissistic personality disorder and delusions of grandeur.

Reporters were pleading for interviews, and autograph seekers were sending $5 and $10 checks, hoping he would sign and cash them. A meeting with the President would only compound the problem.

‘‘I didn’t want him to feel rewarded in any way for what he did,’’ Peele said. Telling the President that wasn’t easy.

If Reagan got his way, it probably wouldn’t hurt, Peele remembers thinking. ‘‘Even so,’’ he said, ‘‘I thought it was my role to say what was in the patient’s interest.’’ Daniel Ruge, then the White House physician, arranged for Reagan and Peele to talk.

The President had first broached the idea with Ruge at Camp David, Ruge, now 87 and living in Denver, said yesterday. The revelation that the President wanted to meet with him, said Hinckley’s lawyer, Barry W. Levine, ‘‘demonstrates the magnanimity of the President, a man of grace, great grace’’. —(LAT-WP)