A Drifter Who Stalked Success

"Something happened to that boy in the last six years"

It cannot be said fairly that John Warnock Hinckley Jr., 25, was destined for infamy.

He is accused of a shooting that, perhaps even to him, is a surprise; the first openly extraordinary act of his life. This son of Sunbelt affluence —blond, blue-eyed, with the fleshy good looks of a country club lay-about—had never been outwardly quirky or unpleasant. His unremarkability confounds the desire for tidy, comforting explanations.

Says a family friend: "There but for the grace of God goes anyone's kid." Beverly McBeath was no friend at Highland Park (Texas) High School, but she speaks for all her schoolmates when she recalls that John Hinckley was "so normal he appeared to fade into the woodwork." Nonetheless, some time in the barren years since his 1973 graduation from high school, Hinckley went beyond mere ordinariness. His solitude and fecklessness became chronic, and he started drifting:

to seedy neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Denver, toward fascism, and then to his climactic infatuations with handguns and a teen-age movie star. Says his father's business associate Clarence Netherland: "Something happened to that boy in the last six to eight years to break him from the family tradition and the family life-style." In fact, John Hinckley's past years seem not to constitute a break so much as Hollywood's slow fade to black.

John Jr. was Jack and JoAnn Hinckley's last child. He was born on May 29, 1955, in the southern Oklahoma town of Ardmore, where his father worked as a petroleum engineer. Two years later Hinckley Sr. took a job in Dallas, 100 miles south. The growing family was good-looking and healthy and Protestant, and all five settled down to life in Uni versity Park, a moneyed Dallas suburb of broad lawns and handsome houses. The Hinckleys are "a fine Christian family," according to one friend, and regular churchgoers; it was fitting that their first home in Dallas was a former parsonage.

Scott, now 32, ever the good eldest child, sought and won parental approbation; Diane, now 28, was exceptionally blond and pretty in a neighborhood of blond, pretty little girls; and John, never a problem, joined the Y.M.C.A.'s Indian Guides and distinguished himself in grammar-school sports. Recalls Jim Francis, John's basketball coach for three years during elementary school: "He was a beautiful-looking little boy, a wonderful athlete, really a leader. He was the best basketball player on the team." No wonder the fa ther of such a child, told years later that his son was being held as an assassin, would scowl in disbelief:

"It had to be a stolen ID."

In 1966 the Hinckleys traded up: they moved to Highland Park, the neighborhood-of-choice for haute Dallas. The house on Beverly Drive where John Jr. spent the years of his adolescence is large, with a sweeping circular driveway in front and a swimming pool out back.

He was not a troublesome teen-ager or even a loner. Indeed, in the seventh and ninth grades he was elected president of his home room, and as an eighth-grader managed the basketball team. John Hinckley was no aloof oddball then. Says his junior-high friend Kirk Dooley: "No one rooted louder than Hinckley for the Highland Park Red Raiders."