By Katrina Kaufman
April 28, 2026 / 5:45 AM EDT / CBS News
When shots rang out at the Washington Hilton as President Trump sat in the ballroom for the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night, the hotel’s storied presidential history once again came into focus.
The Hilton had been at the center of another presidential shooting 45 years earlier. On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. drew a .22-caliber revolver and fired six shots in 1.7 seconds from about 15 feet away as President Ronald Reagan was leaving the hotel after addressing AFL-CIO members in the ballroom. Reagan had ended his remarks with the line, “Together we’ll make America great again.”
Lead Secret Service agent Jerry Parr acted quickly to get Reagan into the limousine, Del Wilbur, author of Rawhide Down (Reagan’s Secret Service code name was Rawhide), recounted. But Wilbur said Hinckley’s sixth shot “slaps against the side of the limousine, flattens to the size of a dime, slips through a gap an inch and a half wide between the door and the door frame and hits Reagan.”
Bullets struck White House press secretary James Brady in the head, paralyzing him; D.C. police officer Thomas Delehanty in the back; and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy in the chest. Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and senior fellow at the Reagan Institute, emphasized how close Reagan came to dying, noting the president insisted on walking into the hospital despite his injuries and then collapsed inside. “He rallied so the nation wouldn’t panic and think he was dying,” Troy said.
The assassination attempt was a turning point for the Washington Hilton and for presidential security. The hotel, designed with a wing-shaped, bird-in-flight form, was built to attract presidents, featuring its own presidential entrance, a spiral staircase, a private elevator, a subterranean holding room wired to the White House, and a safe hallway from the holding room to the ballroom stage.
Opened 16 months after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Hilton became the longtime home of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, the National Prayer Breakfast, the First Lady’s Luncheon, inaugural balls and frequent presidential speeches — dating back to Lyndon Johnson. Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have all spoken or attended major events there; Biden gave three speeches in eight days at the hotel in April 2024.
Security vulnerabilities exposed by the Reagan shooting prompted changes. At the time Reagan was shot, he had to step outside to reach his limousine; the hotel later built a bunker-like garage with a secure door so presidents need not be exposed when exiting. The Secret Service introduced magnetometers and rethought staffing and event procedures; even the White House added magnetometers where it had not before, Wilbur said.
Forty-five years later, authorities say Cole Tomas Allen attempted to rush through a magnetometer into the Hilton ballroom in an alleged assassination attempt on President Trump, carrying a pump-action shotgun and a .38-caliber pistol, according to an affidavit. CBS News obtained what it reported as Allen’s alleged “manifesto,” which named “administration officials” as targets prioritized by rank, with the exception of Kash Patel.
The dinner shooting was the third alleged attempt on Mr. Trump’s life. In February, Ryan Routh was sentenced to life in prison for plotting to assassinate him at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach during the 2024 campaign. In July 2024, Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate Mr. Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing his ear with a bullet. Troy said multiple attempts are rare in modern presidential history, likening the pattern only to Gerald Ford, who faced two attempts in California within a month.
Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity, a verdict that sparked public outcry and contributed to changes in federal law. The Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984 shifted the burden of proof, requiring defendants to prove insanity rather than prosecutors proving sanity beyond a reasonable doubt. Hinckley spent more than three decades at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital before being released in 2016; in a 2022 television interview he expressed remorse for his actions.
Reagan returned to the Washington Hilton in September 1981 for a charity ball roughly six months after the shooting, using the new garage entrance and not mentioning the attack in his brief remarks.
In the wake of the latest incident, Mr. Trump said the White House Correspondents’ Dinner should be rescheduled within 30 days with increased security. On the night of the shooting, reporters gathered in the White House press briefing room, some still in black tie. “We’re going to do it again,” Mr. Trump said.