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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient James Brady
The Brady Bill passed both Houses, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law on Nov. 30, 1993. It went into effect in March 1994. Restrictions on purchases and background checks on all buyers of handguns were part of the law.
White House press secretary James Brady lies wounded on the sidewalk outside a Washington hotel after being shot during an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. In the background, Secret Service agents and police wrestle the assailant to the ground.
A changed life changes forever By SARAH BRADY Last Updated: March 31, 2002
It is almost impossible to overstate how much our life changed after Jim was appointed White House press secretary.
The announcement was made less than two weeks before the inauguration, and immediately, we began to be invited to things, left and right. I had almost no appropriate clothes. After all, I'd been a stay-at-home mom for the past two years. I had exactly one pair of heels - black. Jeans and loafers were my usual daytime clothes. So I had to get out and do some shopping almost immediately. I did, and was able to find several good, conservative cocktail dresses that served me well.
One of the first parties I remember was at Bob Novak's place. I knew Bob himself, because I'd almost gone to work for him and also because he and his wife owned a beach house next to one we rented in the summers, in Bethany Beach, Delaware. But apart from the Novaks, I knew almost no one. Jim, of course, knew everybody, and he was the number one attraction, because the guests, apart from a few members of the Reagan team, were mostly from the press.
I was standing on the sidelines, feeling incredibly awkward, when a woman came up to me. She, too, looked a little uncomfortable. She asked whether I was Sarah Brady, Jim's wife, and introduced herself as Kay Graham. She said she was having a small dinner party later that week - it was Inaugural Week - and wondered if we would like to come. She said to check with Jim, and asked me to give her a call.
On the way home, I told Jim that a woman named Kay Graham wanted to know if we could come to dinner. Jim looked at me with utter astonishment, and said, "My God - why didn't you tell her yes right off?" Any press secretary, he added, would kill to go to Kay Graham's house. Then I realized what he meant: Kay Graham must be Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post and probably the most powerful woman in the United States.
Kay Graham's party was an education for me. To begin with, there was valet parking, even though they parked the cars right there on the beautiful grounds of her Georgetown house. I had never been to a party with valet parking. Then there was the fact that Mrs. Graham had called it a small dinner party, which made me expect maybe 12 people, at most. But there were at least 50 there, maybe 75. At the parties I was used to, if the crowd grew so large that the guests' coats couldn't fit in the front closet, they got piled on one of the beds.
Mrs. Graham, in stark contrast, had her library set up as a cloakroom, complete with a coat check person. The house was lovely, all lit with candles, and the guest list was spectacular. There were members of the press, members of the Senate and the House, ambassadors, even movie stars. At the time it was all so new to me that just seeing these people boggled my mind.
But that was just the beginning of our incredible new life. * * *
That winter, Jim worked extremely hard. He loved every minute of it, of course - was having the time of his life. Almost every night, he was on television, and our son Scott, who had just turned 2 , loved to watch him. He was a little confused, though, about exactly what his father did for a living. He thought Jim was working for Ronald McDonald. He had a Ronald McDonald puppet, and in his mind, the two Ronalds were one and the same.
Many nights, there were dinners and other affairs that both Jim and I had to attend together. The parties - especially the embassy affairs - became more and more exotic. I couldn't help noticing how different I was in many small ways from the people we started associating with as soon as Jim became White House press secretary. The truth is that it was a lifestyle I wouldn't have chosen for myself. I like to eat earlier, I like to go to bed earlier. I like things much more casual. I'd much rather stay home. I love rock and roll, not classical music. I know this sounds terrible, but there it is. I don't like big formal cocktail parties. I like small, casual affairs with friends. I really don't feel comfortable in big groups of people I don't know.
But for those first few months, in the winter of 1981, it was all new, and wonderfully exciting. It was a true whirlwind, and that's the way I still see it in my mind's eye.
And it lasted fewer than seventy days.
Along with a bottle of champagne Jody Powell (Jim's predecessor as press secretary) had left in Jim's office, he had also left a second gift, which had been passed down to him by Ron Nessen, President Ford's press secretary. It was a hideous bulletproof vest of blue brocade, clearly designed to be worn under a tuxedo. Pinned to it was a note: "Jim, it's not the guns that'll get you in this job; it's the gnats and the ants," meaning the endless tiny annoyances that came with the position.
On Inaugural Day, we laughed, as Jody had meant us to. But it was the bullets that got Jim Brady. * * *
Jim Brady's job left the family little time together. Occasional outings were treasured, and one of them was a "wonderfully fun and romantic evening" at a favorite restaurant. "There was no way to know that there was anything truly remarkable about that night - that we would never have another like it."
The next morning, as always, Jim got up at the crack of dawn. Since we'd been out later than usual, I was thinking we'd let Scott, who was 2, sleep in for a while. It would give me a little extra rest as well. But Jim felt he saw too little of our son now that he was so busy at the White House.
Typically, he left for work by 6 or 6:30 every morning and didn't get home until 7:30 or 8 at the earliest. The weekend before, we had managed time for a great family outing, first to the National Zoo, then to a restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, where Jim and I drank margaritas and ate Mexican food out on a patio, with Scott sitting beside us in his stroller. But those times were few and far between, and that Monday, Jim was just determined to get Scott out of bed and play with him before he left for work. So after he showered, despite my protests, that's exactly what he did. Looking back, I'm so very glad.
As it happened, my mother was in Arizona for a nephew's wedding. She had a wonderful woman named Frances McKnight who helped her clean house a half day every two weeks, and since Mother was going to be out of town, she'd suggested that Frances work for me that Monday. I picked her up, then collected Scott from play school. After lunch, Scott and I settled down in the recreation room in our basement, and I turned the television to my favorite soap opera, "As the World Turns."
Suddenly, there was a bulletin from CBS news, a Special Report: Shots had been fired at President Reagan outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, where he had just addressed a meeting of the AFL-CIO. Apparently, CBS reported, the President had not been injured. So I wasn't at all panicky.
When the phone rang, almost immediately, I thought it was Mom, who watched the same program, and I picked up the receiver and said, "Did you hear that?" But it was not my mother. It was my good friend Jan Wolff, who said, in a very shaky voice, "Sarah, do you want me to come get Scott?" What for, I asked - why would she need to come get Scott? Then she told me: ABC News was reporting that Jim had been shot. I said, "Oh, Jan, hang up and I'll call the White House." Because of Jim's position, we had a special White House signal phone - a direct line to the switchboard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - and I grabbed it. I explained to the operator that I'd just heard my husband had been shot. "Is that correct?" I asked - not believing it for a minute - and the operator told me to hang up, they'd call back. Within 30 seconds someone did. Yes, he had been shot, the answer was, but he was alive. I asked whether he was stable, and the answer was yes. I asked where the ambulance was taking him, and the operator said to the George Washington University Hospital.
By now, I was really anxious, and I was just going to get in my car and take off. Then the phone rang again, and it was Jim's assistant, Sally McElroy, in the White House press office. Stay right there, she said. We're on our way. They were sending a White House "carpet" driver - a military driver - to get me. I asked Frances to take care of poor little Scott, who of course had no idea what was going on, and I raced around frantically, looking for my pocketbook, then ran outside to wait for the car.
Otto Wolff, Jan's husband, arrived just about the time the White House car pulled up, and I asked him to come with me. Sally McElroy and Mark Weinberg, another of Jim's aides, were already in the car, and as soon as Otto and I got in, we took off for the relatively short drive across the river to the GW Hospital. The driver, Sergeant Sam Sampsell, was in constant communication with the White House garage, keeping up with developments.
We were about two blocks from the hospital when the traffic came to an abrupt standstill, absolutely bumper to bumper. I was getting word, via the radio, that I should go to the main entrance and someone would meet me, and I didn't want to wait. I jumped out, along with Sally, Mark, and Otto, and we ran the last two blocks.
At the main entrance was a woman by the name of Sandra Butcher, the head social worker at GW. The minute she spotted me, she introduced herself, then said she wanted to take me to the neurosurgeon in charge of Jim's case. We raced through the hospital to an area not far from the operating suite, and there I met Arthur Kobrine.
I'll never forget seeing him that first time. He looked so young - I was only 39, but he was even younger - a large, good-looking man. He said, "Your husband has been hit above the left eye. The bullet entered above his left eye, and has transversed to the right side. If the operation is successful, he may well walk out of here. However, we do know that he will lose total use of his left arm and partial use of his left leg." He told me the operation would take about five hours, but he wanted me to know that Jim could easily succumb to the surgery. He asked if I had any questions. He had covered so much, so succinctly, that I had none. I just asked him please to save Jim's life - our little son needed him.
The magnitude of what was happening hadn't really hit me yet, partly because everything had gone so fast. I had reached the hospital within a half hour of the time Jim got there, and Jim had arrived within six minutes of the shooting. Not even one hour had gone by since John Hinckley fired those lethal .22-caliber Devastator bullets at the President of the United States and took down my husband as well.
We hadn't been there very long when Michael Deaver, the President's deputy chief of staff, brought Mrs. Reagan to the little room off the ER. She rushed in and I, jerk that I was, thought she had come to see me because of Jim. I had heard in the CBS report that the President had not been hit. But as we hugged each other, I realized she was shaking like a leaf. Then I said, "Oh, I am so scared," and she replied, "I am, too." And I knew instantaneously that the President, too, had been shot. "They're going to be fine," I told her. "They are both strong men." We talked for a few minutes, and then she left. * * *
The time dragged on, and I grew more and more nervous. At some point, someone brought in food, sandwiches. I was sure I wouldn't want any, but to my surprise, we devoured that food quite quickly. Toward the end of the five hours, it became more and more nerve-racking. I paced a lot - could hardly sit still.
All of a sudden, the door opened, and there was Art Kobrine. I hardly recognized him. The first time I'd seen him, he was so solemn, so very serious. But as he walked through the door into that room, he was beaming. I knew, before he said a word, that things had gone well. He explained that Jim had done beautifully - so well that he was not even going to have to spend much time in the recovery room. They were going to get him ready to go to intensive care, and we'd be able to see him in about half an hour.
After what seemed like ages, at about 9:30 or 10 p.m., they said we could see him. I went in first, and was not at all prepared for what I saw. All told, of course, he looked pretty damned good to me. His head had been shaved, and it was almost entirely bandaged because of the craniotomy. The entrance wound itself was tiny. I had thought I'd see more stitches on his face, but there were none. His face was just fine, except it was so black and blue, so swollen.
He was moving, and he recognized me immediately. " 'Coon, 'Coon," he said (using an old nickname that poked affectionate fun at the way Sarah ate). He was on a respirator, and it's almost impossible to talk on a respirator, but you could tell he was trying to get that out. I didn't realize how miraculous this was, but the doctors and nurses were completely overwhelmed. They could not believe that this man, who had been so gravely shot, whose brain had been damaged, could be so alert, could recognize people, was actually trying to speak.
He had tubes and monitors everywhere. And he was very, very restless. Sedating a head-injury patient is a very risky business, so they couldn't do much, pharmacologically, to make him less fidgety. But he did not seem to be in any pain. I was just so delighted to see him, so thankful that there he was.
Then, all of a sudden, I was afraid. For the first time, I realized how many monitors there were. They kept beeping, alarms sounding, and every time one went off, I'd ask what was wrong. It would be nothing, of course, but it just sounded so loud in there.
Pretty soon, Jim settled down somewhat, and the noises in the room became more regular.Jim's mother Dorothy came in. She was almost 75 at the time, and quite frail, and the sight of Jim just crushed her - broke her heart. She stayed for just a minute or two, then went back to our room and refused to return. After that night, though, she visited every day, always bringing cookies and other treats for the nurses.
By this time the President, after some time in recovery after his own surgery, had been brought to a room at the far end of the ER. In the room next to Jim was Tim McCarthy, the Secret Service agent who also had been shot. I met his wife, Carol, who, like me, was spending the night. And of course the whole place was teeming with White House personnel and security people. This emergency room had been transformed almost instantly into a White House outpost. In fact, by the next day a special office had been set up about halfway between Jim's room and mine. It contained typewriters and telephones and televisions. It had snacks and sodas always available, along with just about anything else the President's people might need or want. It was a regular working White House, because the White House is wherever the President is. The whole hospital was under the tightest security you could imagine. There were SWAT teams everywhere, and hardly anyone was allowed in or out.
Later that night, someone from the hospital looked in and said now that everything's in order, we need you to come down and fill out the admittance papers. They had them all ready, and after showing our insurance cards, I started to fill out the forms. Suddenly, it struck me how absurd this was. The form asked the "Reason for Admittance." "Shot in the head," I wrote. The form wanted to know whether this was work-related. "Yes." Every question seemed to evoke a bizarre answer because it was bizarre, what we were going through. It was as if we were in some strange movie, or a dream. How had the injury occurred? "In an assassination attempt on the President of the United States." What a surreal experience that was.
After I got back to Jim, I stayed up all night, watching. I knew from what Art Kobrine had said that the next three days would be crucial. That's when brain swelling, infections and seizures might occur, and they could be devastating. It was going to be three days before the doctors would feel Jim was out of the woods. I had no intention of leaving his side.
Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 31, 2002. A life's ambition grows out of tragedy By SARAH BRADY Last Updated: April 7, 2002
The night after Jim was shot, I never slept at all. By morning, he still seemed to be doing very well, despite being on a respirator and hooked up to all those monitors, so I stepped across the hall to where the White House had set up its hospital command post.
They had orange juice and coffee and doughnuts there, and also television sets, which gave me a chance to catch up with the early-morning news reports about the assassination attempt. Every time they mentioned Jim, they would talk about "the gravely injured Jim Brady," and stress that his survival was doubtful. And I kept thinking Why do they say that? He's doing so beautifully.
There were lots of visitors that morning, mostly White House people and Cabinet members on their way to see the President - who was doing so well that he actually signed a bill into law - but all of them stopped to say hello. And there was one stranger who hovered around that morning and every day for the rest of the week, a man so somber that to me, he seemed almost ominous. I noticed that he was talking with various doctors, and he kept looking in at Jim, almost as if he were waiting for him to die. Finally, he disappeared, and I asked someone who he was. The answer just chilled me: He was a homicide detective.
Despite that horrible moment, my spirits were quite high. Jim seemed so alert. I went into his room at one point, and he said-quite clearly, even with the respirator, "feet, feet." I knew exactly what that meant. He wanted me to scratch them.
By that night, I was beginning to feel more secure. I went to bed in the room they had given me and slept pretty well. The next day, Jim continued to get better. The hospital personnel made a ball out of adhesive tape, and he started bouncing it around the room and throwing it at people, so they knew that his cognitive abilities were in fairly good shape despite the damage to his brain. It was going to be the next day before he was truly out of danger, but all of us felt very good about his progress.
By the end of that first week, Jim was moved out of intensive care and into a regular room on the fifth floor of the hospital.
For a while, I was pretty careful about who got to see Jim - he was still very confused, very sick. People did come by to see me, though. Among them was Barbara Bush, wife of the vice president. I was reading in Jim's room when she arrived, and went out to greet her. She apologized for disturbing me, and when I said she hadn't at all - I'd just been reading - she replied, "Oh, I hope it's a good, dirty book!" Barbara was very good to us for years afterward, always making sure that I was included in any women's get-togethers and inviting Jim and me to several affairs at the vice president's house.
It was interesting to watch Jim during this period. You could see his mind trying to put everything together. He would switch back and forth, from periods of clear understanding to moments of utter confusion. I made it a point to try to keep him in touch with what had been going on in his life before he was hurt. I would talk about family or friends and read him articles about President Reagan or politics, and most of the time I kept his television tuned to news programs. They had started occupational and physical therapy, which would have to teach him how to do, with one hand, all the things he had done all his life with two. He had not yet begun speech therapy, which he desperately needed.
Because of the damage to Jim's left frontal lobe, which affects your emotions and your ability to mask them, strong feelings of any kind could bring on what we called a "wail" - a very unnerving noise somewhere between crying and laughing. As his brain healed, he was increasingly able to control it, and in later years, he would wail only during extremely emotional moments - sad or happy - such as the singing of the national anthem. But in those early days, it happened all the time: He would start to say something, and suddenly his voice would just wail off.
For anyone, that noise was disconcerting. For Scott, the first time he heard it was terrifying. I brought him in to see Jim the second Sunday after the assassination attempt. He was so excited to see his dad, and of course Jim was extremely glad to see him. As I put Scott up on the bed, Jim started wailing helplessly. He couldn't stop - it just went on and on. Imagine how that little boy must have felt. He could remember, two weeks before, his great big father playing with him, joking with him, telling him stories, carting him around on his shoulders, taking him for rides in the Jeep. Suddenly, here he was in bed, not looking much like himself, and making this horrible noise. Jim couldn't finish one whole sentence without breaking into the wail. Scott was scared to death and burst into tears - something I had very rarely seen in this happy-go-lucky child. But it was not long before he got used to the new Jim, and from then on he went to the hospital a lot.
It wasn't long before I decided it would be good for Jim to see more friends. During the presidential campaign, he had gotten to know Bill Plante of CBS very well, and Bill had been eager to visit. So Sally McElroy, Jim's loyal White House assistant, arranged it. When Bill arrived, Art Kobrine (the neurosurgeon) was in with Jim, so Bill and I waited outside. All of a sudden, the door burst open and Art and the nurses ran Jim's bed down the hall and into the elevator. "I'm taking Jim to surgery," Art shouted. "He has air in his ventricles" - brain cavities that should have been filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Art had tried to let the air out with a syringe, but there was so much of it that he suspected a major leak in the dura mater, the membrane that covers the brain. To fix it, he had to do a second craniotomy. It took more than six hours.
Once again, Jim came through the ordeal beautifully and began to recuperate. But now it began to seem as if something life-threatening was destined to hit him every two or three weeks. He would be gaining strength and eating well, and some new enemy would strike him down. The next setback was pneumonia. And then, for quite a while, he was having trouble swallowing. He lost a lot of weight. He was down to skin and bones - a skinny little soul, which for my Bear is not normal. He ate lots of pudding and gradually built himself back up. * * *
There was just one night when I truly felt sorry for myself. It was maybe the second week after Jim was hurt, and a friend of mine, Bobbie McGraw, had come for a couple of days to help take care of Scott in the evenings so I could be with Jim. That one night I came home and just fell apart: Oh, why me? Why did this have to happen to us? By the next morning, the wave of self-pity had passed, and I remember feeling very ashamed. Once I got that out of my system, I never felt that way again.
Quite the contrary, in fact. I was afraid at times, of course, and acutely aware of how close to death Jim had been and how fragile he was. But always, in my heart, I felt he was going to get back. I tended not to think ahead very much, but to take each day as it came. In that hospital, and especially with Art Kobrine in charge of us, you almost felt as if you were in a womb, and it was easy to believe that Jim was going to be safe.
And something else: I felt lucky. Jim was on a neurosurgery floor, where everyone has a brain injury or spinal cord damage or cancer of the brain, or any number of other devastating disorders. Being there, you saw every day that you weren't the only one, that hundreds of others faced the same drastic changes in their lives. Many of them didn't have anything like the support system we had, and many were young people, in their late teens or early 20s. So I didn't feel different from anyone else. In fact, I felt much luckier. * * *
By summer, Jim was doing so well - even beginning to walk with a cane - that we were able to take a Fourth of July outing. We were invited to the White House, where there was a big party on the South Lawn for staffers and their families, with hot dogs and balloons and entertainment and bands. Because of Jim's condition, we couldn't actually be out on the lawn, so we were invited to use the second floor at the residence, along with the people who came with us - among them my mother and brother, Art and Cindy Kobrine and their kids, and Otto and Jan Wolff.
We took Jim, in his wheelchair, out on the balcony that overlooks the South Lawn, because we wanted him to be able to hear the music and see all the activity. The crowd noticed, and suddenly, there was just thunderous applause. Later, our entire entourage went over to the Hay-Adams Hotel, where we had rented several rooms. From there, we could see the fireworks. It was Jim's first trip out of the hospital, and it was a wonderful experience for him - made him realize that he really was going to get home.
One day in July things were going so well that I thought I might be able to spend just a couple of hours relaxing in the sun, which I've always loved. It had been such a hard four months that I needed a little R&R. So I went out to the Army-Navy Country Club, which was quite near our house, and settled down by the pool and was enjoying the beautiful day and listening to the normal, happy sounds around me. In some lounge chairs next to me, there were several Navy wives a little older than I was, very nice-looking women. Suddenly, one of them said, "Oh, I have a good joke." One of the others asked what it was, and the first woman said, "What's Ronald Reagan's favorite vegetable?" No one knew, so the woman delivered the punch line: "Jim Brady."
It was as if somebody had stabbed me through the heart. I lay there for a minute, then picked up my bag and my coverup and moved to the other side of the pool. Of course, it must have been a joke that was going around. I just hadn't been out in public much and had been surrounded by super-supportive people, so the shock was terrible and the pain was very deep. The longer I lay there, the more I hurt. And the more I hurt, the angrier I got. So when I was getting ready to leave, I marched over to them. I said, "Hi, my name is Sarah Brady, and I just wanted to say one thing: I heard the joke you told about my husband, and I just want you to know that my husband is one of the brightest, most wonderful men in the world and I would hope in the future you won't tell that joke again." Oh, the look in their eyes. They were just stricken.
It was a stupid thing for me to do, so immature. I know they didn't mean it. I know we've all done cruel things. But at the time, boy, did that one hurt. * * *
Jim Brady overcame a series of medical setbacks, but eventually turned the corner and, with therapy, made steady progress. At the same time, his family learned to adjust to his physical limitations and return to some of the activities they had always enjoyed. In the
summer of 1985 Jim, Sarah and 6-year-old Scott visited Centralia, Ill., Jim's hometown.
-5 I drove us out, and we all looked forward to our stay. Our visits there had always been fun. Almost everyone in town knew everyone else, and Jim had so many friends. It was a typical small Midwestern town.
We had been there for a day or two when a dear friend, Dorothy Mann, came to get us for an outing. The Manns were transplanted Texans who owned a construction company that built railroad ties for the southern railroads - a very lucrative business. When I first met them, they lived next door to the Bradys in a huge, charming Victorian house. The matriarch, Marie, was in her seventies at the time, a widow. The rest of the clan included Marie's daughter Dorothy, Dorothy's husband A.C., and their three living children, who were a bit younger than Jim and me. Dorothy and A.C.'s youngest child, Mike, had killed himself in the early 1970s, when he was a student in high school.
The Manns had been friends of Jim's for years. They threw an engagement party for us, and we always spent lots of time with them when we were out there. In the years since I first met them, they had sold the Victorian homestead and bought a new place on the edge of town. It had lots of land and a swimming pool, and it became the center of social life for many people in Centralia.
On that summer day in 1985, Dorothy and the manager of the construction company were out doing errands, and they stopped by in their pickup truck with the idea that maybe Scott and I would like to come out to the house and go swimming. We loved the idea, so we got our suits and went out to the truck. Scott got in first, and I climbed in behind him. He picked up off the seat what looked like a toy gun, and started waving it around, and I thought this was a perfect chance to talk to him about safety. So I took the little gun from him, intending to say he must never point even a toy gun at anyone. As soon as I got it into my hand, I realized it was no toy. It was a fully loaded little Saturday-night special, very much like the one that had shot Jim.
I cannot even begin to describe the rage that went through me. To think that my precious little boy, six years old, had actually held a loaded .22 that somebody, that manager, had left it there, out on the seat, pushed me right over the edge. The Manns had little children around all the time, kids who were always in and out of everything. It wasn't as if they lived in some kind of adult cocoon. And here was this gun - I couldn't believe it!
Dorothy hopped in next to me, and the manager got in. I handed the gun to Dorothy and asked her to put it away. I didn't want to see it again, I said - get rid of it. They both could tell that I was extremely angry. The manager made some lame excuse about how he had to have that for self-protection against union members in St. Louis. I didn't reply.
All the way out to the Manns' I could think of nothing else. When we got there, I could hardly speak to anyone. I was disappointed and shocked. My father had been an FBI agent, and I'd grown up with a gun in my home. But I had never, ever seen such stupidity - someone just allowing a gun to lie around. I loved Dorothy Mann with all my heart. But her own son had shot himself. How could she have allowed that fellow to have a gun where a child could get hold of it?
Suddenly, I just wanted to get out of Centralia. I know I over-reacted, but I was panic-stricken on Scott's behalf. I called my mother and told her what had happened. Bill and my father had owned an Enfield rifle, and I asked Mother where it was. I said please just make sure that rifle is not there at your house. It wasn't. It was at Bill's place. But by the time I got back to Washington, I was at a point where I didn't want Scott anywhere unless I could watch him every second. Anyone might have a gun lying around. And anyone could get hold of it.
A couple of days after we got back, we were spending a typical August evening at home. We'd finished dinner, and I was washing the dishes while listening to the news on television. I heard a report that the National Rifle Association was pushing a bill called McClure-Volkmer after its sponsors, Republican Senator James A. McClure of Idaho and Democrat Harold L. Volkmer of Missouri. The bill, according to the report, would do away with the 1968 gun control act.
Instantly, all the fury that had hit me that day in the pickup truck came rushing back. I knew the 1968 law well, from my days working for Congressman Mike McKevitt. It had been passed after the deaths of two of my heroes, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. It was a small, sensible measure that essentially set age limits for gun buyers - you had to be 18 to purchase a long gun and 21 to get a hand gun - imposed some inspection and bookkeeping requirements on gun dealers, set up some guidelines for interstate sales, and banned the importation of Saturday night specials. It was not, by any means, a restrictive law. In fact, it had no teeth. Even though it required you to fill out a federal form when buying a gun from a dealer, a form that asked your name, address, and age and whether you were a fugitive or felon, there was no mechanism for checking out the truth of what you wrote, no background check. You were on your honor.
A sensible law, hardly an abrogation of anyone's rights. Yet here was the NRA, pushing this bill to rescind it.
I didn't even stop to think. I picked up the phone and called the National Rifle Association's Washington headquarters. I have no idea who answered. At that time in the evening, it may well have been a cleaning person. I didn't care. I just said, "My name is Sarah Brady, and you've never heard of me, but I am going to make it my life's ambition to try to put you all out of business."
The next day, I went to work. Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on April 7, 2002.
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Medal History
