Shots heard 'round the world.

• Author: O'Sullivan, John
• Position: The World Yesterday - Assassination attempts on Pope John Paul II, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

IF LIFE WERE A supernatural thriller, the next plot twists would have been expected: 26 months separated the elections of John Patti II and Ronald Reagan, while Margaret Thatcher began her premiership roughly in between. Precisely 70 days separated Reagan's election and the attempt on his life by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981. John Paul II narrowly survived an attempted assassination a mere 43 days later, on May 13--and three years after that. Thatcher escaped unharmed when an Irish Republican Army bomb intended to assassinate her exploded in the Grand Hotel in Brighton on Oct. 12, 1984. killing five people and wounding many others, including her close friend and ally, Norman Tebbit.

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There is an almost cinematic neatness about this series of crimes. In The Omen or The Exorcist, they readily would be explained as the forces of Satan seeking to destroy the apostles of hope before they could do too much good (though a more formulaic film director than God would have insisted that Satan move his attempt on Thatcher's life up to 1981). This slightly eerie impression is reinforced by the extraordinary narrowness of the escape of all three intended victims--and at least two of them believed that God had intervened to preserve their lives, and guided their later actions by the light of that belief. Some assassinations have altered the course of history. For instance, World War I was triggered by such an act. In these three cases, however, it was the failure of assassination that indeed altered history.

John Paul II was struck by two bullets fired by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish terrorist, as the Pope passed by him on a circuit of St. Peter's Square at 5:13 p.m. Agca had been waiting in the second row of pilgrims behind wooden barriers. He was a mere 20 feet away from the Pope when he fired his Browning 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Two shots hit the Pontiff: one in the abdomen and the other on the elbow. John Paul II immediately fell backward into the arms of his secretary, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz. Agca promptly was seized by nearby pilgrims and handed over to the police.

The Pope, meanwhile, was in mortal peril. He was rushed by ambulance to the Gemelli hospital four miles away. By the time he arrived, his blood pressure was falling and his pulse was weak. His secretary administered last rites in the operating theater as the medical staff cut away the Pope's clothes to discover the nature of his wounds.

Francesco Crucitti, one of the Gemelli's chief surgeons, was at another hospital when he learned of the attack. He rushed to the Gemelli, which had been designated as the venue for any medical emergency involving the pope; a suite was kept in permanent readiness. Speeding over to the hospital (talking his way past traffic police), he discovered on arrival that the inside of the Pope's abdomen was awash in blood. Six pints of it had to be suctioned out so that the surgeon could find the source of the bleeding. When it had been stanched and blood transfusions given, the surgeon set about dealing with the patient's actual wounds. These were multiple: blasts from the bullet in his abdomen, a perforated colon, and five injuries in his small intestine. The surgery took five hours to repair the damage and remove parts of the Pontiff's intestines. Only after midnight, more than seven hours after Agca had struck, was the Pope's condition satisfactory enough for a hopeful bulletin to be issued.

John Paul II had been extraordinarily lucky. Agca's bullet missed his abdominal artery, his spinal column, and every major nerve cluster when it passed...