The satirically pious story tells how a soldier's breast-pocket Bible stopped the bullet en route to his heart. Ronald Reagan had no Bible in his jacket outside the Washington Hilton several weeks ago, but some of the world idly suspected that he may have been otherwise armored—that in some obscure way he may have been protected by his own remarkable luck.
Something in Reagan has always been lucky; it has been part of his attraction, his charm, the nimbus around him. Reagan's luck has a distinctly American shine; his grin proclaims it, the confident expectation of the happy ending. That may be why the nation was drawn to him. Reagan's vehicle on the journey from Dixon, Ill., to Hollywood to the White House ran on persistence and self-knowledge, all right, but it was also propelled by a breezy admixture of the luck that the country was born with.
So, when an assassin tried to terminate Reagan's progress, his luck seemed to hold again: if the gunman's arm had been jostled even a hair, if the angle of the slug's deflection off the President's seventh rib had been minutely sharper, if the Devastator bullet had not been a dud . . . Of course, one can argue it the other way: if the assassin's arm had been jostled, he might have missed Reagan entirely.
When one embarks on elaborate multiple fantasies of ifs, he enters abstract forests of luck and chance, of contingency and probability, where each speculative path opens onto a thousand new possibilities. Usually the mind penetrates only a few steps, looks nervously over its shoulder, then bolts back to the hard terrain of actuality. Luck is, by definition, mysterious, a force that may really be the clunkingly erratic, everyday version of the divine mind. Luck is God in a scatterbrained and even amoral mood, with his sense of justice out of commission. Or, agnostically, luck is the collision of the random with human biography; naturally, human intelligence resents and resists the inexplicable random, and so attributes it to imps, dybbuks, wood sprites, gods of the volcano—all the subdeities of jinx.