Rawhide Down

by Del Quentin Wilber

  The president’s limousine had just six blocks to go.

  * * *

  ONLY JERRY PARR knew why the motorcade was racing to the hospital. Mary Ann Gordon and Ray Shaddick had no idea what had happened; even Drew Unrue, who assumed Reagan had been injured while being pushed into the car, didn’t know how seriously the president had been hurt.

  Reagan’s top aides were also at sea. Two of them were already on their way to the hospital: Mike Deaver and David Fischer, along with the president’s military aide, were riding in the control car, just behind the makeshift motorcade. After the shooting, Deaver had scrambled for the door of the president’s limousine but couldn’t open it. Then he spotted Fischer, the president’s body man, huddled nearby and pointing at the control car. “We have to get to that car!” Fischer yelled at Deaver.

  A minute or two later, as they careened down Seventeenth Street, Fischer reached over and squeezed Deaver’s hand. “Everything is going to be okay, Mike.”

  Fischer saw the limousine turn in what seemed to be the wrong direction, down Pennsylvania Avenue and away from the White House. The control car made the same pivot, and soon Fischer realized that the president’s motorcade must be heading toward the hospital.

  Now Fischer was sure something terrible had happened. Holding back tears, he started to pray, for Reagan and for the men left behind at the Hilton. He couldn’t stop his hands from shaking.

  * * *

  A FEW BLOCKS away, in the Secret Service command post underneath the Oval Office, Agent Joe Trainor was monitoring traffic on police and Secret Service radios and a stack of scanners. Once Ray Shaddick reported the shooting, the radios went berserk, and he had called a supervisor into the room to help him. Trainor could barely make out what people were saying through the screeching of sirens. As soon as he learned that the president’s limousine was on its way back to the White House, he spoke by phone with the uniformed division of the Secret Service. He had to make sure the limousine could get inside the White House perimeter quickly. “Open all the gates,” he told an officer.

  A minute later, when Trainor heard that the motorcade was heading to George Washington University Hospital instead, he picked up the phone again and asked the White House signal operator to patch him through to a special telephone in GW’s emergency room.

  “Hold on for a second,” the operator said.

  While he waited, Trainor heard Shaddick’s voice speak from the radio in front of him asking if he had heard the transmissions about going to GW.

  Trainor replied that he had and that he was calling GW now.

  Just then a woman answered the phone Trainor was holding to his ear. He presumed it was a nurse in the emergency room.

  “This is Agent Trainor at the White House,” he said. “The president is en route to the emergency room.”

  “Has he been shot?”

  “I’m not sure,” Trainor said. “I don’t think so. Three other people may have been wounded and are also en route. Tell every doctor to get to the emergency room. And please make sure a stretcher is ready at the entrance.”

  * * *

  AS THE MOTORCADE neared GW, Drew Unrue asked Jerry Parr if they should head the wrong way around the traffic circle in front of the hospital to save time. “No, go around the circle,” Parr said. He didn’t want to risk crashing into oncoming traffic.

  Tires squealing, the Lincoln sped around the circle and jerked to a stop in front of the emergency room doors, its right side facing the hospital entrance.

  Parr looked out the window. No one was waiting for them.

  The two agents with Uzis jumped from the running boards of the follow-up car, and Ray Shaddick leaped from its passenger seat. Shaddick opened the back right door of the presidential limousine; Parr slipped past the president and got out first, then put his hand out for the president. Reagan shook his head, as if to say “I can do it myself.”

  I guess he wants to be a cowboy, Parr thought, momentarily reassured that the president seemed to be strong enough to get out of the limousine under his own power.

  Mary Ann Gordon and Dan Ruge emerged from the spare limousine, and a moment later Mike Deaver, David Fischer, and the military aide got out of the control car. They all moved quickly toward the president’s limousine.

  Reagan climbed out of the Lincoln and stood up. He steadied himself and hitched up his pants, a reflex that Deaver and Fischer had seen hundreds of times.

  So far, so good, thought Deaver.

  Fischer felt less sanguine: he thought Reagan looked sick and gray. But Fischer could see that his boss was determined to walk unaided through the ER doors.

  Parr took a position to the president’s left, Shaddick to his right. Others stood nearby while an agent went ahead to run interference and scout for trouble in the hospital’s hallway.

  Surrounded by his guards, the president shuffled uneasily through the hospital’s sliding glass doors. It was 2:30 p.m.

  * * *

  BEFORE THE PRESIDENT’S arrival, it had been a typical afternoon in the busy emergency room of George Washington University Hospital, a 512-bed medical center near downtown Washington. Nurses in green scrubs and doctors in white lab coats worked under the yellowish haze of fluorescent lights, checking on a dozen or so patients suffering from colds, broken bones, and more serious maladies. They treated at least one person who had overdosed on drugs and another who’d experienced a stroke. In a secure room, they evaluated a psychiatric patient who seemed deeply troubled. The tiled floors and walls, which gave off a faint odor of disinfectant, echoed with the din of hospital chatter—nurses questioning patients about their pains and headaches and fevers, doctors providing diagnoses of illnesses and injuries.

  In Trauma Bay 5, a curtained-off area on the northeast side of the ER crammed with equipment and supplies, Dr. Joyce Mitchell, an attending emergency-room physician, was examining an elderly woman who had suffered a heart attack. The woman had arrived in the ER that afternoon and been stabilized; she was now resting on a gurney near a wall of shelves stacked with medical equipment, gauze pads, medication, monitors, tubes, instruments, and clean sheets. As Mitchell prepared to transfer the woman to intensive care, a police radio crackled in the hands of a nearby officer who was taking a report.

  The policeman pressed the radio to his ear and listened for a few seconds. Then he spoke in a loud, angry voice. “I’m tired of my buddies getting shot down!”

  “Please,” an ER nurse said. “Keep your voice down.”

  The officer became more upset. “There’s a cop down, there is a cop down at the Hilton!” he shouted. “The president was there.”

  Mitchell knew that anyone shot at the Hilton could be coming their way. She immediately turned to Kathy Paul, an experienced emergency room nurse, and said, “Maybe you should set up the other room for a trauma patient. It sounds like somebody has been shot at the Hilton.”

  The elderly woman on the gurney was wheeled to a nearby room, and a nurse drew a curtain that divided the trauma bay into two units, 5A and 5B.

  A moment later, a small white telephone began to ring at the ER nurses’ station. Tucked away in the corner of the desk, it was the special White House telephone, which was never to be touched unless it rang. It was a direct line to the White House signal operator, installed sometime in the 1970s to speed communication between the White House and its closest emergency room.

  A busy clerk at the nurses’ station ignored the ringing. Wendy Koenig, a nurse doing paperwork within reach of the phone, watched and listened as it rang once, then twice. On the rare occasions when the white telephone rang, it usually stopped after a couple of rings—perhaps someone at the White House had dialed the wrong number. But this time the phone rang a third time. Koenig answered.

  Before she could say a word, a gruff male voice told her that the presidential motorcade was on its way to the hospital. Then the line went silent.

  Koenig’s face turned white. “The presidential motorcade is on its way,”
she told the assistant nurse in charge of the unit, Judith Whinerey.

  “That means the president is coming here,” Whinerey said. “Let’s assume it’s the president.”

  Whinerey, who had been gathering her things to leave for a doctor’s appointment, picked up the phone and got her doctor on the line. “I have to cancel,” she told her. “The president is coming here. Turn on your television.”

  Whinerey hung up and began calling the heads of every department and specialty in the hospital. If the president really was coming to GW, she wanted the hospital’s most experienced doctors on hand in the ER. Her hands trembled as she flipped through the hospital’s phone book. “I’m so nervous that my hands, they won’t stop shaking,” Whinerey told a clerk as she cradled two telephones to her ears. “You have to help me.”

  “You’ll be fine,” the clerk replied. “I can’t help you. My hands are shaking, too.”

  A minute later, the White House telephone rang again. This time, the clerk at the nurse’s station picked it up.

  “We have three gunshot wounds coming in,” a voice said. Again the line went dead. Wendy Koenig hurried to the trauma bay to get intravenous lines and equipment ready for arrivals. Joyce Mitchell and Kathy Paul headed toward the emergency room’s entrance. All over the hospital, pagers chirped and loudspeakers barked the names of doctors who were needed immediately in the ER.

  Near the nurses’ station, Frederick White, a Secret Service administrator who happened to be in the ER on personal business, watched the commotion and stood up after he heard a nurse announce, “Attention everyone, the president’s motorcade is on its way here!” White approached the nurse, identified himself, and suggested they clear the emergency room. She agreed, and White helped usher about a dozen patients from the ER into a hallway. He then walked to the emergency room’s entrance and told a security guard to hold open the sliding glass doors in case the president had to be rushed inside. As White stood just outside the open doors, he heard the sound of sirens approaching from Pennsylvania Avenue; a moment later, he saw the president’s limousine race around the traffic circle. Right behind it was the follow-up car—and when he saw the two men clinging to the running boards and holding Uzis, he knew something awful had happened.

  * * *

  KATHY PAUL WATCHED as President Reagan hobbled through the open glass doors. He and his entourage walked over a rubber mat with arrows pointing to the emergency room, then passed an admissions area and approached another set of glass doors.

  Paul stepped to the president’s side and braced her right hand under his left arm. She thought he looked terrible—ashen and very sick. She noticed a spot of blood on his lips.

  “This is the president, let’s get to the emergency room,” a Secret Service agent yelled.

  “I feel like I can’t breathe,” Reagan told Paul. “I can’t breathe.”

  “Come this way,” she answered, gently coaxing the president toward the trauma bay.

  Joyce Mitchell, the ER doctor, felt suddenly overwhelmed by the knowledge that she was in charge. Collecting herself, she addressed the Secret Service agents accompanying Reagan. “Was he shot?” she asked.

  “No, we think he got an elbow in the ribs,” one agent said.

  “Maybe broke a rib when we pushed him into the limousine,” said another.

  Mitchell wasn’t convinced; the president looked so bad that she thought he might be having a heart attack.

  Bob Hernandez, a paramedic who had earlier brought in the cardiac patient and had just finished writing up a report, stepped out of a small office and into the hallway. His partner followed him. Seeing the president and several Secret Service agents walking toward him, Hernandez froze. As it happened, the two men had trailed Reagan in their ambulance during the inaugural parade, and they had been told that a sudden move near the president might cause the Secret Service to pounce. Now, they both stood like statues until Reagan was within arm’s reach.

  Studying the president as he shuffled forward, Hernandez immediately noticed several things: Reagan’s legs wobbled and his steps seemed uncertain; his eyes were glazed and he seemed to be staring off into the distance; his arms were locked at his sides. Hernandez thought the president was on the verge of collapse.

  An agent yelled for a wheelchair, but he was too late. Just as they passed through the second set of glass doors, Reagan’s eyes rolled to the back of his head, his legs buckled, and he toppled toward the floor. Jerry Parr and Ray Shaddick caught him before he hit the ground.

  “Don’t make him walk!” one of the paramedics shouted.

  Parr and Shaddick grasped the president’s arms. The two paramedics held his legs, as did Kathy Paul. With Joyce Mitchell hovering alongside, the clutch of medical personnel and agents lifted 196 pounds of dead weight and rushed the president into the ER. Turning left, they surged past the nurses’ station and several examination rooms. Once they reached the trauma bay, they gently placed Reagan on a gurney.

  Paul was dizzy. Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t believe her own eyes: the president of the United States was having a heart attack right here in the ER! She realized that she was pleading silently, repeating the same thought over and over. Please don’t die, please don’t die, please don’t die. Not here. Not today. Please don’t die.

  Hernandez, the paramedic, was convinced the president wasn’t going to make it. He looked like a heart attack victim in the final moments of life. My God, he’s Code City, Hernandez thought—paramedic jargon for someone about to die.

  Paul, still struggling to keep calm, leaned over and spoke into Reagan’s ear. “We’re going to cut your clothes off and stick some needles into your arms to pump in fluid and draw blood.”

  “I feel so bad,” Reagan said. “I really feel awful. I can’t breathe.”

  Paul loosened the president’s tie, ripped apart his white shirt, and began slicing at his suit with scissors so nurses and technicians could insert intravenous lines and take Reagan’s blood pressure. Paul noticed blood on the president’s left hand. She still couldn’t stop her own hands from trembling, and she felt her skin getting hot and splotchy.

  Another ER nurse elevated the foot of the bed to force more blood toward the president’s heart and head. A technician who had just arrived in the trauma bay helped Kathy Paul cut off his suit jacket. The technician then jabbed a three-foot-long IV line into a vein in Reagan’s right arm and snaked it to his heart so that it could supply fluids and measure how the heart was functioning. A smaller line was inserted into a vein in his left arm. The nurses and the technician were following standard ER procedures: strip, insert IVs, start fluids.

  “I’ve got a line!” the technician shouted.

  At first the technician was so busy that she didn’t look at her patient’s face. As usual, she had responded to the emergency call by getting to the trauma bay as fast as she could and then going right to work. But now she noticed that several men in suits surrounded the patient, and that some of them had radio plugs jammed in their ears. She also thought one or two of them were holding guns. Finally she looked closely at the patient’s face and realized that it was President Reagan. Dizzy and disoriented, she swiveled, grabbed a pack of smelling salts from a box on a shelf, and inhaled. A moment later, she returned to the president’s side.

  Herndanez pulled off Reagan’s shoes and socks and began yanking at his pants, hoping to pop the button. But his trousers wouldn’t budge. What are these, made of steel? he wondered as he kept tugging. When they finally came off, Hernandez’s partner cut away the president’s boxer shorts with a pair of bandage scissors. He left the shredded undershorts on the table; the rest of the president’s clothes had already fallen into a pile on the floor.

  Wendy Koenig had helped cut away the president’s shirt, and while doing so she noticed that it was stitched with the monogram “RR.” When she looked into Reagan’s ashen face, she saw that he was laboring to breathe and seemed about to go into shock. He’s barely hanging on, she t
hought. He’s going to die. Her hands started shaking. She fought back tears. Suddenly her mind flashed on two images. In the first, it was 1963 and she had just come home to find her dad sobbing in front of the television. The second was a vivid and recent nightmare in which Reagan had been wheeled into the ER and then died from a heart attack.

  Now, trying to refocus, Koenig wrapped a blood pressure cuff around the president’s left arm, put her stethoscope under the device, and began to inflate the sleeve to constrict blood flow. She released the pressure and listened for the telltale thump of Reagan’s systolic blood pressure. But she couldn’t hear anything above the din in the trauma bay.

  “I can’t get a systolic pressure,” Koenig told the nurses and doctors around the gurney.

  Koenig repeated the procedure. Again, she heard nothing.

  “Oh, shit, try it again!” Mitchell shouted. “Try again!”

  * * *

  SINCE ENTERING THE ER, Jerry Parr had stayed as close as possible to the president. As the nurses and technicians cut away Reagan’s clothes, he’d turned to Ray Shaddick and said, “Set up a perimeter.” He also told a nurse to prevent any unnecessary hospital personnel from coming into the ER.

  But now there was nothing left for Parr to do. He watched the flurry of activity around the president; he heard a nurse trying to take Reagan’s blood pressure yell, “I can’t hear anything!”

  He felt sick, helpless. What had happened? What had gone wrong? When he pushed the president into the limousine, had he caused one of Reagan’s ribs to puncture a lung or some other organ? Had he caused a heart attack? He felt nauseous and terrified. If the president died, it would be his fault. He shouldn’t have pushed him so hard.

  Watching the nurses struggle to take the president’s blood pressure, Parr felt overwhelmed by an awful thought: Oh, my God, we have lost him. We’ve lost another one. Parr had never been a religious man, but he felt something surging within him. Lord be with him, he prayed.