by Bob Spitz
“Can anybody tell me what happened?” Price requested of the room at large.
The question drew nothing but blank stares.
The president reiterated that he was having trouble breathing. Aside from that, there were no other symptoms that gave Dr. Price anything to go on. Price knew from Jerry Parr that Reagan suspected he’d punctured a lung in the limo, and in the course of examining the chest area and abdomen, the doctor noticed a paper-thin, jagged slit, like a buttonhole, over the left axilla, a few inches below the president’s armpit and on a plane even with the nipple area.
“Look, Bill,” Price said to his colleague, “there is a hole.”
He was careful not to say “wound” or “gunshot” in front of the scrum of people in the trauma bay—people in green scrubs, white lab coats, blue coats that had “Hospital Security” stitched across the chest, Secret Service agents in black Hart Schaffner Marx suits, and well-tailored physicians from other parts of the hospital who’d turned up to take in the spectacle—maybe thirty-five or forty people in a space not much larger than a galley kitchen. “The amount of noise was unbelievable,” says a nurse on duty. “It was absolutely nuts.”
“Am I dying?” the president asked through his mask.
An attending intern answered, “No, you’re going to be fine.” But it was a dodge; the patient’s condition looked serious.
“We’re going to do some films,” Wesley Price announced, as technicians rolled in a portable X-ray machine. “Everybody needs to leave.”
As the audience filed out through the doors, Dr. Price pulled Jerry Parr aside and quietly said, “It looks like he’s been shot.”
* * *
—
Dick Allen, the national security adviser, had taken a rare twenty-minute break from anguishing over a pair of Soviet subs lurking closer than usual to the East Coast, and had gone swimming at the University Club, two blocks from the White House. As he prepared to do a flip-turn in one of the pool’s lanes, a hand reached down and pulled him up by the hair. His driver, Joe Bullock, knelt by the gutter and softly told him, “Something terrible has happened. The President’s been shot.”
Allen dressed in the backseat of the car as it roared down East Executive Avenue and around the Ellipse. The driver had radioed ahead so the gate would be open, and as they entered the driveway it became necessary to jam on the brakes to avoid broadsiding a car belonging to Don Regan. Allen looked at its passengers and saw Ed Meese and Jim Baker staring back at him. He knew they were probably headed to a hospital and figured he’d have to help hold down the fort. The White House would no doubt be in an uproar. There were precautions—a crisis management plan—that needed to be activated. As national security adviser, he was in charge of its implementation.
After clearing the corridors of an overwrought young staff, Allen and Al Haig huddled in Jim Baker’s office and decided it was time to contact the vice president. George Bush was en route to a political fund-raiser in Texas, aboard a DC-9 that lacked secure voice communications. All that Haig could say to Bush on an open line was, “George, it’s Al—turn around, turn around!” The ground-to-air reception was awful. Haig, dressed in an open trenchcoat with the belts flapping loosely, strode back and forth in front of a desk, growing increasingly frustrated that he couldn’t be heard. “George . . . turn . . . around!”
In the interests of national security and to prevent leaks to the media, Allen and Haig herded key administration personnel into the Situation Room, a windowless hi-tech conference room secured by a guard and cipher lock in the basement of the West Wing, where Security Council planning sessions were held. It was an exclusive group: Allen and Haig, along with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis, White House counsel Fred Fielding, domestic adviser Martin Anderson, CIA director Bill Casey, White House Director of Communications David Gergen, Attorney General William French Smith, Bush’s chief of staff Admiral Daniel Murphy, and, for some unknown reason, John Brock, the secretary of agriculture, who, according to Dick Allen, “sat against the wall and didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
“Nobody in the Sit Room knew what was happening,” Fielding says. “It was March thirtieth, just two months after the inauguration, most of which were spent getting our staffs together. So we were basically a bunch of strangers.”
Even so, Fielding notes, “it was pretty civilized.” The first order of business was securing the “football,” the briefcase that never left the president’s side, containing the nuclear code sequences in case of a belligerent attack. There was a duplicate in the military aide’s office, and Haig ordered it delivered to the Sit Room at once. No one knew if the shooting was part of a greater conspiracy or whether the Soviets might take advantage of the situation to launch an attack. Those Russian nuclear subs off the East Coast created a few unnecessary jitters—“two minutes closer than normal,” Cap Weinberger pointed out, meaning the time it would take for a Soviet missile to reach Washington. According to Dick Allen, “We determined it was eight minutes’ flying time from a submerged ballistic missile launch to the White House.” As a result, Weinberger increased the alert for the Strategic Air Command, which would save precious minutes should the Air Force need to get bombers aloft.
There was also the question of succession. “At that point, we didn’t know how bad the president was,” Fred Fielding recalls. “Baker and Meese were at the hospital, but they didn’t know much, either. So the attorney general and I were there to deal with the Twenty-fifth Amendment.” The proviso was relatively new, ratified in 1967 to establish a procedure should the president die, resign, or be removed from office. It stated clearly that the vice president automatically inherited the presidency, as enacted when Nixon resigned and Ford succeeded him. The president, if he felt compelled to do so, could, on a temporary basis, transfer his authority to the vice president. A document was prepared so Reagan could do exactly that.
But the president was currently on an operating table. And at 3:25 p.m., George Bush’s plane had landed in Austin to refuel for the trip back, making him due for arrival at Andrews Air Force Base at approximately 6:30. That left succession pretty much up in the air. But not to Al Haig. “The helm is right here,” he announced, jabbing a finger at his own chest, “and that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, till the Vice President gets here.” Others in the Sit Room rolled their eyes and several responded accordingly: “Fuck you!”
* * *
—
It hadn’t taken long for Dr. Wesley Price to determine that a bullet had lodged somewhere in the president’s chest or abdomen. There was no evidence of an exit wound. Eventually, the chest X-rays revealed “blood in the pleural cavity and the bullet behind the heart.” Dr. Joseph Giordano, who headed the trauma unit, wasn’t encouraged by Reagan’s symptoms. “The President’s blood pressure was very low, and his pulse was barely detectable,” he recalled. “He was seriously injured. I think he was close to dying.” A decision was made to call in Ben Aaron, a seasoned cardiovascular surgeon. Doctors Aaron and Price, and David Gens, a surgical resident, sat for a while and discussed their options—“Where do we go from here? What’s our next move?”—while an operating room they ordered was being prepared. In any case, they felt the president was stable enough to receive a visitor and asked that Nancy Reagan be brought into the trauma bay.
The extent of her anxiety was written on her face. She had been prepped in advance for what to expect—that her husband had a tube in his chest and was breathing through an oxygen mask—but the reality was markedly worse. “Ronnie looked pale and gray,” she recalled. “Underneath the oxygen mask, his lips were caked with dried blood.” She recoiled when she saw him, but if there had been any questions that his faculties were impaired, he dispelled them with typical élan. With an unsteady finger, he pushed up the oxygen mask as Nancy bent close and kissed his forehead.<
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“Honey,” he whispered, “I forgot to duck.”
Both the president and the First Lady inquired about the condition of others who had been hurt in the shooting. No one responded. “We either pretended we hadn’t heard or didn’t know,” said an attending medic. But not more than ten feet away and separated only by a curtain, Jim Brady lay on a gurney, critically wounded.
CT scans of Brady’s brain showed an ugly, large clot developing in the right frontal region, exacerbated by swelling, not good signs. To make matters worse, he appeared to have been shot by a bullet known as a Devastator, which contains a charge of toxic lead azide meant to explode on impact. There were chances that fragments lay elsewhere unobserved. The bullet had traveled through Brady’s sinuses, an air passage that often led to infections, complicating his recovery should he survive. There was some talk of not operating at all—that Brady’s chances were one in ten—but Arthur Kobrine, the surgeon assigned to the case, insisted, “We are not going to fucking let this man die.” One medic on the team who glanced at Brady’s monstrous wound recalls, “I went straight down to the doctor’s urinal and stood there for five minutes, so uptight I was unable to pee.”
As nurses rolled the president out of the trauma bay toward the OR, one of them confided to Nancy Reagan, “We don’t think Mr. Brady’s going to make it.”
Fortunately, the president didn’t hear. He was distracted by the sight of three familiar figures hovering tentatively in the hallway—the Troika: Baker, Meese, and Deaver. Reagan’s face lit up as they stepped gingerly toward his cart. “Who’s minding the store?” he asked and winked. They were relieved that he had his sense of humor. A good sign, considering the circumstances. But Ed Meese recalls, “He looked terrible, pale—white.” The fact that Reagan was a seventy-year-old man wasn’t far from anyone’s mind. Certainly the surgeon, Ben Aaron, worried about the president’s ability to withstand major chest surgery. The patient was in shock and bleeding internally, which compounded the doctor’s concern. He wanted to operate and stop the bleeding. Reagan gave his immediate approval, as did Nancy. A battalion of doctors escorted the procession, led by “extremely aggressive” Secret Service agents, who screamed “Move out of the way!” at staff and patients on stretchers. “Get out of the way! Move! Now!” The route to the OR was nearly a city block away, obstacle-laden and circuitous, necessitating a detour down narrow hallways past the urology suites and through the recovery room, where open-mouthed patients gaped in astonishment as the president was wheeled by.
Meanwhile, the Troika took Nancy Reagan into a meditation room inside the chapel. “She was very much agitated,” says Ed Meese “We all were. We needed to pray.”
* * *
—
Right now, their heavenly entreaties for Jim Brady were more urgently needed. “Reports kept coming out that he was dead,” Meese says, “and we knew that it wasn’t true. But he was so close to death that we didn’t want to say anything. By the time we said it, Jim might in fact have expired.”
The media had botched its coverage of Brady. CBS was the first to report that he had died at the hospital. A scene in the White House press room compounded the error. Bill Plante, the ABC News correspondent, had observed Dave Prosperi nodding affirmatively while on a phone call nearby and misinterpreted it as corroboration that Brady was dead. The correspondent commandeered a cameraman and, moments later, announced it on the air. In the Sit Room, where officials were monitoring TV screens, Dick Allen asked for a moment of silent prayer. Meanwhile, someone else at ABC was on a phone line to the hospital, forcing an awkward retraction from its anchor, Frank Reynolds. “Let’s get it nailed down, somebody!” Reynolds huffed, disgusted by the clumsy reporting.
But it wasn’t just the fault of his crew. Howard Baker, the Senate Republican leader, corroborated Brady’s death. And Dick Allen was infuriated by David Gergen’s repeated exits from the Sit Room, certain that the communications director, whom he called Professor Leaky, was disclosing privileged information to the press. Haig suspected the same thing. He touched Allen discreetly on the shoulder and said, “He’s making a mess of this upstairs.” Haig’s comment served to describe two culprits—Gergen, but also Larry Speakes, the assistant press secretary, who was manning the Communications Center in Jim Brady’s absence.
During a hastily called press conference updating the unfolding action, a reporter had asked Speakes, “Who’s running the government right now?”
“I cannot answer that question at this time,” Speakes responded.
“This is very bad,” said Dick Allen, who was watching the proceedings on a separate monitor. “We have to do something.”
Haig agreed. “We’ve got to get him off. He’s turning this into a goddamn disaster.”
Allen and Haig pounded up the stairs from the basement and raced across the hall into the Press Room. It was a full house; every major outlet was represented. Speakes was already finished talking, but Haig bulled his way to the lectern. “I just want to touch on a few matters associated with today’s tragedy,” he began. Allen jumped on the dais next to Haig, concerned about the secretary of state’s visible agitation. “He started to quiver,” Allen recalls. “His elbows were shaking, his voice was cracking, and his face was flushed and perspiring. I literally thought he was going to collapse.”
Once again, someone in the audience asked the key question: “Who is making the decisions for the government right now?”
Haig didn’t miss a beat. “Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State, in that order. . . . As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the Vice President and in close touch with him.”
I am in control here . . .
“What’s this all about?” said Don Regan, watching on a monitor in the Sit Room. “Is he mad?” Regan, like most government officials, knew that the secretary of state wasn’t in the line of succession.
“He’s wrong,” Weinberger said. “He doesn’t have such authority.”
I am in control here . . .
Dick Allen’s eyes bugged out of his head. “I thought, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!’” he recalls. “Should I tell him, ‘That’s not quite right,’ and we get into a tussle on the facts in front of the press?” He glanced down at the first row of the press corps seated in front of him, where Bill Plante and Sam Donaldson were furiously scribbling notes. Better not, Allen decided. Instead, they went back downstairs to the Sit Room. “And that’s where the real fireworks started,” Allen says.
Cap Weinberger very calmly announced that he had moved two hundred bomb crews at the Strategic Air Command from the shacks to the cockpits of the B-52s as a precaution.
“You’ve done—what?” Haig fumed. “I think we could have discussed it [first].”
“Until the Vice President actually arrives here,” Weinberger said, “the command authority is what I have . . . and I have to make sure that it is essential that we do everything that seems proper.”
Haig nearly lunged across the table at the secretary of defense. “You’d better read the Constitution, buddy,” he shouted.
Weinberger was incredulous. “What?”
“You’d better read the Constitution,” Haig repeated, this time chasing it with a sarcastic laugh.
There was no love lost between Haig and Weinberger. “They were not getting along well, almost from September of 1980,” says Ed Meese. “Al was used to the highly charged turf battles from the Nixon days, and he resented anyone who had the president’s ear.” Meese and Weinberger grew tired of hearing Haig, time and again, refer to himself as the Vicar of Foreign Policy. “It was Al’s personality—he just couldn’t get into the spirit of cooperation, especially when it came to Cap.”
Haig was wrong about who was in charge at the White House and wrong about the chain of control pertaining to the National Command Authority, which wen
t from the president to the vice president to the secretary of defense. But Weinberger didn’t bother giving Haig a brush-up lesson in constitutional law. Word had arrived that George Bush’s plane was on its descent to Andrews Air Force Base, abrogating any talk about succession. The vice president’s impending presence preempted any conversation about who was in control until Ronald Reagan was out of surgery.
* * *
—
The operating suite—OR 2—at George Washington University Hospital was a chilly, old-fashioned medical facility, outfitted in jade-green ceramic tile and lit by blinding overhead lamps. It was built as an amphitheater with Hollywood-style windows around the ceiling so that medical students could observe surgeries, and every seat was occupied by hospital personnel, Secret Service agents in green scrubs with guns, and the simply curious, a gaggle of hospital personnel rubbernecking for a good view of the star patient. As the president was transferred from the gurney onto the operating table, his eyes swept across the crowded room.
“Please tell me you’re all Republicans,” he said.
Dr. Giordano, a lifelong Democrat, responded, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.”
It didn’t take much sodium pentothal to put Ronald Reagan to sleep. He was under in seconds as doctors, led by Ben Aaron, began making incisions to perform an abdominal tap. Afterward, they opened the president’s chest to examine the heart cavity and search for a bullet. Thankfully, the aorta was unharmed. While two doctors gently nudged the heart from side to side, Aaron probed the lung with his fingertips, feeling for metal fragments. After ten futile minutes, he considered abandoning the search, leaving the bullet inside rather than risking harm. A determining factor for continuing was the president’s physical shape. “He didn’t look much different from the days when he was a lifeguard,” says a nurse stationed at the operating table. He was trim with “a physique like a thirty-year-old muscle builder.” And his heart was strong. Aaron figured he could withstand the stressful procedure. It took another X-ray before the surgeon spotted the bullet in spongy lung tissue, lower than where his fingers had probed. Making a slight incision and squeezing carefully, he guided the bullet with a finger through the tissue until it dropped into his hand. No wonder it had eluded him: the .22-caliber bullet was flattened to the size of a dime.
