Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  Later, they would determine that the assassin’s shot had glanced off the rear panel of the limousine and passed through the door frame’s hinged narrow opening before hitting the president and ricocheting off his seventh rib. By the time it entered his body, it was more a razor-sharp disk than a projectile.

  “I’ve got it!” Aaron announced to a greatly relieved team.

  Even better, the bleeding from the wound had finally stopped. Aaron stitched closed an artery that had been nicked by the bullet. No other internal damage was evident in the process. The surgery was a success. The President of the United States was going to survive.

  * * *

  —

  But for Jim Brady, survival was anything but certain. He lay prostrate in critical condition on an operating table in OR 4, just one door from the president’s surgical theater, with several holes drilled into the side of his skull. Bullet fragments were strewn across the right side of his brain, where a massive clot had formed exerting dangerous pressure.

  “We are not going to let this fucking guy die,” Arthur Kobrine continued to declare repeatedly, as he and a team of surgeons explored the damage. But as they drained blood and tweezed out shrapnel from the patient’s ravaged skull, a radio broadcasting over the OR’s speakers reported that Brady was dead. “Those fuckers,” Kobrine said. “What do they think we’re operating on, a corpse?”

  Kobrine and his team did all they could to save Jim Brady. Friends and family affectionately called him Bear, an animal that was hard to bring down. But after a long, laborious surgical procedure, the best they could give him was a fifty-fifty chance.

  Later that night in the ICU, Dick Allen and his wife visited the comatose press secretary, whose bandaged head was so swollen it looked like a blood-encrusted basketball. Heartbroken, Allen picked up Brady’s lifeless right hand and cupped it gently in his own, perhaps as a way of saying goodbye. He was completely shocked when Brady squeezed back—squeezed long and hard.

  Dick Allen, a notoriously tough piece of work, started to weep.

  * * *

  —

  Allen and his wife also looked in on the president, who lay in a recovery room on a respirator, still under the effects of anesthesia. He began to regain consciousness around 7:30 p.m. The intertracheal tube and the ventilator frightened him, as did the pair of tubes draining fluid from his chest. He experienced extreme discomfort as a result of the surgery. Morphine helped. As a result of the drug, he grew groggy, slipped in and out of consciousness. When he came to again, after a short nap, he attempted to speak, but was unable to squeeze out a sound. A nurse handed him a clipboard and marker.

  “Am I alive?” he wrote.

  He followed with a sheaf of witty rejoinders. “All in all, I’d rather be in Philly.” “If I had this much attention in Hollywood, I would have stayed there.” “Send me to LA where I can see the air I’m breathing.” “I’d like to do this scene over again, starting at the hotel.” “I feel like I’ve done a remake of Lost Weekend.” To a nurse who assisted in monitoring his blood pressure, he wrote, “Does Nancy know about us?”

  At some point, he began to regain his sense of purpose.

  “Was anyone else hurt?” he wrote on the clipboard.

  Joanne Bell, the change nurse on duty in the recovery room, had been instructed by the Secret Service not to give him any information about the attack. She hedged, anguished, froze. How to respond? It became an ethical dilemma: nurses don’t lie to patients. “Mr. President,” she hemmed and hawed, “I’ve been so busy taking care of you I couldn’t say.” She draped a washcloth over his eyes. “Go to sleep. You need your rest.”

  He lifted the clipboard and scrawled another question.

  “Did they get the guy?”

  * * *

  —

  The D.C. police had a suspect in custody. A Texas Tech student ID card in the young man’s wallet identified him as John W. Hinckley Jr., a twenty-five-year-old “deranged loner,” as far as anyone could tell. His last known address was an apartment in Lubbock, but there was some kind of tie to Evergreen, Colorado. Hinckley had been tackled and disarmed at the scene of the shooting. There was little doubt that he’d been the gunman, although it was unknown to law enforcement at the time whether there were more individuals involved or some type of conspiracy. Hinckley wasn’t saying. The only thing he admitted to was his recent arrival on a Greyhound bus from California and the room he’d taken in the city at the Park Central Hotel. As far as other evidence went, there were several photos in his wallet of a young, attractive woman, photos torn from a magazine—“a friend of mine,” Hinckley explained. In a matter of hours, FBI agents conducting an interrogation of the suspect learned that the so-called friend was actress Jodie Foster, whom Hinckley had been stalking while she attended Yale University, and that the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan was intended to somehow impress her. “Jodie,” he had scrawled on hotel stationery an hour before leaving for the Hilton, “I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love.”

  The investigation turned up further evidence that Hinckley might have attempted to kill a president before. In October, he’d been arrested in Nashville on possession of handguns, just hours before Jimmy Carter was due in the city. Police surveillance had been on top of that event. In Washington, Hinckley managed to find his target.

  * * *

  —

  The president suffered through a restless night. Too many uninvited visitors and medical voyeurs marched through the recovery room, distracting him from precious sleep. His lungs were congested with mucus, prompting painful bouts of coughing, and he was agitated. On several occasions he lashed out at his oxygen supply from the ventilator in what nurses called “bucking against the tube.” His son Ron, who had visited earlier in the evening, encouraged him to think of the apparatus in terms of scuba gear. Understandably, the endotracheal tube was a more punishing experience. “Let the machine breathe for you,” he was instructed, but it was difficult to master.

  Around three in the morning, Ben Aaron came by on his rounds. He’d been pushed to the brink, seguing from the surgery on the president directly into another difficult operation that lasted well into the middle of the night, and his scrubs bore bloody evidence of the grind. Exhaustion showed on his face. While he reviewed Ronald Reagan’s chart with a colleague, the doctor at his side nodded gravely in response and said, “This is it . . . this is it.”

  Alarmed, the president grabbed the clipboard and scribbled, “What do they mean, ‘This is it’?”

  A nurse offered reassurance: relax, the news was good. They’d decided to remove the breathing tube that had caused him discomfort. He’d feel better now, more able to rest. Once the tube was out, however, Reagan began to talk incessantly. There were questions about his assailant—“What was that guy’s beef?” he wondered—about others who were wounded in the attack, about his condition, about Nancy’s state of mind. At 4:30 a.m., Joanne Bell placed a washcloth over his eyes. “Mr. President,” she said, “in the most polite way I can tell you, when I put this over your eyes it means I want you to shut up.”

  * * *

  —

  Small chance of that. The president slept intermittently. His blood pressure was taken every half hour; pain medication was administered at intervals; doctors streamed in and out probing, prodding, checking his vital signs. “There were times during sleep when he had trouble breathing,” recalls Bell, “and I would touch him on the shoulder and say, ‘Take a deep breath.’”

  With morning came welcome signs: color had returned to his face and his eyes were brighter, clearing the way for a move to the intensive care unit just after daybreak, on the floor above the recovery room. When the elevator doors opened and the president’s cart rolled out, more than twenty District of Columbia policemen in full dress lined either side
of the corridor, standing at attention and saluting.

  Later that morning, when Mike Deaver, Jim Baker, and Ed Meese laid eyes on him, Ronald Reagan was gingerly walking up and down the corridor in his bathrobe, clearly in a great deal of pain. “He looked pale and was grimacing,” Meese recalls, “so we helped him into bed before getting down to business.”

  Mike Deaver assured the president that he needn’t worry about the White House. It was functioning like a well-oiled machine. “What makes you think I’d be happy to hear that?” he responded.

  There was no day off for the President of the United States, not even after surviving an assassination attempt. The Troika brought legislation he needed to sign—a price-support bill that terminated $147 million in subsidies to the dairy industry—that couldn’t wait. If it wasn’t signed by midnight of March 31, the money flow would continue unabated. “It was the first—and key—component of our freeze on federal spending,” says Ken Duberstein, who helped steer the bill through the House committee. “We also knew that having Reagan sign it at the hospital sent a signal to the rest of the world that he was still in charge.” Wincing, the president took a pen and scrawled his name in shaky script across the last sheet of the document: Ronald W. Reagan—the only signature in his eight-year term that included the middle initial.

  That was the extent of presidential business. Reagan’s physical condition fluctuated for several days as he was beset by severe congestion and spikes of fever. Only immediate family members were permitted to visit. Somehow, Strom Thurmond managed to talk his way past Secret Service agents posted at the door to the president’s room, which outraged Nancy Reagan and spurred her to station Max Friedersdorf, the administration’s congressional-relations chief, at the hospital to identify and intercept trespassers.

  It wasn’t until April 6 that an outsider was granted access. Friedersdorf recognized the person right away as he barreled down the hall, “a great big burly bear of a man”: Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House, the president’s number-one political nemesis, and in Friedersdorf’s eyes, “a very fearsome person.” O’Neill strode into the hospital room, went straight to the bed, and planted a kiss on Ronald Reagan’s forehead. Then the Speaker dropped to his knees and recited the Twenty-third Psalm. It was a surreal display of affection from this hard-bitten politico. “The Speaker was crying,” Friedersdorf recalled. He sat by the bed and held the president’s hand for a long time until taking his leave.

  By all appearances, it would be some time before Ronald Reagan was able to leave as well. He appeared weak, disoriented as a result of sedatives, and hammered by his ordeal. And yet, only five days later, on April 11, 1981, the doctors cleared him for release. All things considered, it was an extraordinary recovery for a seventy-year-old man who had taken a bullet to the chest. He even circumvented hospital protocol, which required that all patients leave the facility by wheelchair to avoid a potential accident.

  “I walked in,” Ronald Reagan declared. “I’m walking out.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION

  “Popularity? It is glory’s small change.”

  —VICTOR HUGO

  A window opened.

  Following the assassination attempt, Ronald Reagan’s heroic return to the White House brought him a media honeymoon that sent his poll numbers soaring into the upper-70 percent range. Even reluctant Democrats began edging to his side. Making his first public appearance, on April 28, 1981, for a speech to a joint session of Congress, he was greeted by a standing ovation and an explosion of cheers and whistles that stretched on for three minutes. “That reception,” he joked afterward, “was almost worth getting shot for.” Seizing the opportunity, he launched into a pitch for a series of key issues that had, so far, thwarted his young administration, in particular tax reform and the sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia.

  Reagan’s aides milked it for all it was worth. They designed a strategy that merged the president’s ongoing recovery with the kind of workload that allowed him to make political strides to advance his pet policies. Instead of meetings and official functions, he spent his days lashed to the phone, running down call lists to legislators still balking at his proposals. He courted, cajoled, and sweet-talked the most malleable holdouts: moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats. These members of Congress found themselves unable to resist his personal appeals to support even bills that put them squarely in jeopardy with their constituents.

  At the outset, his Economic Recovery Program seemed dead on arrival. Skeptics had lined up to offer doomsday scenarios. But the president sent his emissaries on a goodwill rampage through congressional hallways and stepped up his calling campaign. “In order to win in the House, we needed twenty-seven Democratic votes,” says Ken Duberstein, the administration’s political lobbyist on the Hill. On May 7, sixty-three of them joined the Republican bloc to approve Gramm-Latta, a compromise bill that preserved the heart of the program. Five days later the Senate approved its own version by a sweeping majority, giving life to Reaganomics. Both houses needed to thrash out a bill to reconcile their differences, but the administration was optimistic.

  The AWACS presented a thornier issue. In the words of Dick Allen, whose job it was to sell them to the Saudis, “I’d been handed a steamin’ turd.” The Israelis were dead set against the sale, and the American Jewish community was up in arms. Their fearsome lobby, AIPAC, the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill, had the House completely wired, which meant the bill had to be won in the Senate, where fifty-eight of its one hundred members had already signed a pledge to vote against it. Complicating matters, Congress had placed a 120-day time limit on the sale, and the clock had started running under Jimmy Carter. It might have been politically prudent to simply let the clock run out, but the president was determined to see the deal through. Saudi Arabia was America’s best friend in the Arab world. Reagan had accepted the argument that Israel was in no danger from the AWACS; it was a defensive, not an offensive, system. What’s more, he was advised by Allen that “the Saudis, who were notoriously incompetent, were never going to be able to operate those bloody airplanes.”

  An early loose poll of senators revealed that the administration was down by a count of 92–3. “Totally hopeless” was how a Reagan official sized it up. “We pulled out all the stops,” Ed Meese recalls. Every lobbying tactic was dusted off and launched—inviting senators to the Oval Office for one-on-one conferences, doling out presidential cuff links and tie clips as perks, arranging weekend junkets to Camp David, and providing rides on Air Force One. The president hit the phones. “We went up real quick to thirty, forty votes,” recalled Max Friedersdorf, who oversaw the operation. From there, they developed a hit list, which Reagan worked with virtuoso skill. Every potential crossover got his arm gently twisted. The president leveraged his support with Democratic senators in states he’d won, promising them that, come midterm elections, he wouldn’t campaign against them. It was a veiled threat, but wildly effective. In one case, involving Howell Heflin, the Alabama Democrat, Reagan exploited the senator’s deep-seated religious beliefs, “reminding Heflin that the Bible said Armageddon would begin in the Middle East and that Russians would be involved.”

  Often, Reagan worked as part of a tag team with Nancy. Eavesdropping on calls he made from the residence, she would suggest something to use as ammunition to help change a senator’s vote. Before a call to Mark Andrews of North Dakota, she said, “Now, Ronnie, you remember, you went up to Bismarck and campaigned for him in a snowstorm. You remind him of that.”

  It was a challenging but productive process. Still, two days before the AWACS vote, the administration remained down by a dozen votes. And the negotiations turned bitter. AIPAC played the anti-Semitism card and threatened senators who were still on the fence that Jewish contributions to their campaigns would dry up. Its party line was: either you’re with Israel or against Israel. Four rabbis appeared in Warren Rudma
n’s office, warning him, a dutiful Jew, that if he voted in favor of the AWACS sale, he was abandoning his religion.

  Reagan was furious. He publicly castigated Israel, saying, “It is not the business of other nations to make United States foreign policy.” Then he went back on the phones, working them with a vengeance in a last-ditch effort to turn the tide. Every no vote or holdout got a call or two. Financial backers of the senators still opposed to the sale were recruited to exert their influence by withholding support. Dick Allen says, “It was my job to bring the hesitating [senators] up to the White House, one by one, to sit with the president so he could sway them.” It went down to the wire. “Within two to three hours before the vote, we switched three votes that won it,” Max Friedersdorf recalled. The final tally was 52–48. Reagan had risked valuable political capital in the name of regional stability for the Middle East and the strengthening of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The wager had paid off.