Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  One bullet hit James Brady, Reagan’s press secretary, in the head. He fell to the ground, grievously wounded. A second bullet struck police officer Thomas Delahanty in the back. A third hit Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy in the chest. Three other bullets seemingly did no damage other than to the president’s limousine and the pavement.

  Immediately on hearing the first shot, Secret Service agent Jerry Parr pushed Reagan unceremoniously into the limousine, shoving him onto the floor of the back part of the car. Another agent shoved Parr in on top of the president and slammed the door behind them. Parr ordered the driver to get out of the area as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, he reported that the president had not been hit. “Rawhide is okay,” he radioed to the Secret Service command post, using Reagan’s code name. He repeated: “Rawhide is okay.”

  Reagan did not feel okay. “I felt a blow in my upper back that was unbelievably painful,” he wrote several days later. “I was sure he’d broken my rib.” As the car sped away from the hotel toward the White House, Reagan tried to find a more comfortable position, to no avail. “I sat up on the edge of the seat almost paralyzed by pain,” he recalled. “Then I began coughing up blood which made both of us think, yes, I had a broken rib and it had punctured a lung.”

  Parr ordered the driver to change course, to the hospital at George Washington University, several blocks northwest of the White House. The drive took just a few minutes, but during that time Reagan’s condition worsened. “I was having great trouble getting enough air,” he recalled. Even so, he insisted on walking from the car to the emergency room. But just inside the double doors he passed out and collapsed. He might have hit his head on the floor, but Parr and another Secret Service agent caught him. They and some hospital attendants carried him the rest of the way to the emergency room and laid him on a gurney.

  The hospital staff initially thought Reagan was having a heart attack. They cut off his clothes and prepared to insert intravenous lines.

  Reagan regained consciousness. “I’m having a hard time breathing,” he said haltingly.

  An intern placed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

  “Am I dying?” Reagan asked.

  “No, you’re going to be fine,” the intern said.

  The oxygen did little good. “I can’t breathe,” Reagan repeated. “My chest hurts.”

  The senior surgeon present listened to Reagan’s lungs with a stethoscope. The right lung sounded normal but the left wasn’t inflating. The surgeon instructed the attendants to roll Reagan onto his right side.

  When they did, the surgeon noticed a small, bloody slit in the skin beneath Reagan’s left armpit. Emergency rooms in Washington received their share of gunshot victims, and the surgeon recognized this as a bullet wound, despite the odd shape. He didn’t take time to consider how the bullet had hit Reagan there, but what apparently happened was that one of the bullets had ricocheted off the bulletproof glass or armor of the limousine, flattening in the impact, and then sliced into Reagan. The wicked disk evidently remained within the president’s body, for there was no exit wound.

  Discovering the cause of Reagan’s distress cued the trauma team as to how to alleviate it. A chest tube began draining the blood that had filled the chest cavity and was hampering Reagan’s breathing. Intravenous fluids helped restore his blood pressure.

  As the blood drained from around his lung, Reagan breathed more easily. The trouper’s spirit in him revived. Noting the people hovering around him, he quipped to Jerry Parr, “I hope they are all Republicans.”

  An X-ray was taken to find the bullet. The image was imprecise, but the bullet appeared close to the heart. Conceivably, it had grazed the aorta, which might be near rupture.

  Sometimes bullets are left inside shooting victims. Surgery is always risky, and a bullet can remain inside a person’s body for years without incident. One of Reagan’s predecessors, Andrew Jackson, carried souvenirs from a duel and a separate gunfight encysted within his body. But surgery’s survival rate had improved since the nineteenth century, and the chief surgeon, on reflection, decided not to leave a bullet lying next to the heart of the leader of the Free World.

  NANCY REAGAN PACED and worried in the waiting room while the trauma team was stabilizing her husband. At length they let her see him. “I walked in on a horrible scene—discarded bandages, tubes, blood,” she recalled. “In the corner were the remains of Ronnie’s new blue pin-stripe suit, which he had worn that day for the first time. I had seen emergency rooms before, but I had never seen one like this—with my husband in it.”

  Reagan, ashen and weary, brightened on seeing her. He pulled his oxygen mask to the side and said, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” She fought back the tears and tried to smile. She kissed him and said, “Please don’t try to talk.”

  She walked beside the cart as they wheeled him to the operating room. The crowd in the hallway included Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver. Reagan, recognizing his troika, asked Baker, with what passed for a smile beneath the oxygen mask, “Who’s minding the store?” At the entrance to the operating room, Nancy and the others had to stay behind. She kissed him and said, “I love you.”

  Inside the room Reagan was transferred from the cart to the operating table. The operating team gathered around him, and the anesthesiologist prepared to put him under. Realizing he had a fresh audience, Reagan recycled his earlier line. “I hope you are all Republicans,” he said.

  The head of the team responded, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.”

  42

  THE FIRST NEWS of the shooting had thrown the White House into confusion as Jim Baker and the others there attempted to learn what was happening. Baker had declined to join Reagan at the Washington Hilton, pleading the press of work. He was in his office when he heard of the shooting; Ed Meese soon joined him there. For several minutes they couldn’t tell who had been shot or how badly. Mike Deaver called from the hospital, saying that Jim Brady had been badly wounded and Reagan had taken a bullet in the side. One of the doctors joined Deaver’s call and said the president had lost a great deal of blood. His condition was very serious.

  Baker and Meese decided to join Deaver at the hospital. Just before Baker left his office, he got a call from Al Haig. The secretary of state was alarmed that the president was incapacitated, if perhaps only temporarily, while the vice president was out of the city, in Texas. Haig’s military training kicked in, and he stressed the need to ensure the chain of command. He told Baker he would gather the cabinet members most crucial to national security: Weinberger from Defense, Regan from Treasury, Casey from the CIA, William French Smith from Justice, Dick Allen from the NSC. Haig said he would get in touch with George Bush.

  To Baker as chief of staff fell the initiative in determining whether to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which provides for a transfer of authority to the vice president in case of presidential incapacity. By the time he had sufficient facts to make a reasoned decision, the doctors had stabilized Reagan. The only question was whether his sedation during surgery would constitute sufficient incapacity to warrant invoking the amendment.

  He decided it did not. It would be temporary, for one thing. For another, it would make Bush acting president. Baker had no qualms about Bush, but he knew that many of Reagan’s supporters still doubted Bush’s conservative bona fides. And those supporters were leery of Baker as Bush’s best friend and former campaign manager. “They might view the transfer as something just short of a Bush-Baker coup d’etat,” Baker remembered.

  Baker’s diffidence wasn’t matched back at the White House. Jim Brady’s injury compelled Larry Speakes, his assistant, to be the administration’s chief liaison to the media. The reporters clamored for more information than Speakes had received, and under the glare of the television lights he inadvertently gave the impression that the president’s condition left no one in charge of the government.

  Al Haig and Dick Allen were watching Speakes’s performance. They agreed
that he was struggling, and they worried that this would send the wrong impression to the world. They had no reason to think that the shooter—by this time identified by Washington police as John Hinckley Jr., who would turn out to be an emotionally unbalanced fan of actress Jodie Foster, whom he hoped to impress by assassinating the president—was part of a conspiracy. But they couldn’t be sure he was not part of a conspiracy, perhaps one with Soviet connections, and they didn’t want to take any chances.

  “This is very bad,” Allen said to Haig. “We have to do something.” Haig agreed. “We’ve got to get him off,” he said, referring to Speakes. As Haig explained later, “It was essential to reassure the country and the world that we had an effective government.” He asked Allen to join him. “Together, Allen and I dashed out of the Situation Room and ran headlong up the narrow stairs. Then we hurried along the jigsaw passageways of the West Wing and into the press room.”

  They arrived flushed and out of breath. Haig commandeered the podium to update the reporters on Reagan’s condition. One reporter asked who was making the decisions for the executive branch.

  “Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order,” Haig replied. “Should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm, he will do so. He has not done that. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the vice president and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.”

  Haig had intended to calm the country and reassure the world, but his red face, his breathlessness, and his words had just the opposite effect. The secretary of state was not third in line for the presidency; the speaker of the House and the president pro tem of the Senate came before him. Haig’s proclamation “I am in control here” was too easily excerpted for the news networks to resist, and it made him look like a power grabber. “Perhaps the camera and microphone magnified the effects of my sprint up the stairs,” he reflected later. “Possibly I should have washed my face or taken half a dozen deep breaths before going on camera … Certainly I was guilty of a poor choice of words.” But he defended the point he was trying to make about the chain of command at the White House, awaiting the return of the vice president. “I was the senior cabinet officer present.”

  REAGAN’S SURGERY BEGAN smoothly. Fresh blood replaced the large quantity he had lost, a breathing tube kept him oxygenated, and his vital signs were stable. The surgeons on his team had extracted many bullets in their various practices, and this bullet seemed unlikely to be more elusive than most of those. The X-rays told them where to look, if not precisely where the bullet was located.

  But the bullet seemed not to want to be found. The lead surgeon probed around the president’s left lung and discovered nothing solid. He tried again and then again. He turned to his assistant and asked her to try. She had no better luck. The lead surgeon, puzzled, ordered a new X-ray while wondering whether he might have to leave the bullet in the president after all.

  The X-ray showed the slug, about where it had appeared to be earlier and where the surgeon had been looking. He concluded that his probing fingers were causing it to move, always just out of his reach. Now, taking precautions to prevent the motion, he finally located it. A scalpel cut it free, and it was extracted.

  The rest of the surgery was straightforward, though not free from risk. A damaged artery, the one that had caused most of the bleeding, was repaired. The wound to the lung was sutured, as were the incisions produced by the surgery. The patient was cleaned up and sent to recovery.

  RON REAGAN WAS the first of the children to arrive. He had been in Nebraska when he heard of the shooting. No scheduled flights east were leaving soon, so he chartered a plane for himself and his wife, Doria. He got to the hospital while his father was still in surgery. His mother was nearly in shock. “I’m so frightened,” she said, reaching out to him. “I know, Mom,” he replied. “But hold on.”

  At about seven thirty in the evening, five hours after the shooting, Nancy and Ron were allowed into the recovery room. Reagan looked like many patients after major trauma and surgery: drained of color and energy, tubes down his throat and in his arms, wires connecting him to monitors. Nancy began crying at the sight. “I love you,” she told him through her tears.

  He groggily returned her gaze, but fear crept into his eyes. He fumbled for a pad and pencil. “I can’t breathe,” he wrote.

  “He can’t breathe!” she shouted to the room.

  A doctor told her not to worry. The respirator took some getting used to, but it supplied the president all the air he needed.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Ron Reagan told his father. “You’ve got a tube in your throat. It’s like scuba diving. Just let the machine breathe for you.” Afterward Ron wondered why he had employed this analogy. “Dad had never been diving; I had barely been diving myself. And having a plastic hose lodged in your throat is probably entirely different and quite a bit more unpleasant than breathing pressurized oxygen from a tank while communing with brightly colored fish. Nevertheless, this non sequitur seemed to calm everyone who needed calming—except, perhaps, my father, though I doubt it did him any harm.”

  The visit was brief. Reagan drifted in and out of consciousness. The doctor told them to go and let him rest.

  As they drove from the hospital to the White House, they passed crowds of people standing vigil and holding signs conveying encouragement. “Get Well Soon” and “Tonight We Are All Republicans,” the signs said.

  At the White House, Nancy couldn’t sleep. “Nothing can happen to my Ronnie,” she wrote in her diary. “My life would be over.”

  REAGAN RECOVERED, BUT Nancy never did. Four days after the shooting he developed a fever. The doctors couldn’t discern its cause, but they put him on antibiotics in case it signaled an infection. The fever gradually subsided.

  The list of his visitors expanded from family members to staff. Eight days after the shooting Tip O’Neill, the Democratic speaker of the House, was allowed in. “God bless you, Mr. President,” O’Neill said. He began reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” Reagan joined him in a voice a bit above a whisper.

  As he gained strength, Reagan reflected on the meaning of his near-death experience. “It heightened his sense of mission,” Ron Reagan said later. “He thought God had saved his life and so he had a greater responsibility.” Reagan himself wrote in his diary, “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.”

  After thirteen days Reagan was released from the hospital. Knowing there would be cameras, he refused the wheelchair required of most non-presidential patients and insisted on walking out. He managed a smile and a wave.

  He recuperated at the White House during the next two weeks. Nancy arranged the solarium so he could spend his days there in the spring sunshine. On the warmest afternoons they sat outside on the terrace. Soon he began to laugh off his ordeal. “I don’t know what you’re worried about,” he told Nancy, who still fretted. “I knew all along that I’d be fine.”

  But she couldn’t stop worrying. “I was devastated after the shooting,” she recalled. “Ronnie recovered, but I’m a worrier, and now I really had something to worry about: that it might happen again, and that this time I would lose him forever.” She thought time might ease her distress, but it didn’t. “I continued to be haunted by what had happened, as well as by what had almost happened,” she said. “For the rest of Ronnie’s presidency—almost eight more years—every time he left home, especially to go on a trip, it was as if my heart stopped until he got back.”

  Subsequent events increased her foreboding. Six weeks after the attempt on Reagan’s life, a gunman shot and wounded the pope in Rome. Five months later, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was murdered in Cairo.

  “Everyone said it was just a coincidence,” Nancy recounted. “And yet I worried. How could any
public figure be protected from acts of violence? And what if these three events were somehow connected in a way that would become known only at some future time?”

  Nancy knew of the fatal pattern that had long afflicted presidents elected in years divisible by twenty. Since 1840 every chief executive so elected had died in office: William Henry Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy. Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy had been assassinated. Now her husband had nearly been assassinated. Did death in office still await him?

  The specter wouldn’t leave her. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t eat. Her thin frame grew gaunt. She prayed, to no lasting avail. “When Ronnie wasn’t around, I cried,” she remembered. “Sometimes I also cried when he was around, but I would usually manage to slip away into the bedroom or the bathroom so he wouldn’t see me.”

  She sought the advice of friends she could trust. Some she saw in person; others she consulted by phone. “One afternoon I was on the phone with Merv Griffin, an old friend from my Hollywood days,” she recalled. “He mentioned that he had recently talked with Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer. I had seen her years ago on Merv’s television show, where she was part of a panel of astrologers. Later, Merv had apparently introduced us, although I don’t remember meeting her. Joan had then volunteered her advice during Ronnie’s 1980 campaign, and had called me several times to talk about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ times for Ronnie. I was interested in what she had to say, and I was pleased when she told me that Ronnie was going to win—that it was in his chart and in mine.”

  Griffin said that he and Quigley had spoken about the attempt on Reagan’s life. “I remember as if it were yesterday my reaction to what Merv told me on the phone,” she said eight years later. “He had talked to Joan, who had said she could have warned me about March 30. According to Merv, Joan had said, ‘The president should have stayed home. I could see from my charts that this was going to be a dangerous day for him.’ ”