Someone was looking out for us that day.
Most of the doctors who practiced at George Washington University Hospital had been attending a special meeting there that afternoon and were only an elevator ride away from the emergency room. Within a few minutes after I arrived, the room was full of specialists in virtually every medical field. When one of the doctors said they were going to operate on me, I said, “I hope you’re a Republican.”
He looked at me and said, “Today, Mr. President, we’re all Republicans.”
I also remember saying, after one of the nurses asked me how I felt, “All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia”—the old W. C. Fields line.
For quite a while when I was in the emergency room, I still thought I was there because Jerry Parr had broken my rib and it had punctured my lung. Little by little, though, I learned what had happened and what the situation was: I had a bullet in my lung; Jim Brady, my press secretary, had been shot in the head; Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy had been shot in the chest; policeman Tom Delehanty had been shot in the neck. All of us had been hit by the gun of a young lone assailant who was in police custody.
When Jim Brady, a funny and irreverent man who was as talented and well liked as anyone in the White House, was wheeled by me unconscious on his way to the operating room, someone told me he was hit so badly he probably wouldn’t make it, and I quickly said a prayer for him. I didn’t feel I could ask God’s help to heal Jim, the others, and myself, and at the same time feel hatred for the man who had shot us, so I silently asked God to help him deal with whatever demons had led him to shoot us.
As people began to tell me more about what had happened, I began to realize that when Jerry Parr had thrown his body on me, he was gallantly putting his own life on the line to save mine, and I felt guilty that I’d chewed him out right after it happened. Like Jerry, Tim McCarthy had also bravely put his life on the line for me. Some weeks later I was shown the TV shots of what happened that day. As I was being thrown into the limo, there, facing the camera between me and the gunman, spreadeagling himself to make as big a target as possible, was Tim McCarthy. He was shot right in the chest. Thank heaven he lived.
I thanked God for what He and they had done for me, and while I was waiting to be taken into the operating room, I remembered the trip I had made just the week before to Ford’s Theater and the thoughts I’d had while looking up at the flag-draped box where Lincoln had died. Even with all the protection in the world, I’d thought, it was probably impossible to guarantee completely the safety of the president. Now I’d not only benefited from the selflessness of these two men; God, for some reason, had seen fit to give me his blessing and allow me to live a while longer.
John Hinckley, Jr.’s bullet probably caught me in midair at the same moment I was being thrown into the back of the car by Jerry Parr. After they took it out of me, I saw the bullet. It looked like a nickel that was black on one side; it had been flattened into a small disc and darkened by the paint on the limousine. First the bullet had struck the limousine, then it had ricocheted through the small gap between the body of the car and the door hinges. It hit me under my left arm, where it made a small slit like a knife wound.
I’d always been told that no pain is as excruciating as a broken bone; that’s why I thought Jerry had broken my rib when he landed so hard on me. But it wasn’t Jerry’s weight I felt; according to the doctors, the flattened bullet had hit my rib edgewise, then turned over like a coin, tumbling down through my lung and stopping less than an inch from my heart.
As I said, someone was looking out for me that day.
On several previous occasions when I’d been out in public as president, the Secret Service had made me wear a bulletproof vest under my suit. That day, even though I was going to speak to some die-hard Democrats who didn’t think much of my economic recovery program, no one had thought my iron underwear would be necessary because my only exposure was to be a thirty-foot walk to the car.
I never saw Hinckley at the Hilton, only the crowd of reporters outside the hotel. In the hospital, I learned he had gone to a movie, Taxi Driver, and fallen in love with an actress in the picture and then begun trailing her around the country, hoping to meet her so he could tell her how he felt. Although I have never seen the movie, I’m told there was a scene in it in which there was a shooting; for some reason Hinckley decided to get a gun and kill somebody to demonstrate his love for the actress.
I was told he’d plotted to kill Jimmy Carter and had actually stalked him, taking his gun to where Carter was going to be—but he never got the chance so he shot me instead. He was a mixed-up young man from a fine family. That day, I asked the Lord to heal him, and to this day, I still do.
After I left the hospital and was back in the White House, I wrote a few words about the shooting in my diary that concluded: “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.”
43
I HAD WONDERFUL CARE at the George Washington University Hospital, for which I will be eternally grateful. But it wasn’t long before I was very anxious to get on my feet, go home, and get back to work, and I’m afraid there may have been times when I was not a perfect patient. Once during those first few days, when I was bedded down and fastened to an intravenous apparatus, I had to go to the men’s room. I didn’t want to trouble the nurses, so I got out of bed and wheeled the intravenous cart with me over to the restroom. When the nurses found out about it, they gave me a scolding, but I persuaded them to let me out of bed more often and pretty soon they were letting me go out into the corridor outside my room and walk around in a little oval to exercise. I was determined that, when I left the hospital, I was going to walk out, and I did.
On April 12, I wrote in my diary: “The first full day at home. I’m not jumping any fences and the routine is still one of blood tests, X-rays, bottles dripping into my arms but I’m home. With the let-up on antibiotics, I’m beginning to have an appetite and food tastes good for the first time.”
Incidentally, I did take an afternoon nap during the first three or four weeks after I came home from the hospital, but, despite reports to the contrary, that was the first and only time I’d needed one since I was a child.
On April 14, three days after I got home, the space shuttle Columbia eturned to earth in triumph after its maiden voyage. The landing touched off tremendous excitement around the country, convincing me more than ever that Americans wanted to feel proud and patriotic again. I watched the landing on television in the Lincoln Bedroom, where they set up a hospital-style bed for my recuperation. While lying there, or relaxing in robe and pajamas in the solarium on the third floor of the White House, I had lots of time to think about the problems our country faced and the things we could do to deal with them.
On the domestic scene, our economic program was beginning to make a little headway in Congress, but I knew we had a fight on our hands, and I’d have to win the support of more Democrats in the House to get it passed. On the international front, I kept recalling those thoughts I’d had on the Sunday before the shooting about the MAD policy. During my watch as president, I thought, there was nothing I wanted more than to lessen the risk of nuclear war. But how do we go about it?
Our relationship with the Soviets was based on “détente,” a French word the Russians had interpreted as a freedom to pursue whatever policies of subversion, aggression, and expansionism they wanted anywhere in the world. Every Soviet leader since Lenin, up to and including the present one, Leonid Brezhnev, had said the goal of the Soviet Union was to Communize the world. Except for a brief time-out during World War II, the Russians had been our de facto enemies for almost sixty-five years; all this while, their policies had been consistently and religiously devoted to the single purpose of destroying democracy and imposing Communism.
During the postwar years, America had repeatedly stood up to the threat of Soviet expansionism, going to the far corners of the world—Turkey, Greece, Korea, South
east Asia, and elsewhere—to defend freedom. It was our policy that this great democracy of ours had a special obligation to help bring freedom to other peoples, as we did after World War II when we helped the new nations that emerged from the colonial past. We spent billions to help the countries ravaged by World War II, including our former enemies, rebuild after the war. We spent more billions to keep American troops stationed in Western Europe and South Korea for the purpose of containing Communism. Sometimes the price of defending freedom was even higher: Many brave Americans made the ultimate sacrifice. America had always been willing to pay the price of defending human liberty.
During the late seventies, I felt our country had begun to abdicate this historical role as the spiritual leader of the Free World and its foremost defender of democracy. Some of our resolve was gone, along with a part of our commitment to uphold the values we cherished.
Just as it had accepted the notion that America was past its prime economically and said our people would have to settle for a future with less, the previous administration for some reason had accepted the notion that America was no longer the world power it had once been, that it had become powerless to shape world events. Consciously or unconsciously, we had sent out a message to the world that Washington was no longer sure of itself, its ideals, or its commitments to our allies, and that it seemed to accept as inevitable the advance of Soviet expansionism, especially in the poor and underdeveloped countries of the world.
I’m not sure what was at the root of this sense of withdrawal; perhaps it was related to the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and the inflation and other economic problems of the Carter years—or the frustrations endured by the Carter administration over the failure of its policies in Iran. Whatever the reasons, I believed it was senseless, ill-founded, and dangerous for America to withdraw from its role as superpower and leader of the Free World.
Predictably, the Soviets had interpreted our hesitation and reluctance to act and our reduced sense of national self-confidence as a weakness, and had tried to exploit it to the fullest, moving ahead with their agenda to achieve a Communist-dominated world. With the breathtaking events that have occurred in Eastern Europe since then, it can be easy to forget what the world was like in the spring of 1981: The Soviets were more dedicated than ever to achieving Lenin’s goal of a Communist world. Under the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, they claimed the right to support “wars of national liberation” and to suppress, through armed intervention, any challenge to Communist governments anywhere in the world.
We saw the Brezhnev Doctrine in practice around the globe on a daily basis. In El Salvador, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and elsewhere, the Soviets and their surrogates, Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, and Syria, were seeking to undermine and destroy non-Communist governments through violent campaigns of subversion and terrorism. In Afghanistan, they were brutally trying to suppress a revolt against Communist rule with tanks and rockets; in Poland, they were responding to the tentative stirrings of a democratic movement with ominous hints of an invasion, the same method they had used to crush brave freedom fighters who had sought to bring democracy to Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
As the foundation of my foreign policy, I decided we had to send as powerful a message as we could to the Russians that we weren’t going to stand by anymore while they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic governments. Our policy was to be one based on strength and realism. I wanted peace through strength, not peace through a piece of paper.
In my speeches and press conferences, I deliberately set out to say some frank things about the Russians, to let them know there were some new fellows in Washington who had a realistic view of what they were up to and weren’t going to let them keep it up. At my first press conference I was asked whether we could trust the Soviet Union, and I said that the answer to that question could be found in the writings of Soviet leaders: It had always been their philosophy that it was moral to lie or cheat for the purpose of advancing Communism. I said they had told us, without meaning to, that they couldn’t be trusted. (Much of the press later got it wrong when it claimed I called the Soviets liars and cheaters, failing to point out that I was simply quoting what the Russians themselves had said.)
I wanted to let them know that in attempting to continue their policy of expansionism, they were prolonging the nuclear arms race and keeping the world on the precipice of disaster. I also wanted to send the signal that we weren’t going to be deceived by words into thinking they’d changed their stripes: We wanted deeds, not words. And I intended to let them know that we were going to spend whatever it took to stay ahead of them in the arms race. We would never accept second place.
The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money. The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever. Moreover, incentives inherent in the capitalist system had given us an industrial base that meant we had the capacity to maintain a technological edge over them forever.
But in addition to sending out the word that the United States was dealing with the Soviet Union from a new basis of realism, I wanted to let them know that we realized the nuclear standoff was futile and dangerous for all of us and that we had no designs on their territories. They had nothing to fear from us if they behaved themselves. We wanted to reduce the tensions that had led us to the threshold of a nuclear standoff.
It was ridiculous for both nations to continue this costly, open-ended competition to build bigger and better offensive weapons able to annihilate the world. The money we were spending on weapons could be better spent on so many other things. Somewhere in the Kremlin, I thought, there had to be people who realized that the pair of us standing there like two cowboys with guns pointed at each other’s heads posed a lethal risk to the survival of the Communist world as well as the Free World. Someone in the Kremlin had to realize that in arming themselves to the teeth, they were aggravating the desperate economic problems in the Soviet Union, which were the greatest evidence of the failure of Communism.
Yet, to be candid, I doubted I’d ever meet anybody like that.
44
NOT LONG AFTER I moved into the White House, Anatoly Dob-rynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, made some guarded hints to Secretary of State Al Haig indicating that the Russians were interested in reopening East-West talks on controlling nuclear arms. But he said Soviet leaders were unhappy with some of the harsh things I’d said about them. I told Al to inform Dobrynin that my words were intended to convey a message: There was a new management in the White House along with a new realism regarding the Russians, and until they behaved themselves, they could expect more of the same.
I didn’t have much faith in Communists or put much stock in their word. Still, it was dangerous to continue the East-West nuclear standoff forever, and I decided that if the Russians wouldn’t take the first step, I should.
As I sat in the sun-filled White House solarium in robe and pajamas that spring, waiting for doctors to give me a go-ahead to resume a full work schedule, I wondered how to get the process started. Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war; perhaps there was a reason I had been spared.
Finally, I decided to write a personal letter to Brezhnev, whom I had met briefly when I was governor and he had come to San Clemente for a meeting with President Nixon. I thought I’d try to convince him that, contrary to Soviet propaganda, America wasn’t an “imperialist” nation and we had no designs on any part of the world. I wanted to let him know that we had a realistic view of what the Soviet Union was all about, but also wanted to send a signal to him that we were interested in reducing the threat of nuclear annihilation.
A week after leaving the hospital, I got out a pad of yellow paper and wrote the first draft of a letter to Brezhnev—still not sure I’d send it, but anxious to get some thoughts on paper.
Before the shooting, I ha
d been leaning toward lifting the grain embargo imposed during the Carter administration. It was hurting our farmers more than it was hurting the Russians. I didn’t want to make a concession to the Soviets without a quid pro quo, but felt we could lift the embargo and indicate it was a demonstration of our sincerity in wanting to improve Soviet-American relations. It would also demonstrate to our allies that, as the leader of the Free World, we were willing to take the initiative in attempting to reduce Cold War tensions.
Partly because of concerns in West Germany and European countries, where there was growing political sentiment in favor of unilateral disarmament, Al Haig wanted to go to the arms control bargaining table with the Russians fairly soon, but was against an early summit. He opposed conciliatory gestures toward the Russians until they gave us evidence they were willing to behave. As a result, he opposed lifting the grain embargo, saying it would send a wrong message to the Russians. I understood his feelings, but felt the advantages outweighed the disadvantages.
When I told him I was thinking of writing a personal letter to Brezhnev, Al was reluctant to have me actually draft it. If I was going to send a letter, he said the State Department should compose it.
That was probably the first indication I had that it wasn’t only other members of the cabinet and White House staff whom Al didn’t want participating in foreign affairs. As I was to learn over the next year, he didn’t even want me as the president to be involved in setting foreign policy—he regarded it as his turf. He didn’t want to carry out the president’s foreign policy; he wanted to formulate it and carry it out himself.
An American Life Page 27
