Nancy started heading for the elevator as soon as she heard the word shooting. Then other details began to register. The hotel. Ronnie was supposed to be giving a short speech at two in the afternoon to the National Conference of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department at the Washington Hilton, a mile and a half up Connecticut Avenue. The hospital. George Washington University was the closest. It was six blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Why, she asked, were they taking Ronnie there if he wasn’t hurt? Opfer told her he didn’t know. Perhaps it was precautionary. Maybe the president wanted to find out about the condition of the wounded.
Opfer pleaded with her to stay put. The hospital was a madhouse. Ronnie was fine. He’d be home soon. “If you don’t get me a car, I’m going to walk,” Nancy said firmly. Six minutes and forty-four seconds after the first report of shots fired, Opfer got in touch with the command center. Using Nancy’s code name, he informed his fellow agents: “We’re gonna leave with Rainbow and go to that location.”
A limousine was dispatched to the Diplomatic Entrance. Nancy climbed into the back seat, and Opfer into the front. The command center alerted agents at the hospital to be ready for her arrival at the Twenty-Second Street entrance. Nancy became frantic as the limousine, traveling without sirens or escort, got stuck in the mayhem of police cars, emergency vehicles, reporters, and onlookers around the hospital. She grabbed Opfer’s shoulder and demanded to be let out, saying she would get there on foot, running if she had to. The agent insisted she stay in the car. He still believed the president was uninjured, but other possibilities were racing through his mind: Was this a conspiracy? Was the First Family under attack? Was the country under attack?
Mike Deaver met them at the emergency entrance and delivered the news that Ronnie had, in fact, been wounded. In the opening of her post–White House memoir, Nancy recounted her shock and mounting panic:
“But they told me he wasn’t hit,” I stammered.
“Well,” Mike said, “he was. But they say it’s not serious.”
“Where? Where was he hit?”
“They’re looking for the bullet.”
Looking for the bullet! “I’ve got to see him!” I said.
“You can’t. Not yet.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, my voice rising. “If it’s not serious, then why can’t I see him?”
“Wait. They’re working on him.”
“Mike,” I pleaded, as if it were up to him. “They don’t know how it is with us. He has to know I’m here!”
Just inside the hospital, in curtained-off trauma bay 5, Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes was taking notes of what he was hearing: “Doctors believe bleeding to death. Can’t find a wound. ‘Think we’re going to lose him.’ Rapid loss of blood pressure. Touch and go.”
Ronnie had arrived at the hospital three minutes after the presidential motorcade peeled out of the Washington Hilton driveway. The initial plan had been to take him back to the White House. But in the car, Ronnie began coughing up bright, frothy blood, prompting Parr to redirect the motorcade to the hospital. It was a decision that no doubt saved Ronnie’s life. “Get an ambulance—I mean get the, um, stretcher out there,” Parr called over the radio at 2:29 p.m. Ronnie kept coughing, filling first his own handkerchief and then Parr’s with blood.
The president walked the fifteen yards from the car to the entrance of the emergency room, but as soon as he got inside and out of public view, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his knees buckled. His blood pressure plummeted so low that nurses could not get a systolic reading. It looked like he was having a heart attack. Not until they cut off his clothes and a surgical resident lifted his left arm did they notice a tiny, jagged slit in Ronnie’s side. An intern who had been in Vietnam recognized it as a bullet hole. There was no exit wound.
As the medical team worked, Nancy was taken to a nearby office, where she began having flashbacks to a day in November 1963, when she was driving down San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles and heard over the car radio that John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. She prayed that history was not repeating itself. The windowless room where they put her was tiny and hot. She heard a lot of noise. People were running back and forth in the hallway, shouting at one another to get out of the way. Nancy kept demanding to see her husband, only to be told the same thing over and over: Soon. “Later, I learned that they were afraid to let me in too early because they thought I’d be traumatized by what I saw,” she recalled. “Considering what I did see, they were probably right.”
At last, she got the summons. Deaver and Opfer accompanied her into the room where the president was. It was a ghastly scene of bandages, tubes, blood. In one corner, Nancy spotted the shredded navy pinstripe suit that Ronnie had put on for the first time that morning. It had been a gift from her, custom-made by his Beverly Hills tailor Frank Mariani.
Ronnie was lying naked on a table under a sheet, surrounded by strangers. His normally ruddy cheeks were ashen. His lips were blue and caked with blood. Opfer held Nancy’s arm, worried she might faint. But he saw her quickly focus and pull herself together.
Nancy stifled her horror when she got to her husband’s side. She smiled at him, held his hand, and whispered over and over: “Oh, Ronnie. Oh, Ronnie.” Twelve days later, the president would write in his diary that “I opened my eyes once to find Nancy there. I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there. In all the ways God has blessed me, giving her to me is the greatest and beyond anything I can ever hope to deserve.”
He pulled the oxygen mask from his face and tried to make a joke. His mind conjured a famous old line that boxer Jack Dempsey supposedly told his wife after he lost his heavyweight title to Gene Tunney in 1926. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” Ronnie said. Nancy pushed the mask back on and urged him not to talk. As she left the room, she whispered to Deaver, “Mike, he looks so bad.”
Ronnie continued to lose blood—at one point, more than half of what he had in his body—and was in danger of going into shock. Just under an hour after he had been shot, the president of the United States was wheeled toward operating room 2. Doctors were going to try to repair his damaged artery and extract the bullet that an X-ray had shown was lodged in his left lung. Ronnie caught sight of Baker, Nofziger, Laxalt, and Meese in the hallway. He winked and said, “Who’s minding the store?” Nancy walked beside him, her hand in his. When she finally had to let go and leave her husband’s fate to the skill and training of the surgeons, Nancy kissed Ronnie on the forehead and told him one last time that she loved him. Right before they put him under, the president joked with his medical team: “I hope you are all Republicans.” Everyone laughed, and Dr. Joseph Giordano replied, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.”
Nancy spotted another patient being wheeled right behind him. It was Press Secretary James Brady, who had been hit above the left eye. A nurse told Nancy he was not expected to survive. So dire was Brady’s condition that, at one point, all three television networks announced erroneously that he was dead. Nancy would never forget the sight of Brady’s head “open and bleeding and grotesquely swollen. I had never seen anybody with a head wound, and it was monstrous.” Brady would survive, though he was severely disabled. He retained the title of press secretary, a symbolic one given his inability to work on more than a limited schedule. When Brady died in 2014 at the age of seventy-three, the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide resulting from the wound he had suffered more than three decades earlier. The White House briefing room is named in his honor.
With Ronnie in surgery that would last for more than three hours, Nancy sat in a waiting room, watching the television footage that was being broadcast over and over. The president emerging from the hotel, smiling and waving to the small crowd that had gathered there. The brief pause he made to take a shouted question from Associated Press reporter Mike Putzel, who was standing about twenty feet away. Ronnie’s sudden look of surprise as the first shot was fired. Brady falling, a
nd a pool of blood forming around his head as he twitched on the sidewalk. Two other bodies on the ground. Agents and police diving on the shooter just a few feet away, one of them screaming “Get him out! Get him out!” An ambulance arriving with its siren on. On ABC, anchorman Frank Reynolds said: “God, you tremble to think he could get such a clear shot at the president.”
She learned that the blond assailant she saw being dragged away was a twenty-five-year-old drifter named John W. Hinckley Jr. More details would come out later: he came from an affluent family in Colorado and wanted to impress the young actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had become obsessed after seeing the 1976 movie Taxi Driver. (The movie’s protagonist, Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, plots to assassinate a presidential candidate.) In addition to Ronnie and Brady, the six bullets that Hinckley fired in less than two seconds wounded two others: Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, who was shot in the chest, and District of Columbia policeman Thomas Delahanty, hit in his upper spine. Both were being treated.
Nancy went to the window to look at the crowds that had gathered below. Opfer pulled her back and drew the blinds. He told Nancy they still didn’t know whether this was a larger plot, which meant there might be more killers out there. She looked startled, and once again thoughts of Dallas raced through her head.
A nurse asked Nancy if she wanted to visit the hospital chapel. She and Opfer went there, knelt together on a pew, and were soon joined by Brady’s wife, Sarah, who hadn’t yet seen her husband. That day was the first time the two women had met. They hugged, joined hands, and prayed together—for their husbands, for the men who had been wounded protecting them, for the country. Deaver, Baker, Meese, and Nancy’s press secretary, Sheila Tate, had also made their way to the chapel. They formed a tiny, traumatized congregation.
Meanwhile, in the operating room, Dr. Benjamin Aaron was still searching for the elusive bullet. He ordered another X-ray. Just as he was preparing to abandon the search and sew Ronnie up, he found it. The slug was slightly lower in the president’s lung than they had initially thought, just an inch from his heart and aorta. Tests would show it was a type known as a “devastator,” an expensive and customized .22-caliber cartridge designed to explode on impact into fragments, with the force of a shot fired from a much more powerful handgun. This bullet hadn’t done that, possibly because it was flattened to the size and shape of a dime when it ricocheted off the door of the presidential limousine.
Back at the White House, there was bedlam. In the first hours after the shooting, details of the situation were scarce. Ronnie’s top aides were later criticized for not temporarily transferring presidential authority to Vice President Bush while the commander in chief was unconscious on the operating table. That should have been the call under the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, but they worried that it would alarm the country and allies around the world and stir questions about Ronnie’s age and health. Meanwhile, Bush was headed back to Washington aboard Air Force Two, having canceled the rest of his scheduled speaking engagements that day in Texas. He was expected to land at Andrews Air Force Base at six thirty. The military had been put on standby alert status. Initial assessments by the Pentagon showed more Soviet submarines than usual off the East Coast.
What would linger in the public perception was an image of the combustible secretary of state, Al Haig, charging to the podium of the briefing room at 4:14 p.m. and addressing the media. The place was already in chaos. Speakes had fumbled a news conference in which he was unable to provide reporters the answers to such basic questions as whether the president was in surgery or even whether the country had a functioning government. The secretary of state’s attempt to take control of the situation only made things worse. From behind Haig, National Security Adviser Richard Allen could see his knees were wobbling and his arms shaking.
“Who is making the decisions for the government right now?” one reporter asked.
“Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state in that order, and should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm to the vice president, he will do so,” Haig said. “As of now, I am in control here, in the White House.”
Cabinet secretaries and national security officials, who were watching all of this from the Situation Room, were horrified. So were Baker and Meese, who saw it on a television at the hospital. Not only had Haig revealed the depth of his ignorance of the Constitution—there were actually three others ahead of him in the line of succession; he’d omitted the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate—but he came off as breathless, agitated, and possibly unhinged. Haig gave out further erroneous information by denying that the military had been put on increased readiness.
Nancy was too concerned about Ronnie to take note of the secretary of state’s blunder in the moment, but when she learned about it later, she thought it revealed his true character. “From that day on, he was on thin ice with Nancy Reagan,” said Jim Kuhn, who was later Ronnie’s executive assistant. Haig’s performance at the podium was an image the public would never forget—and that Nancy would never forgive.
The first of the Reagan children to reach the hospital was Ron. He arrived as Nancy waited for her husband to come out of the anesthesia. Ron’s unconventional career had taken off, and he was dancing with the Joffrey Ballet’s junior ensemble when he got the word about his father. “Doria and I were having lunch in our hotel coffee shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, before heading to the theater for rehearsal and that night’s performance. A Secret Service agent traveling with us approached the table and quietly informed us that shots had been fired at my father but that he didn’t appear to have been hit,” he recalled. “We quickly left the restaurant and went upstairs to our room, where we watched the scene play out on TV. Some minutes later, the detail leader gave us the news that my father had been wounded, but they didn’t believe it was serious. We immediately began searching for a way to get back to DC, no easy feat from Lincoln.” The Secret Service scrambled to charter a private Learjet for Ron.
Nancy was comforted by the presence of her favorite child. “I’m so frightened,” she told him.
“I know, Mom,” Ron said tenderly, “but hold on.”
When Ronnie woke up around seven thirty, he reached for a pencil and paper and wrote: “I can’t breathe!” Nancy shouted at the doctors: “He can’t breathe!” They assured her that the president was getting enough oxygen, but it didn’t feel that way because it was coming through a respirator. This would not be the last time the medical team would be exasperated by her badgering, though they understood her concern and tried to be patient with her. Doctors gently told Nancy it might be better if she left the room. As she did, she paused at the door for what seemed like several minutes, staring at her husband’s face with worry etched on her own.
Tension soon developed between Nancy and the White House physician, Daniel A. Ruge, who had trained under Loyal Davis and worked as her father’s partner for twenty years. Ruge had been standing near Ronnie when he was shot. He and Deaver jumped into the follow-up car as the president’s motorcade sped off. At the hospital, Ruge made the call that the president should be treated by the trauma team on duty there rather than taking charge himself or bringing in high-powered surgeons from other medical centers to confer. Renowned heart surgeon Michael DeBakey had already called, offering to fly in from Houston with his own emergency specialists. Ruge declined. All of that would have taken too much precious time. Nor did he allow the president to be moved eight and a half miles to Bethesda Naval Hospital, as the Secret Service wanted.
Ruge told the GW medical personnel at hand to move quickly and treat the president as they would any other seventy-year-old man who had come into the ER with a gunshot wound. They should not wait for a plan to be developed by a consensus of more senior specialists. That was a controversial decision in the moment, but the right one, and it probably helped save Ronnie’s life. Still, the White House
physician bore the brunt of the First Lady’s second-guessing and her anxiety. At one point, Ronnie groggily handed his doctor a note in faint and wobbly handwriting that said: “I am aren’t alive aren’t I?” Nancy snatched it out of Ruge’s hand, and he never saw the note again.
This was one of many missives to his doctors and nurses that Ronnie would write in pencil and felt-tip pen on a pink-and-white pad stamped George Washington University Hospital. Some were funny: “If I’d had this much attention in Hollywood, I’d have stayed there.” And to pretty nurse Denise Sullivan, who had tended to him in the recovery room: “Does Nancy know about us?” Others were not so lighthearted: “What happened to the guy with the gun?” “What was his beef? Was anyone hurt?” “Will I still be able to work at the ranch?” Nancy gathered as many as she could find and saved them in a manila envelope.
Her brother, Dick, who came from Philadelphia that night, witnessed intense arguments between Ruge and Nancy over Ronnie’s care. As a surgeon himself, Nancy’s brother sympathized with the doctor, who would move into the White House for a month while Ronnie recuperated. “Dan was a marvelous surgeon and also a very, very kind, good man. He couldn’t stand Nancy. The two didn’t get along at all, which he and Mrs. Ruge were never hesitant to tell me, how awful she was to them,” Dick recalled. His sister’s feelings about the White House physician were mutual. “She couldn’t stand him. She didn’t like him at all,” Dick added. Ruge’s daughter, Charlotte Wiessner, offered a similar assessment of the relationship between the president’s physician and the first lady, saying, “My father wasn’t crazy about her.”
Nor was Ruge, a distinguished figure who stood six foot two, crazy about the job itself. Though he would be regarded as one of the heroes of the day that Ronnie was shot, Ruge found most of his duties as White House physician to be, as he put it later, “vastly overrated, boring, and not medically challenging.” Unlike most presidential physicians, he did not come from the military. In private practice, his specialty had been spinal cord injuries, which was not an expertise he was likely to be called upon to use in the White House. Nor was he quite prepared for the reality of being just another member of the staff. During state dinners, he was required to don a tuxedo to be at the ready if he was needed, and then had to sit in his office, where he did crossword puzzles and read medical journals. One White House official who knew both Ruge and Nancy well said that their long relationship, which revolved around Loyal, stirred mixed feelings in the first lady: “Dan was a very comfortable reminder of her father and connection with her father, but also an uncomfortable reminder of her past.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 30
