Killing Reagan

by Bill O'Reilly

  All around Reagan, the emergency room is a frantic scene of doctors, nurses, and well-armed Secret Service agents. Dr. Joseph Giordano, a surgeon who heads the hospital’s trauma team, is inserting a clear plastic chest tube into Reagan, hoping to drain the blood from his chest cavity. “This better go well,” Giordano tells himself as he slices open the president’s skin.

  “He was seriously injured,” Giordano will later remember. “He was close to dying.”

  Ronald Reagan is a seventy-year-old man who has just suffered a devastating trauma. Not only was he shot, but he was thrown bodily into a car, and his head slammed hard into an armrest. His body may not have the ability to endure much more.

  Reagan is conscious throughout the trauma procedure. Once he is stabilized, the next step will be surgery to remove the bullet. Spotting Jerry Parr just before being wheeled to the operating room, Reagan shows the first signs that he might make it: “I hope they’re all Republicans,” he tells the Secret Service agent who saved his life less than thirty minutes ago.

  “Mr. President,” Dr. Giordano, a lifelong Democrat, tells Reagan, “today we are all Republicans.”

  * * *

  A pained but lucid Ronald Reagan is being prepped for surgery. Lying on the gurney, he looks up to find Nancy Reagan gazing down at him. She is unsteady. Blood loss has made her husband’s skin the palest white she has ever seen. A nurse removes the president’s oxygen mask from his mouth. “Honey,” he tells her, hoping that a joke will erase the fear from her face, “I forgot to duck.”

  Nancy fights tears as she bends down to kiss him. “Please don’t try to talk,” she whispers.

  Later, Nancy will remember this moment with sadness and fear. “I saw him lying naked, with strangers looking down at his naked body and watching the life ebb from him, and as a doctor’s daughter I knew that he was dying,” she will recount to her friends.

  But Ronald Reagan is experiencing another reaction. He will later write of the joy this moment gives him. “Seeing Nancy in the hospital gave me an enormous lift. As long as I live, I will never forget the thought that rushed into my head as I looked up into her face. Later, I wrote it down in my diary: ‘I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there … [O]f all the ways God had blessed me, giving her to me was the greatest—beyond anything I can ever hope to deserve.”

  Reagan is wheeled into surgery. Nancy clings to the bed’s handrail the whole while, walking with the team of doctors and the now surgically gowned Secret Service agents who will accompany her husband into Operating Room Two.

  “Who’s minding the store?” Reagan asks Ed Meese as the gurney passes the White House counselor.

  At the double doors leading into the surgery center, Nancy is told she cannot accompany her husband any farther.

  The time is 3:24 p.m.

  All she can do is wait.2

  * * *

  At 4:00 p.m., Ronald Reagan lies unconscious on the operating table. A rib spreader pulls his fifth and sixth ribs apart, allowing Dr. Ben Aaron to see clearly inside Reagan’s chest. The seventh rib is indeed fractured, thanks to the bullet glancing off it. More troublesome is the blood filling the chest cavity. The president has lost half his total blood supply. Tubes running into Reagan’s body fill him with new blood, antibiotics, and hydration fluid.

  Dr. Aaron’s goal is to remove the bullet from Reagan’s body, but there is a big problem. While he can trace its path through the half-inch-wide hole it has left in the tissue and lung, he cannot find the location of the .22-caliber round.

  Using his fingers, Aaron reaches inside the president’s body and feels for the bullet, delicately working around Reagan’s slowly beating heart as he does so. “I might call it quits,” the surgeon says, frustrated he can find no sign of the bullet.

  * * *

  Frustration also reigns one mile away, at the White House.

  “Who is running the government in the absence of President Reagan?” a journalist asks Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes on live television.

  All across America, millions are glued to their TV sets as regular programming has been interrupted. A somber America awaits news about the severely wounded Ronald Reagan.

  But if viewers are looking for reassurance, Speakes’s words do not provide it.

  “I cannot answer that question at this time,” he responds.

  One floor below where the press conference is taking place, members of Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet huddle in the White House Situation Room, horrified at Speakes’s response. Even worse, they know something that the press secretary does not: the Soviets are taking advantage of Reagan’s condition by moving their submarines alarmingly close to America’s East Coast. A nuclear missile could strike Washington in just eleven minutes. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger has ordered America’s bomber crews to go on high standby alert. Yet with the president now unconscious and Vice President George H. W. Bush in the air somewhere over Texas, no one at the White House has the direct authority to respond to the Soviet threat.3

  Fearing the worst, National Security Adviser Richard Allen has ordered that the special briefcase known as “the football,” which contains the nuclear launch codes that could begin World War III, be brought to him. It now sits on a conference table here in the Situation Room, safely concealed beneath a small pile of papers.

  Suddenly, Gen. Alexander Haig takes charge. The secretary of state, who has long sought to expand his power, appoints himself temporary president.

  “The helm is right here,” he declares to the startled Cabinet members. “And that means in this chair, right now, constitutionally until the vice president gets here.”

  Haig, an intimidating man, looks around, daring anyone to dispute him. Constitutionally, the general is incorrect. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill should be next in line. But no one in the Situation Room cares to defy the former four-star army general who fought in Vietnam and Korea.

  “How do you get to the press room?” he asks, rising from his chair.

  The room goes silent. Before anyone can stop him, Haig races upstairs and barges into the press center. Knees buckling, voice cracking, and hands grasping the lectern so hard his knuckles turn white, Alexander Haig proclaims his authority to the nation on live TV.

  “As of now, I am in control here in the White House.”

  * * *

  Nancy Reagan is not in control. She is desperately praying. She sits in the hospital chapel along with the wives of Press Secretary James Brady and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy. All three of their husbands are currently in surgery. The women are unaware that the media will soon report that James Brady is dead.

  The women are not alone in this small second-floor sanctuary. White House chief of staff James Baker kneels in prayer, while Mike Deaver and Ed Meese join the vigil. They are as close to the president as any group of advisers could be, and the wait is torturous.

  * * *

  Finally, at 5:25 p.m., thanks to a set of X-rays that show the bullet’s location, Dr. Aaron feels the dime-size chunk of metal. The surgeon plucks the bullet from Reagan’s lung with his fingertips.

  “I’ve got it,” he tells the surgical team, which includes a member of the Secret Service, who now steps forward to retrieve the bullet as evidence.

  Dr. Aaron now turns his attention to the nonstop internal bleeding that still might kill Ronald Reagan.

  Finally, at 6:46 p.m., an unconscious Reagan is closed up and wheeled from the operating room. The greatest crisis has passed, but danger remains.

  Within an hour, Reagan is awake, though groggy. A breathing tube in his throat makes it impossible for him to talk, so he scribbles a note to his nurse. “If I’d had this much attention in Hollywood, I’d have stayed there.”

  * * *

  Twenty miles away, at Andrews Air Force Base, the plane carrying Vice President George H. W. Bush has finally touched down on the runway. His return marks the end of Alexander Haig’s self-declared three-hour reign as leader of the fr
ee world. And while Haig was legally wrong to declare himself in charge, his blunt behavior has had one positive effect: Soviet forces are backing down.

  Alexander Haig briefs the press in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.

  In the White House Situation Room, National Security Adviser Richard Allen breathes a sigh of relief that there will be no need to open the special briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes.

  Not today, at least.4

  * * *

  Meanwhile, John Hinckley sits in a Washington, DC, interrogation room. He complains that his wrist might be broken; there are also cuts and bruises on his face from being shoved to the concrete sidewalk. But for the most part, Hinckley is calm as Detective Eddie Myers of the Washington Metro Police Department’s Homicide Division interrogates him.

  “How do you spell ‘assassinate’?” Myers absentmindedly asks a fellow officer during the questioning.

  “A-s-s-a-s-s-i-n-a-t-e,” Hinckley answers, grinning.

  The FBI has requested Hinckley be given a physical, including retrieving a sample of his pubic hair.

  “Pubic hair?” the grizzled Myers asks in disbelief. “For Chrissakes. He didn’t fuck Reagan, he shot him.”5

  * * *

  It is not until morning that Ronald and Nancy Reagan are allowed to see each other again. She has spent a long night alone in the White House, sleeping at the side of his bed, hugging one of her husband’s T-shirts to feel his presence. At 10:00 a.m., Nancy enters the intensive care unit with Patti and Ron Reagan, who have made the flight to Washington upon hearing of the shooting. Although Michael and Maureen Reagan have traveled to the hospital, they are not ushered in until Nancy’s children have had their moment.6

  John Hinckley Jr. in police custody following the shooting of Ronald Reagan and three others, March 30, 1981

  Ronald Reagan is oblivious to any sibling rivalry. He sees his family and is deeply moved. His breathing tube has been taken out, allowing him to joke and visit with Nancy and his children. He knows the shooting has changed his life forever.

  “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God,” he will write in his diary, “and I will try to serve him in every way I can.”

  20

  HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

  WASHINGTON, DC

  APRIL 28, 1981

  7:00 P.M.

  The president who was nearly killed is bathed in applause. Members of Congress leap to their feet in bipartisan support of the man who was hit by an assassin’s bullet a little more than four weeks ago. Ronald Reagan is visibly thinner and frail but is walking easily under his own power.

  The roar continues as Reagan strolls to the podium and shakes hands with Vice President George Bush, who also serves as president of the Senate. Reagan greets the rotund white-haired Speaker of the House, Massachusetts congressman Tip O’Neill. The president then turns to address the Congress.

  But the ovation will not end.

  Reagan grins. He is genuinely thrilled by the outpouring of warmth. His cheeks and forehead are red, thanks to hours spent enjoying the sun in the White House Solarium during his recovery. He wears a well-tailored dark blue suit with a gray-and-blue-striped tie.

  Referring to the shooting, Reagan launches an unexpected joke: “You wouldn’t want to talk me into an encore.” Laughter erupts.

  After three full minutes, the applause finally dies down, and Reagan begins his remarks. The purpose of the speech is to gain congressional approval for his economic recovery program. However, almost immediately, he detours from the details of that plan to speak from the heart.

  “Mr. Speaker,” Reagan begins, “distinguished Members of the Congress, honored guests, and fellow citizens: I have no words to express my appreciation for that greeting.

  “I’d like to say a few words directly to all of you and to those who are watching and listening tonight, because this is the only way I know to express to all of you on behalf of Nancy and myself our appreciation for your messages and flowers and, most of all, your prayers, not only for me but for those others who fell beside me.”

  * * *

  At the mention of her name, all eyes shift to Nancy Reagan. She sits in the front row of the congressional balcony, wearing a bright red dress. The murder attempt has rattled her so deeply that she has stricken the word assassination from her vocabulary. Her public approval rating is one of the worst a First Lady has ever experienced, for many consider her a controlling ice queen. But what the public does not know is that Nancy Reagan sobbed at the hospital after her husband was shot. Even now, there are moments when she completely breaks down emotionally.

  Nancy knows the little things about her husband that every wife knows: that Ronald Reagan likes his eggs soft-boiled for precisely four minutes; that his favorite soup is a hardy combination of beef broth and lean ground hamburger served with a slice of French bread; and that the bumps on his left hand are caused by a hereditary disease that forces his pinky finger to curl permanently into his palm.1

  Nancy Reagan is one of the few who saw how pale and feeble her husband was in the hours after the shooting. For the first time, with those great dark circles under his eyes and haggard wrinkles, he looked like an old man. She saw the same frailty when he returned to the White House, walking in small, hesitant steps, his arms punctured by intravenous injections. In those days, he slept on a hospital bed in the Lincoln Bedroom, reliant on pain pills to get through the day and night. Nancy has even given up her own nightly sleeping pill to make sure that she will hear her husband should he cry out.

  Ronald and Nancy Reagan at George Washington University Hospital during his recovery

  The First Lady’s obsession with her husband’s well-being extends to the public arena. Nancy Reagan now works with Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver to regulate the president’s schedule. Fearing that he will be overscheduled, Nancy decides whom Reagan will and will not see. This practice will continue throughout Reagan’s presidency. Nancy’s behavior is so hands-on that Deaver will one day state, “I always imagined that when I died there would be a phone in my coffin and at the other end of it would be Nancy Reagan.”

  She also watched with trepidation on April 16 as Ronald Reagan made his first public appearance since the shooting—taking a stroll around the Rose Garden before photographers. The nation marveled at his vigor and quick recovery, but Nancy knows it was all a carefully orchestrated façade, designed to reassure Americans that their seventy-year-old president was still very capable of leading the country.

  On this evening, Nancy supervises her husband’s meticulous prespeech preparation. It begins with Ronald Reagan styling his hair immediately after stepping out of the shower. Reagan combs his still-wet locks forward until they hang over his eyes in long bangs. Then he applies a dab of Brylcreem in order to hold his hair in place and maintain the “wet look.” Only then does the president sweep his hair back, deftly combing it into the trademark pompadour that takes years off his appearance.

  “I never realized how much your face is changed when you comb your hair up in that pompadour,” Michael Deaver once said to Reagan, after witnessing the hairstyling ritual. At first, with the hair hanging down on Reagan’s face, Deaver was concerned that “Reagan looked eighty years old.”

  But with each stroke of the comb, youth magically reappears.

  “Oh, yes,” the president told Deaver. “It takes all the lines right out of my face.”

  Nancy has seen the combing ritual many times, just as she has seen countless makeup artists try to coax her husband into their chair before a big television appearance or a speech under bright lights. But harkening back to his old Hollywood days, Ronald Reagan refuses to wear makeup. That red-rouged appearance he now displays on the congressional podium is all natural.

  These are the peculiarities of a man who has long charted his own course, and after his near-death experience Nancy is thankful for the gift of being able to witness them at all. Not that the shooting is entirely be
hind the first couple. Nancy alone knows that even now, basking in the relieved applause of his political friends and rivals, Ronald Reagan is summoning all his strength and concealing a great deal of pain in order to give this address.

  Nancy needs strength as well. She knows America does not like her. The press has been ruthless, disapproving of what they perceive to be her power over the president. The criticism nettles her, but Nancy endures it. She can be a vain, selfish, and even deluded woman, far too reliant on fortune-tellers. But she is also very clever. And her loyalty and love for Ronald Reagan are absolute.

  * * *

  The president feels Nancy’s approval as his speech transitions from the personal to the patriotic. “The warmth of your words, the expression of friendship and, yes, love, meant more to us than you can ever know,” Reagan tells America and the Congress. “You have given us a memory that we’ll treasure forever. And you’ve provided an answer to those few voices that were raised saying that what happened was evidence that ours is a sick society.”2

  Reagan pauses for dramatic emphasis.

  “Well, sick societies don’t produce men like the two who recently returned from outer space.”

  The president is referring to astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen, who successfully piloted a new craft known as the Space Shuttle on its inaugural voyage into the heavens during Reagan’s convalescence. Columbia’s journey forever changes manned space flight. What Crippen and Young accomplished is, indeed, revolutionary.3 It seems that the entire world has undergone a major transition in the twenty-nine days since John Hinckley opened fire.

  The days of Reagan’s recovery also marked the end of an era, when the last top American World War II general, Omar N. Bradley, died at the age of eighty-eight. Just one day later, on April 9, a frightening new epoch begins when the first confirmed diagnosis of a disease that will come to be known as AIDS takes place in San Francisco. And just four days previously, Reagan penned his long-delayed letter to Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, opening a new epoch of relations between the two nuclear superpowers.4