Killing Reagan (23 page)

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.”
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*   *   *

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.
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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

H
OUSE
OF
R
EPRESENTATIVES

W
ASHINGTON
, DC

A
PRIL
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 behind 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.”
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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

But the greatest changes to Reagan since the assassination attempt are more personal. In addition to allowing Nancy to assume control of his schedule, he surprised her one recent Sunday morning by suggesting they go to church. In the past, religion has been mostly politically expedient to the president. After the shooting, however, Ronald Reagan has become a man who understands his own mortality and is determined to draw closer to God.

*   *   *

“Sick societies,” Reagan continues, “don't produce young men like Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, who placed his body between mine and the man with the gun simply because he felt that's what his duty called for him to do.”