Rawhide Down (16 page)

Paul loosened the president’s tie, ripped apart his white shirt, and began slicing at his suit with scissors so nurses and technicians could insert intravenous lines and take Reagan’s blood pressure. Paul noticed blood on the president’s left hand. She still couldn’t stop her own hands from trembling, and she felt her skin getting hot and splotchy.

Another ER nurse elevated the foot of the bed to force more blood toward the president’s heart and head. A technician who had just arrived in the trauma bay helped Kathy Paul cut off his suit jacket. The technician then jabbed a three-foot-long IV line into a vein in Reagan’s right arm and snaked it to his heart so that it could supply fluids and measure how the heart was functioning. A smaller line was inserted into a vein in his left arm. The nurses and the technician were following standard ER procedures: strip, insert IVs, start fluids.

“I’ve got a line!” the technician shouted.

At first the technician was so busy that she didn’t look at her patient’s face. As usual, she had responded to the emergency call by getting to the trauma bay as fast as she could and then going right to work. But now she noticed that several men in suits surrounded the patient, and that some of them had radio plugs jammed in their ears. She also thought one or two of them were holding guns. Finally she looked closely at the patient’s face and realized that it was President Reagan. Dizzy and disoriented, she swiveled, grabbed a pack of smelling salts from a box on a shelf, and inhaled. A moment later, she returned to the president’s side.

Herndanez pulled off Reagan’s shoes and socks and began yanking at his pants, hoping to pop the button. But his trousers wouldn’t budge.
What are these, made of steel?
he wondered as he kept tugging. When they finally came off, Hernandez’s partner cut away the president’s boxer shorts with a pair of bandage scissors. He left the shredded undershorts on the table; the rest of the president’s clothes had already fallen into a pile on the floor.

Wendy Koenig had helped cut away the president’s shirt, and while doing so she noticed that it was stitched with the monogram “RR.” When she looked into Reagan’s ashen face, she saw that he was laboring to breathe and seemed about to go into shock.
He’s barely hanging on,
she thought.
He’s going to die.
Her hands started shaking. She fought back tears. Suddenly her mind flashed on two images. In the first, it was 1963 and she had just come home to find her dad sobbing in front of the television. The second was a vivid and recent nightmare in which Reagan had been wheeled into the ER and then died from a heart attack.

Now, trying to refocus, Koenig wrapped a blood pressure cuff around the president’s left arm, put her stethoscope under the device, and began to inflate the sleeve to constrict blood flow. She released the pressure and listened for the telltale thump of Reagan’s systolic blood pressure. But she couldn’t hear anything above the din in the trauma bay.

“I can’t get a systolic pressure,” Koenig told the nurses and doctors around the gurney.

Koenig repeated the procedure. Again, she heard nothing.

“Oh, shit, try it again!” Mitchell shouted. “Try again!”

*   *   *

S
INCE ENTERING THE
ER, Jerry Parr had stayed as close as possible to the president. As the nurses and technicians cut away Reagan’s clothes, he’d turned to Ray Shaddick and said, “Set up a perimeter.” He also told a nurse to prevent any unnecessary hospital personnel from coming into the ER.

But now there was nothing left for Parr to do. He watched the flurry of activity around the president; he heard a nurse trying to take Reagan’s blood pressure yell, “I can’t hear anything!”

He felt sick, helpless. What had happened? What had gone wrong? When he pushed the president into the limousine, had he caused one of Reagan’s ribs to puncture a lung or some other organ? Had he caused a heart attack? He felt nauseous and terrified. If the president died, it would be his fault. He shouldn’t have pushed him so hard.

Watching the nurses struggle to take the president’s blood pressure, Parr felt overwhelmed by an awful thought:
Oh, my God, we have lost him
.
We’ve lost another one
. Parr had never been a religious man, but he felt something surging within him
. Lord be with him,
he prayed.

Then the agent stepped up to the gurney and gently patted Reagan on the head. He didn’t want the president to feel alone, so he leaned over and looked him in the eyes.
Let him live,
Parr prayed.
God, let him live!

CHAPTER 8

THE TRAUMA BAY

Agent George Opfer, the head of Nancy Reagan’s Secret Service detail, was looking forward to a productive afternoon. It had been an easy day so far, and the first lady wasn’t scheduled to leave the White House grounds again, which meant he would have time to catch up on paperwork. But as he eased into a chair at a desk in W-16, the Secret Service command post beneath the Oval Office, he wondered about the first lady’s abrupt departure from a lunch in Georgetown a little while earlier. Something had been bothering Mrs. Reagan—she didn’t seem sick, just anxious and unsettled—and she had told Opfer to take her home. He had promptly escorted her from the luncheon. By the time he drove inside the White House gates at about 2:20 p.m., Mrs. Reagan seemed calmer.

The first lady immediately went upstairs to meet with her decorator and the White House usher about her plans for renovating the residence. Opfer returned to the command post, where he planned to spend the next couple of hours scheduling his team of seven agents. Happily, the week ahead was fairly routine. The first lady’s next major engagement wasn’t for two days, when she would be attending a lunch with the wife of Lloyd Bentsen, a Democratic senator, at Mrs. Bentsen’s home.

Opfer—a lean, blond New Yorker who sometimes received fan mail from young women who’d spotted his photograph in the newspapers when he happened to be standing next to Mrs. Reagan—had been assigned to guard the eventual first lady even before the November election determined who that would be. When Reagan triumphed, one of the service’s top agents, John Simpson, asked Opfer to pay him a visit. In June 1968, Simpson had led a team assigned to protect Reagan when he was an undeclared candidate for the Republican nomination, and he’d become friendly with the Reagans over the years. He knew Opfer would be apprehensive about guarding Mrs. Reagan, who had a reputation for being demanding and sometimes less than understanding when things didn’t go her way, so he offered some advice: “Don’t listen to the stories, because they are wrong. Make your own evaluation when you get out there. And one more thing: the Reagans really are a modern-day love story. So be prepared for that.”

In November 1980, while protecting Nancy Reagan at the couple’s Pacific Palisades home, Opfer had his first encounter with the president-elect. Mrs. Reagan introduced the two men; Reagan looked Opfer in the eye and said, with a bit of an edge in his voice, “Well, George, make sure you take good care of her.”

The hair on the back of Opfer’s neck stood up. Intentionally or not, there was something a little threatening in Reagan’s delivery, as if to let Opfer know that mistakes would not be tolerated. Opfer imagined being shipped off to some remote field office if he screwed up.

Now, as he sat in the command post and jotted notes on his scheduling forms, his earpiece suddenly came alive with radio traffic: there had been a shooting at the Hilton and the president was being rushed back to the White House. Opfer looked up and saw a supervisor and an agent frantically working the radios and phones in the communications area.

Opfer bolted from his chair and rushed over to see what was happening. The agent at the bank of radios said the president “had shots fired at him,” and the supervisor told Opfer to inform Mrs. Reagan that there had been an incident at the Hilton. As he raced for the stairs, he heard over his radio that the motorcade had changed course and was heading to GW. He knew the agents wouldn’t divert to the hospital without a good reason, which meant the president was almost certainly injured.

Now Opfer was desperate to reach Mrs. Reagan before she heard about the incident from someone else. He was certain that if he arrived even a few seconds behind the news, he’d be chasing the first lady across the White House driveway as she ran for the hospital. If he had learned one thing in the past few months, it was that Mrs. Reagan was her own woman. Especially in a crisis, she would never take orders from him. So it was critical that he get to her right away, approach her with extreme care, and somehow manage the situation as it evolved. Above all, he had to protect her from acting impulsively and putting herself in harm’s way. He knew she would stop at nothing to be at her husband’s side.

Opfer’s heart pounded as he took the stairs two at a time to the third floor of the residence and the White House solarium. As he neared the door to the solarium, he tried to calm down. Then he put on his best poker face, opened the door, and walked up the ramp leading into the room.

As Opfer entered, the first lady was talking to Ted Garber, the Reagans’ decorator, and Rex Scouten, the chief White House usher. When Opfer caught Mrs. Reagan’s eye, the first lady seemed puzzled; then as she walked toward him, her expression became anxious, and suddenly he felt certain that she knew that something awful had just happened.

In his calmest and most measured voice, Opfer told her, “There was a shooting when the president was departing the Hilton hotel. My information is that your husband was not injured, but others have been shot. The president is going to the hospital.”

The first lady’s eyebrows furrowed and she instantly seized on the obvious question. “George, why would they be taking him to the hospital if he wasn’t hurt?”

“It’s just precautionary,” he replied, hoping that this invention would allay her fears until he could learn whether a trip to the hospital would even be safe. For one thing, he worried that other assailants might target Mrs. Reagan or anyone trying to approach the hospital; for another, he knew nothing about the president’s condition. If he’d been seriously wounded, it might be traumatic for the first lady to see him.

“Besides,” the agent added, “maybe he is insisting on seeing the condition of the other people who were wounded.”

Before Opfer could utter another word, he was looking at Nancy Reagan’s back. She was hurrying for the elevator.

“I’m going to the hospital,” she said. “If you don’t get me a car, I’m going to walk.”

“No, let’s wait and see what happens,” Opfer said, following her. “It’s a madhouse over there. He’ll probably be coming right back to the White House any minute.”

“No, I’m going to the hospital,” she said.

“Once we get the all clear, I’ll take you over,” he said.

“No, I’m going now,” she replied.

There was no point in arguing. “Okay,” Opfer said. “How about this, give me a couple of minutes to have the cars ready and we can go.”

“Fine,” she said.

With Opfer leading the way, they took the stairs down to the ground floor. Then they headed for the diplomatic entrance to the White House, where the first lady’s two-car motorcade would assemble. He could hear Mrs. Reagan right behind him—she was nearly clipping his heels.

“George, when are we going?” He heard a note of panic in her voice.

“As soon as the cars are ready,” he answered.

By now Opfer had radioed instructions to prepare the motorcade. When the two agency sedans pulled up outside the diplomatic entrance, Opfer took his place in the front passenger seat of the first black car. Mrs. Reagan, wearing her red raincoat, sat in the back and was joined by her spokeswoman. Opfer made sure the doors were locked, as much to keep the first lady in as to keep danger out.

The two cars pulled out of the White House and onto Pennsylvania Avenue for the short ride to the hospital. The radio in Opfer’s ear fed him a steady stream of information, but since the radio’s frequency was unsecured the reports weren’t very specific. He still didn’t know how badly the president had been hurt.

Only a block or two from the White House, the small motorcade encountered heavy traffic and came to a stop. They were stuck for just a few minutes, but to Opfer the wait seemed interminable.

Soon two hands gripped Opfer’s shoulders from behind. “When am I going to get there to see him?” the first lady asked.

“We’re moving,” Opfer replied. “We’ll get there soon.”

A minute later, she seized his shoulders again. “George, I’m going to get out and walk. I need to get out and walk.”

“No, no, we can’t do that, it’s not safe,” Opfer said.

“I need to walk,” she said. “I have to get there.”

At last the traffic eased and they began making good progress. As soon as they reached the ER entrance, Opfer opened the car’s rear door. He watched a blur of red raincoat run for the emergency room doors and then hurried to catch up.

*   *   *

I
N THE CHAOS
of the emergency room, Dan Ruge, the gray-haired and decorous White House physician, remained remarkably composed. As soon as he saw an opening, he stepped up to the gurney carrying the president and used one of his delicate fingers to find an artery in one of Reagan’s feet. The president’s pulse was steady, a good sign.