Rawhide Down (20 page)

“You have the right to remain silent,” Myers told Hinckley. “I don’t want to discuss anything about what happened down here. I’m going to take you upstairs to my office, where we can talk.”

“Watch out for my wrist,” Hinckley said. “I think they broke it.”

“We’ll be careful with your wrists,” Myers said, handcuffing Hinckley behind his back and then taking him up a rear elevator to the third floor. With Dennis McCarthy trailing, Myers led Hinckley through the empty homicide office and into a small, white, windowless room used by detectives to interrogate murder suspects. Myers sat Hinckley down on one of the room’s three chairs and cuffed his left hand to the small metal table, freeing his right hand to fill out forms. Sitting across from Hinckley, Myers pulled out a form that advised the suspect of his right to remain silent and to consult an attorney. Hinckley said he understood his rights.

“Do you wish to answer any questions?” Myers asked.

“I’m not sure. I think I ought to talk to Joe Bates.”

“Who is Joe Bates?”

“He’s an attorney, in Dallas, Texas.”

Myers left the room to find someone who could track down the lawyer. He soon returned; with any luck, he could get Hinckley to decide an attorney was not necessary.

“I simply want to hear your side of the story,” Myers said. Then, trying to get his suspect to loosen up, he said, “You must be a Democrat.”

Hinckley chuckled.

“Whatever you tell me I am going to tell the court,” Myers said, adding, “We don’t have to talk about the shooting.”

“I don’t know anything about any shooting,” Hinckley replied.

Despite this denial, Hinckley expressed concern about his own safety. Myers assured him that the police would protect him.

At the moment, the urgent need was not to prove Hinckley’s guilt but to find out if coconspirators were about to strike other targets. The best way to discover whether Hinckley was part of a larger plot was to get him to tell them, so Myers was eager to keep Hinckley talking. With Dennis McCarthy looking on, the detective rolled an arrest report into the room’s typewriter. Saying he needed to take care of some paperwork, Myers began asking Hinckley questions about his background.

As Myers slowly pecked away at the typewriter, using his two index fingers, Hinckley provided his correct name, date of birth, and social security number. Among other things, he told Myers that he had recently arrived in D.C. on a bus from California and had been staying at the Park Central Hotel. Myers’s low-key approach seemed to be working: Hinckley even mentioned his arrest in Nashville.

Myers left the room again for a minute or two and inspected the contents of Hinckley’s pockets, which had been brought upstairs. He thought the magazine photos of the woman, who looked as if she could be a model, might get Hinckley to open up.

“Who’s the girl in your wallet?” Myers asked when he returned to the interrogation room.

“She’s a friend of mine,” Hinckley said.

“Why did you do this?”

“When you find my room, you’ll know why.”

Hinckley seemed to have no interest in saying more. Myers continued filling out the arrest report, noting that Hinckley was being charged with assault with intent to kill a police officer. The detective was about to add the charge of attempting to kill the president when he paused and turned to McCarthy.

“How do you spell ‘assassinate’?” Myers asked.

“I’ll spell it for you,” Hinckley interjected. “A-S-S-A-S-S-I-N-A-T-E.”

Myers was floored. The detective thought he had seen it all: drug deals gone wrong, violent domestic disputes, gambling-fueled rages, abductions, rapes, murders. A few years earlier, he had questioned a cop killer; in the end, the man coldly admitted, “Yeah, I killed that motherfucker. He was trying to be a hero.” Myers had studied the eyes of sobbing husbands who had killed their wives, of mothers who had identified the bodies of their own children, of thugs who had committed terrible crimes without apology or remorse. But nothing had prepared him for John Hinckley, an emotionless enigma, a man who was both worried about his safety and eerily calm. At first, Hinckley had seemed to want to talk, to tell the story that would apparently be instantly obvious to anyone who “found his room.” But then he went no further. He simply wouldn’t open up—except to spell a word, and correctly at that.

CHAPTER 10

“MY GOD. THE PRESIDENT WAS HIT?”

Hospital personnel continued to pour into GW’s emergency room; doctors and nurses now stood guard with Secret Service agents at the entrances to keep the area from becoming even more crowded with people who didn’t belong there. The noise level was higher than ever; at times, agents and nurses and doctors had to shout to be heard. Even so, the necessary work of trauma care was getting done.

The president seemed to be doing better. He was receiving universal donor blood, and doctors were speeding it into his system by kneading the blood bags dangling from hooks above his gurney. His blood pressure had risen to about 160, high enough that doctors decided to reduce his fluids. But blood kept flowing from his chest. Within a few minutes, the Pleur-evac had collected more than half a liter, then nearly a liter. The crimson stream was steady, and it was not slowing down.

Joe Giordano and David Gens watched it with concern; perhaps the president had suffered a second injury. They rolled him over to inspect his body for more wounds, but found none. Gens “milked” the chest tube to get a sense of the blood’s temperature. The stream was warm, meaning that it came from deep inside the president’s body, another bad sign.

Because the blood was flowing so fast, Giordano suspected that the bullet had ruptured an organ or an artery. Short of surgery, there was only one way to spot such damage. “We better get a chest X-ray,” Giordano said.

A technician wheeled over an X-ray machine and positioned its camera above the president’s chest. The platoon of doctors and nurses around the gurney stepped back six feet as the technician pressed the trigger on a small cord. Then the technician collected the X-ray cartridge and rushed off to radiology.

As the minutes ticked by, the president’s blood kept flowing. The Pleur-evac was now filled with over a liter of blood, more than 15 percent of Reagan’s total volume. Whatever the problem was, the chest tube wasn’t solving it. Giordano was running out of options—it was time to call a chest surgeon and get him to take a look.

Speaking as much to himself as to the others in the trauma bay, Giordano said, “We need Ben Aaron.”

*   *   *

N
OT WANTING TO
stoke panic, Secretary of State Alexander Haig ordered his driver not to use his official car’s lights and sirens as they sped down Constitution Avenue toward the White House. The former general sat in the sedan’s backseat, his right leg crossed over his left, his right foot bouncing up and down, a sign that he was deep in thought. Sitting next to him was his executive assistant, Woody Goldberg. “We have to send a message to all of our posts about what is happening,” Haig told Goldberg. “We are not going to have another Kennedy situation. If there is a conspiracy, we have to let the American people know.”

As a young military aide, Haig had helped plan Kennedy’s funeral, and he’d long suspected the Soviet Union or Cuba of playing a role in the killing. The former NATO commander also had firsthand experience with assassins: two years earlier, he had nearly been killed when terrorists bombed his motorcade in Brussels. Lately, such acts of political violence seemed to be happening with alarming frequency all over the world.

Upon their arrival at the White House, Haig and Goldberg hurried to Jim Baker’s office. Baker—along with Ed Meese, Lyn Nofziger, and Larry Speakes—had already left for the hospital, but the office of the chief of staff was serving as an unofficial headquarters for various officials involved in the response to the assassination attempt. His square jaw clenched, the tail of his trench coat flapping, Haig entered Baker’s office, marched toward his desk, and gruffly asked to be connected to the vice president. Aides looked confused. “How do we do that?” one asked.

When the White House switchboard eventually got Bush’s plane on the line, the connection was poor. Moreover, Air Force Two did not have scrambled voice communications; since anyone with a shortwave radio set could potentially listen to their conversation, Haig had to be vague when informing the vice president about the shooting.

Standing at Baker’s desk, Haig held the phone tight to one ear and put his free hand over his other ear to block out the noise in the office. When Bush came on the line, the secretary of state spoke loudly: “Mr. Vice President, this is Secretary Haig. We had a serious incident and I’m sending you a message by secure line. I recommend you return to Washington as soon as possible.”

Haig heard only static in reply.

“Do you read me, over,” Haig said, his voice rising. “This is Al Haig, over.”

Still there was no reply.

“This is Secretary Haig, over!”

Again Haig heard nothing but static.

“George, this is Al,” Haig bellowed. “Turn around! Turn around!”

Realizing that the bad connection made any communication with Bush impossible, Haig ended the call by saying, “I’ll have a message to you shortly.”

*   *   *

U
NTIL NOW
,
THE
vice president’s trip to Texas had been going exactly as planned. After his speech in Fort Worth, Bush returned to the airfield; at about 2:45, with Major Stetson Orchard at the controls, Air Force Two lifted off the runway.

Minutes later, as the plane flew toward Austin, Orchard and his copilot received a radio call from an air traffic controller. “Are you continuing to Austin or diverting to Washington?” the controller asked.

“We’re heading to Austin, as scheduled,” responded the copilot. He turned to Orchard with a raised eyebrow.

At that moment, one of the plane’s radio operators burst into the cockpit. “We just got a high-priority message,” he said. “You may not want to land in Austin.” The operator scurried off to find someone on the vice president’s staff.

Meanwhile, in an aft compartment of the plane, a Secret Service agent was getting a sketchy report about an assassination attempt over the radio headset plugged into his ear. He passed the information to the head of Bush’s detail, Agent Ed Pollard, who unclipped his seat belt and raced to Bush’s cabin. After knocking on the door, he entered and said, “Sir, we’ve just received word about a shooting in Washington. There is no indication that the president has been hit. Word is that two agents are down. That’s all we have right now. But I’m going to make some calls and see if I can get some more information.”

“Oh, no,” said Bush, stunned. “Where did it happen?”

“Outside the Washington Hilton.”

A few minutes later, Bush got word that Haig was on the line, but after picking up the phone he had heard little but static. Soon Haig’s message emerged from Air Force Two’s secure teletype machine: “Mr. Vice President: In the incident you will have heard about by now, the president was struck in the back and is in serious condition. Medical authorities are deciding now whether or not to operate. Recommend you return to D.C. at the earliest possible moment.”

Sitting in a high-backed chair in his small wood-paneled cabin, Bush began to sort through his thoughts about Haig’s message. His first concern, of course, was for the president’s health and safety; he also hoped that someone was comforting Nancy Reagan. As he tried to imagine how his responsibilities might change due to the crisis, the vice president remained calm. He felt prepared for this day. Yes, there was a brewing crisis in Poland, and yes, there were several other urgent items on the administration’s agenda. But the vice president had attended many of the president’s most important meetings, and he’d kept up with all the information in his briefing books. Bush felt confident that, if called upon, he could navigate the conflicting advice of aides and allies and make the necessary decisions.

By now, others on Air Force Two, including members of the vice president’s staff and three congressmen, were learning about the assassination attempt from a television in the plane’s conference room. Sitting on a couch and crowded around the kidney-shaped desk installed by President Johnson, they watched news reports on a black-and-white set mounted on a bulkhead. Information was still incomplete and scattered; TV reception was poor anyway, and the screen filled with static whenever the pilots used their radios. But when Frank Reynolds, a respected anchor at ABC News, assured his viewers that Reagan had escaped injury, everyone in the small room felt great relief.

“Mr. Reagan was not hit,” Reynolds reported. “He was bounced around as the Secret Service agents maneuvered or flung—I think is probably the right word—flung him into the car to get him out of there.” Sitting to Reynolds’s right was Sam Donaldson, who had come to the studio straight from the scene of the shooting.

Reynolds was handed a note on a yellow piece of paper. “Here we have a report,” he said as the broadcast cut to a replay of the shooting. “The president was not wounded.” When the camera returned to Reynolds, Donaldson could be seen leaning toward the anchorman, studying the piece of paper. Then Donaldson pointed at a word and said quietly, “He was.”