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“He’s on the operating table,” Haig replied.

“He’s on the operating table?” Gergen said, sounding surprised.

“So the helm is right here,” Haig said. “And that means right here in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here.”

For a moment, the room grew quiet. Fielding turned to his right and glanced at Richard Allen; catching Allen’s eye, Fielding shook his head. Both men wondered the same thing: could it be true that the secretary of state did not understand presidential succession? After all, Haig had held a key position at the White House when Richard Nixon resigned and presidential power was transferred to Gerald Ford; how could he not know that after the vice president the Speaker of the House, not the secretary of state, was next in line to succeed the president? And as for the current hierarchy in the Situation Room, wasn’t Haig simply the point of contact? Nobody actually reported to him, even if technically he was the most senior cabinet official present.

But at this difficult moment, the last thing Allen or Fielding wanted was a confrontation with the combustible secretary of state over his authority. The best course of action, they believed, would be to simply ignore Haig’s bluster and try to work around him.

CHAPTER 13

“I AM IN CONTROL HERE”

At about 4:30 p.m., nurses tilted the president onto his right side at a 45-degree angle. After doctors thoroughly scrubbed their patient’s chest with antiseptic, it was time for Ben Aaron to begin his part of the surgery.

Assisting Aaron were Kathleen Cheyney, a thoracic surgical fellow, and David Adelberg, a surgical intern. Cheyney had assisted Aaron in scores of procedures, including two demanding heart operations in the last twenty-four hours. Adelberg was no stranger to Aaron’s operating room either; he had participated in more than half a dozen of Aaron’s recent surgeries. As Aaron washed his hands and arms in the OR’s sink before stepping to the operating table, Adelberg boldly asked if he could “lend a hand.”

Aaron stared at the young intern for a second. “If you have the time,” he replied.

Aaron was determined to conduct the operation as he would any other, and he had discussed the point with Dan Ruge, the White House physician, who fully agreed. Shortly before entering the operating room, Aaron had been approached by one of his friends, an excellent chest surgeon, who asked if he could assist in the operation. Aaron respected the surgeon, but they had never worked together and Aaron worried that adding a new variable to the procedure might lead to VIP syndrome and unexpected problems. Instead, he preferred to work with the two young doctors—Cheyney was thirty-two, Adelberg was thirty-one—who were part of his usual team.

Aaron took his place behind Reagan’s elevated back. Adelberg was to his left; Cheyney stood on the other side of the table. From their three vantage points, the surgeons studied the president. All admired his physique: it was hard to believe he had recently turned seventy, because he had the body and muscle tone of a fifty-year-old who lifted weights.

Aaron picked up a No. 10 scalpel and prepared to make a six-inch incision. He started just under the left nipple, slicing the skin in an arc through the chest tube hole and toward the back. He could have made a far longer incision, but a smaller one would require less recovery time and he could always enlarge it if he had to. As Aaron cut through sinew, fat, and skin, Cheyney retracted the tissue, making it easier for Aaron to see what he was doing and to continue slicing deeper into the chest.

Once the incision was deep enough, Aaron used a retractor—a tool also called a rib spreader—to pry apart the president’s fifth and sixth ribs, creating a six-inch-wide space. By this point he could see the lung and heart inside the chest cavity; he also noticed that the seventh rib had splintered where it had been struck by the bullet. After cauterizing the blood vessels he had just sliced open, he turned his attention to a large pool of blood and clots deep in the chest cavity. With a gloved hand, he scooped out the gelatinous material and deposited it in a kidney-shaped basin. In combination with the blood collected by the Pleur-evac, this brought Reagan’s total blood loss to 3.1 liters, or about half of his total blood volume.

Aaron then lined the chest with sterile surgical sponges to soak up blood so he could inspect organs and tissue. With the help of a powerful light strapped to his head, he began by checking the pericardium, the sac containing the heart. It was uninjured, which meant the heart was fine, too. Next he gently touched and inspected the aorta, which he found free of damage. He looked over the diaphragm; it, too, was intact. Aaron was relieved. If any of these organs or structures had been damaged, the president would be in far more trouble.

Aaron now turned his attention to the track of the bullet. He followed it through the skin, into the chest, and into the lower lobe of the left lung. But the hole puzzled him. The wound on Reagan’s skin was a narrow slit no more than half an inch long, suggesting that the president had been hit by a fragment, not an intact round. But the path of injury through the lung looked as if it had been bored by a drill bit the diameter of a dime. Aaron couldn’t figure out how that was possible.

As he felt the splintered rib and studied the wound track, Aaron realized that the projectile had ricocheted off the rib and begun to whirl end over end, chewing up tissue as it moved through the body. From the X-ray, Aaron knew that the bullet had come to rest in the lower lobe of the left lung, about an inch from the heart. Now he just had to find it.

*   *   *

W
ITH HIS BACK
to the conference room’s table, Al Haig watched the television in horror as it flashed to a live feed of an administration spokesman addressing the media—from the White House press room.

“He’s right upstairs here!” Haig said, glaring at the screen.

It was a little after four. No one was supposed to speak to reporters without first consulting the officials in the Situation Room; Haig had made that very clear. But there was Larry Speakes, the deputy White House press secretary, talking to millions of Americans, and he was floundering. Reporters were hurling question after question at him and Speakes didn’t have answers.

“Is the president in surgery?” asked Lesley Stahl, an aggressive correspondent for CBS News who was growing increasingly frustrated by the lack of information from the White House.

“I can’t say,” Speakes answered.

“We have gotten confirmed reports,” Stahl fired back. “So have other network news, so have the wires, can’t you help us with that, Larry?”

Again Speakes dodged the question: “As soon as we can confirm it, we will.”

Unwilling to let Speakes off the hook, Stahl said, “Larry, his brother has been called by the White House and has been told that the president is in surgery right now, that he already has blood transfusions. Is your information going to be that far behind what we are getting from other sources?”

Speakes gave her another nonanswer, and a flood of questions from other reporters followed.

“Could you confirm the surgery report with a phone call or something?”

“Larry, can you give us an understanding of how serious the chest wound is?”

“Do you have any idea? There are reports that it punctured the lung.”

To each question, Speakes offered a variation of the same response: I can neither confirm nor deny anything.

He was digging a deeper and deeper hole, not only for himself but for the administration. By now, anyone watching Speakes might well conclude that instead of intentionally holding back information, White House officials actually knew little or nothing about what was really happening. Being secretive was sometimes forgivable; being ignorant or incompetent was not.

Watching this disastrous encounter with the media, Haig became incensed. He wanted to yank Speakes from the podium. The CIA director, William Casey, who had joined the others in the Situation Room within the past hour, thought the spokesman was in “over his head” and his answers were scaring the public. David Gergen, who had struggled during his own attempt to handle the press, was anxious. “What’s he doing up there?”

“I don’t know,” replied Frank Ursomarso. “I thought he was at the hospital.”

“Go up there and pull him off,” Gergen said.

Ursomarso scribbled a note asking Speakes to leave the podium and raced to the press room.

But even as Ursomarso ran upstairs, the journalists kept pushing Speakes for answers.

“Who’s running the government right now?” called out one reporter.

Before Speakes could answer, another asked, “If the president goes into surgery and goes under anesthesia, would Vice President Bush become the acting president at that moment or under what circumstances does he?”

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

“Larry, who’ll be determining the status of the president and whether the vice president should, in fact, become the acting president?”

“Pardon?”

“Who will be determining the status of the president?”

“I don’t know the details on that.”

For Haig, this was the final straw. He had worked diligently to reassure the country; now, that work was unraveling—and on national television, no less. Leaping from his chair and charging out of the conference room, he declared that he had to “repair” this catastrophe. Passing through the communications area, he spotted Allen, who was just hanging up after taking another call from Meese at the hospital.

“Why don’t you come with me,” Haig said, grabbing Allen’s elbow. “How do you get to the press room?”

“Up here,” Allen said, pointing to a set of narrow stairs that led from the basement to the briefing room.

“Yeah,” Haig said. “He’s just turning this into a goddamn disaster.”

“Who has?” Allen asked.

“Speakes.”

“Did he walk in up here?”

“He’s up there now.”

“Christ almighty, why is he doing that?” Allen asked.

Haig jogged up the steps with Allen at his heels. A female staff member saw Haig as he emerged from the stairwell. “They want to know who is running the government,” she told him.

“Wait,” Allen said, trying to grab the secretary of state before he walked into the room. Gergen and Ursomarso also tried to stop Haig; seeing that he was upset, they wanted to give him a chance to calm down before he stepped into the glare of the television lights.

But Haig would not be denied.

*   *   *

S
HORTLY AFTER
L
ARRY
Speakes received Frank Ursomarso’s note, he made his escape. But before the journalists could even leave the briefing area to call their editors with updates, they heard a female voice yell, “They’re coming back, they’re coming back. The secretary of state! The secretary of state!”

Haig entered the press room a moment later. Standing in front of a blue backdrop, he gripped the wooden podium with both hands, his West Point ring clacking against it.

Allen joined Haig on stage and stood just off the secretary of state’s right shoulder. The national security advisor wore a stern look for the cameras, but he was alarmed about his colleague’s physical condition. Haig looked as if he might collapse. His knuckles were white and his knees shook. Sweat popped from his pale forehead and cheeks. He labored for breath.

Standing there, Allen raced through various scenarios and his potential actions. If Haig keeled over, should he hurry to the podium, grab the former general, hand him off to another aide, and then continue the briefing himself? Or should he drag Haig offstage and seek medical attention?

Hunching over the podium and looking down at the throng of journalists in the small press room, the secretary of state said, “I just wanted to touch upon a few matters associated with today’s tragedy.” Haig was trying to speak in a measured voice but was betrayed by the need to take gulps of air. “First, as you know, we are in close touch with the vice president who is returning to Washington. We have in the Situation Room all of the officials of the cabinet who should be here and ready at this time.

“We have informed our friends abroad of the situation, the president’s condition as we know it, stable, now undergoing surgery.” Several reporters immediately made a note—for the first time, an administration official had confirmed what the media already knew. “And there are absolutely no alert measures that are necessary at this time we’re contemplating.”

“The crisis management,” a reporter asked. “Is that going to be put into effect when Bush arrives?”

“The crisis management is in effect,” Haig said, his tone ominous.

“Who’s making the decisions for the government right now?” asked Bill Plante of CBS. “Who’s making the decisions?”

“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. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the vice president and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.”

Allen was stunned. In the Situation Room, he had wondered whether Haig understood presidential succession, and now he knew the answer. How could the secretary of state be confused about this crucial point? Was he simply ignorant or had he gone completely around the bend?