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Allen could easily imagine how quickly the media would seize on this latest evidence of Haig’s questionable judgment. As he stood stock-still a few feet from the secretary of state, Allen needed every bit of his willpower to prevent the frustration from showing.

*   *   *

A
S
H
AIG STEPPED
to the podium and began speaking to reporters, Caspar Weinberger watched him on the Situation Room’s television. The secretary of defense was baffled. “I wonder why they’re running an old tape of Al Haig’s,” he said.

“That’s not a tape,” someone replied.

“But I thought he was right there,” Weinberger said, looking at Haig’s empty seat.

A minute later, when Weinberger and the others watched Haig misrepresent the line of succession, the room erupted.

“That’s a mistake!” someone said.

“What’s this all about?” Don Regan asked. “Is he mad?”

“He’s wrong, he doesn’t have such authority,” Weinberger said.

Though irritated with Haig, Weinberger was preoccupied by a much more serious concern. The secretary of defense had just gotten off the phone with his top general, who reported that two Soviet submarines were patrolling unusually close to the United States. Already worried that the Soviets might try to take advantage of a perceived leadership vacuum in Washington, Weinberger found it deeply troubling that the submarines were now outside their usual patrol area in the Atlantic Ocean. According to the general, the nearest sub could now drop a missile with a nuclear warhead on Washington in just ten minutes and forty-seven seconds, a span that was about two minutes shorter than usual. During the phone call, Weinberger told the general to increase the readiness of more than two hundred crews of nuclear bombers, which meant ordering them to their planes or ready rooms and thus shaving several minutes off their response times. He also asked the general to ensure that all U.S. troops were prepared for any kind of aggressive action by the Soviet military.

A few minutes later, when Haig and Allen returned to the Situation Room, Weinberger relayed the new information to them. Allen looked across the table at Haig—he wasn’t sure the secretary was paying attention. “Al, are you listening?” Allen asked. “Ten minutes, forty-seven seconds—the nearest Soviet sub.”

But Haig
was
listening: when Weinberger went on to say more about the submarines and then informed the room that the bomber crews of the U.S. Strategic Air Command were now “moving from alert in their quarters and on the post to their planes,” Haig seemed barely able to contain his irritation.

“I said up there, Cap. I’m not a liar. I said there had been no increased alert.”

“Well, I didn’t know you were going up, Al,” Weinberger said. “I think if—”

“I had to,” Haig snapped, “because we had the question already started and we were going to be in a big flap.”

“Well, I think we could have done a little better if we had concentrated on a specific statement to be handed out,” said Weinberger, rebuking Haig for ignoring his own requirement that no official was to address the press without first getting his statements approved by the others in the Situation Room. “When you’re up there with questions, why then it’s not anything you can control.”

Weinberger, a keen lawyer and tough administrator who had served as California’s budget director when Reagan was governor, was not the sort to back away from a fight. Now he and Haig continued their verbal battle about the issue of alerts and DEFCON levels. After several minutes of intense exchanges, Haig again lost patience.

“Let me ask you a question, Cap,” Haig said. “Is this submarine approach, is that what’s doing this, or is it the fact that the president’s under surgery?”

“Well, I’m discussing it from the point of view that at the moment, until the vice president actually arrives here, the command authority is what I have,” Weinberger said, reiterating what he had been told by Ed Meese earlier on the phone. “And I have to make sure that it is essential that we do everything that seems proper.”

“You’d better read the Constitution,” Haig said.

“What?” Weinberger said incredulously.

“You’d better read the Constitution,” Haig said. “We can get the vice president any time we want.”

*   *   *

V
ICE
P
RESIDENT
B
USH
was still a couple of hours away from Washington in Air Force Two. At 3:25, the plane had landed at Austin’s Robert Mueller Municipal Airport and pulled to a stop at the far end of the tarmac. Bush and the other dignitaries stayed on the plane, and at one point the vice president slipped unobtrusively into his small cabin for a few minutes of solitude. As he sat in the cabin, he prayed, both for the president and for the country. He also jotted some notes on an in-flight information card, scribbling that it had taken about twenty minutes for the “enormity” of the situation to finally hit him.

The plane’s passengers followed reports of the shooting on the fuzzy television set in the conference room. When he returned from his cabin, Bush chatted with his guests, who included Representative Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat who was the powerful House majority leader.

Bush felt awful about what had happened to Reagan, whom he considered a friend. “How could anybody work up a feeling of sufficient personal malice toward Ronald Reagan to want him dead?” he wondered aloud. The vice president also said he felt no special burden, no impending sense of destiny. “He seems so calm,” Wright wrote in his diary aboard the plane, “no signs whatever of nervous distress.”

The pilots and Secret Service agents hoped to refuel and take off as quickly as possible, but the plane’s fuel truck never materialized. Growing uneasy, Bush’s military aide and a Secret Service agent ran onto the tarmac in search of fuel. They quickly spotted an Esso truck filling up a Braniff Airways jet and requisitioned it for Air Force Two. By 4:10 the plane was airborne again.

As Air Force Two streaked toward Washington, Ed Pollard and the military aide entered Bush’s cabin to lobby the vice president to take a helicopter from Andrews Air Force Base directly to the South Lawn of the White House. Security was paramount, Pollard and the military aide argued, and therefore flying to the White House was the safest thing to do. Besides, there was no time to waste, and it was far more efficient to land on the South Lawn than to fly to the Naval Observatory and then fight rush-hour traffic to the White House.

But Bush wasn’t sure. Yes, it would make great television, but he worried that landing on the South Lawn would send the wrong signal to the country and seem disrespectful to the first lady, especially since the helicopter would touch down right outside her bedroom window. Landing at the White House might heighten alarm; it might also suggest that he was usurping power. Bush decided to follow his usual routine and fly to the observatory. “Only the president lands on the South Lawn,” he told Pollard and the military aide.

Bush then dictated a secure message for the officials in the Situation Room: “We will touchdown at 1835 local at Andrews. I plan to helicopter to the observatory and motorcade to the White House. Approximate arrival there at 1900. Feel strongly about proper mode of arrival unless situation dictates more immediate route to White House.”

*   *   *

T
HE CROWD OF
doctors, nurses, and agents made the normally chilly operating room warm and humid. Aaron’s headlamp threw off a good deal of heat as well; a nurse occasionally dabbed his forehead with a towel to prevent sweat from dripping into the president’s open chest. From time to time, Aaron eyed a clock on the wall. He hadn’t given himself a deadline, but he didn’t want to keep Reagan under anesthesia for any longer than necessary.

As Aaron worked, others on the surgical team continued to transfuse Reagan with red blood cells, as well as with plasma and platelets, blood products that promote clotting and slow bleeding. They pumped several other fluids through the IV lines, including lactated Ringer’s, a water solution of calcium, potassium, lactate, and salt that helps rehydrate patients and keep their blood pressure up. They also gave the president an antibiotic to prevent infection, and a diuretic to help him flush all the fluids they had given him. Using blood samples drawn from the arterial line in his left hand, they carefully monitored his oxygen levels. At the start of the operation, the doctors had adjusted the flow of air into Reagan’s lungs so that it was 100 percent oxygen; by now, with his readings improved though still far from optimal, they had reduced the flow to a steady 50 percent.

To accommodate Aaron’s work, an anesthesiologist carefully worked the respiration bag to inflate and deflate Reagan’s lungs. To give Aaron more room to manipulate the left lung as he began searching for the bullet, Cheyney and Adelberg took turns reaching into the six-inch hole in Reagan’s chest and cupping the heart and gently nudging it aside. For Adelberg, holding the president’s beating heart in his gloved hand was a galvanizing experience; he had never felt so focused in his life.

Massaging the lung with his fingertips, Aaron felt for the piece of metal he knew must be nestled in the spongy tissue. The hemorrhaging was tapering off, likely stanched by the pressure of his fingers and the air flowing from the respirator. But ten minutes of squeezing and probing the lung yielded nothing, and Aaron began to imagine the next day’s
New York Post
headline: “Doc Leaves Bullet in President!”

After a few more minutes of fruitless searching, Aaron voiced his doubts. “I think I might call it quits,” he said. But speaking the thought aloud only seemed to spur him on—instead, he redoubled his efforts.

At one point, frustrated, Aaron turned to Cheyney and offered her a chance to hunt for the projectile. She pressed the president’s lung between her fingers, blindly looking for the metal fragment. She respected Aaron for giving her a chance to find the bullet, and she decided that if she succeeded she would grab Aaron’s hand, pull it inside Reagan’s chest, and pass him the slug so he would get the credit. But Cheyney had no luck either, and after a minute or two Aaron took over once more.

When Aaron again wondered aloud whether he should halt the surgery without retrieving the bullet, Dutch Lichtman, one of the anesthesiologists, figured it was time to lighten the mood.

“Having a good time, Ben?” he asked.

Some of the doctors and nurses chuckled. Aaron smiled. “I’m having a marvelous time, couldn’t be better.”

But with each passing minute, his anxiety grew. He had left plenty of bullets in patients when he thought they would do no harm. But this was a special case, and he continued to worry about the medical and political implications of leaving a would-be assassin’s bullet in the president’s chest. Then, as he kept coming up empty, Aaron was suddenly seized by dread—what if the bullet wasn’t in the lung anymore? What if it had slipped into a vein, entered the heart, and then been propelled from the heart into the president’s circulatory system? That could be disastrous—if the bullet ended up in the carotid artery, for instance, it could be pumped straight up to the brain.

Aaron asked for another X-ray.

*   *   *

A
S THE AFTERNOON
wore on, the ashtrays scattered around the Situation Room’s conference table filled up; plumes of cigarette smoke created a haze under the ceiling’s fluorescent lights. Officials sipped Coke, coffee, and Sanka as they worked. Eager for news, they kept an eye on the television and occasionally left the conference room to speak to subordinates by telephone. Aides quietly entered to whisper updates to their bosses. Cabinet secretaries from a number of different departments, including Transportation and Commerce, filtered in and out.

“What’s the situation with the Polish strike?” Richard Allen asked an aide. The staff member reported that the labor strike had been put off indefinitely: Solidarity and the Polish government had reached a compromise. Allen was relieved. That was one less international crisis to worry about.

By now, Fred Fielding had obtained the presidential succession documents he and his staff had prepared, and he began reviewing them with Al Haig and Dan Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff. One was a letter, to be signed by Reagan, informing congressional leaders of his decision to temporarily transfer power. Fielding also showed Haig and Murphy a second letter, to be signed by the vice president and a majority of cabinet secretaries in the event that the president was unable to sign the first. It declared that Reagan’s “present inability to discharge” his duties required the transfer of presidential authority to Bush.

Among the many officials in the conference room at the time was Richard Darman, one of Jim Baker’s top advisors. The sight of Fielding, Haig, and Murphy reviewing the succession documents made him uneasy. In Darman’s view, many of the president’s aides had responded to the crisis far too emotionally. Darman did not think this was the best time or place to discuss a historic transfer of presidential authority.

Darman asked Fielding for the documents, saying that he would hold them until they were needed. Then Darman left the room to call Baker at the hospital. Upon hearing his aide’s account of the conversation initiated by Fielding, Baker was annoyed; in his view, Fielding should not have raised the matter without consulting him first. Baker told Darman that he and Meese had already conferred and rejected the notion of transferring power to Bush, at least until they learned more from the doctors. After the phone call, Darman walked to his office and put the papers in his safe.