Rawhide Down (33 page)

Left the hotel at the usual side entrance and headed for the car—suddenly there was a burst of gunfire from the left. S.S. Agent pushed me onto the floor & jumped on top. I felt a blow to my upper back that was unbelievably painful. I was sure that he had broken my rib.… Getting shot hurts. Still my fear was growing because no matter how hard I tried to breathe it seemed I was getting less & less air.

By then, almost two weeks after the attempt, he had been told that the bullet that struck him—John Hinckley’s sixth and last shot—had ricocheted off the right rear quarter panel of the armored limousine and flown through the small gap between the car’s door and its frame. Because the bullet hit the car at an angle, it was flattened and its Devastator charge was eliminated; the shape of the bullet as it struck Reagan also explains why the bullet’s track through his body was a dime-sized channel even though the wound in his chest was merely a slit.

In the hours after the shooting, while being worked on by doctors and nurses at the hospital, the president prayed for his life. He also prayed for his assailant, realizing that he couldn’t ask for God’s grace while feeling hatred in his heart for the man who had shot him.

The president concluded his entry about the shooting by writing: “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.” Over the next few years, aides and friends recalled Reagan telling them the same thing. “He felt like he had been spared for a purpose,” James Baker recalled.

Never one to presume that he understood God’s intentions, Reagan later speculated that he’d been granted his wish to live so that he could help mitigate the risk of Armageddon. “Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war,” he wrote. “Perhaps that is the reason I was spared.”

Soon after his discharge from the hospital, Reagan retreated to the White House solarium and handwrote a personal appeal to Leonid Brezhnev. Reagan stated that he hoped to create “the circumstances which will lead to meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace.” Though neither Brezhnev nor his immediate successors proved particularly responsive, Reagan continued to pursue an end to the Cold War. Even as he spoke harshly of the Soviets, increased the nation’s defense budget, and launched the expensive antimissile program popularly known as Star Wars, he hoped to engage with a Soviet leader who would commit himself to serious negotiations. That leader appeared in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Reagan and Gorbachev held four summits and in 1987 achieved a historic accord that substantially reduced nuclear weapons. In 1989, ten months after Reagan left office, German citizens tore down the Berlin Wall. Two years later, a decade after Reagan’s appeal to Brezhnev, the Soviet Union collapsed, ending the Cold War.

*   *   *

T
HE PRESIDENT
’
S PERFORMANCE
on the day of his near assassination reassured the nation; in particular, his ability to entertain his doctors and nurses with stories and jokes caused much astonishment. Not surprised was his son Ron Reagan. “He was a performer, basically, and that was what his background was,” the younger Reagan said three decades later. “It’s hard to turn that off. He also probably wanted to put everyone else in the room at ease.” In fact, the president himself commented on the reflexive impulse that drove him to tell jokes and jot notes late into the night. “There was a crowd standing around,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “Somebody ought to entertain them some way.”

Even under the most harrowing of circumstances, Reagan’s prodigious memory held a ready supply of one-liners; relying on his years of training as an entertainer, he used his quick wit to defuse the tension in both the emergency room and the recovery room. Ironically, Reagan’s two most famous roles as a Hollywood actor involved dramatic hospital or medical scenes. In 1940, he played George Gipp, the famed Notre Dame football player, in
Knute Rockne All American
. In the movie, Gipp’s coach, Rockne, visits him at his bedside as the star player lies dying. “I haven’t got a complaint in the world, Rock, I’m not afraid,” Gipp says, fighting to keep his eyes open. “What’s tough about this? Rock, some day, when the team is up against it, the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they got, win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then. But I’ll know about it. I’ll be happy.”

In 1942, Reagan gave what is generally regarded as his best performance in
Kings Row,
a film in which he plays Drake McHugh, a playboy who suffers hard times and is badly injured in a train accident. In the film, a doctor unnecessarily amputates McHugh’s legs. When he awakens from his delirium, McHugh looks down at the bed and screams in terror, “Where’s the rest of me?”

It seems fitting, then, that Reagan delivered his best line of the day—“I hope you are all Republicans”—right before he was put to sleep on the operating table.

That line and others, as well as the president’s extraordinary courage and poise, had a powerful effect on Reagan’s tenure. Immediately after the assassination attempt, Reagan’s popularity improved dramatically: his approval rating went from 59 percent in mid-March to 73 percent within days of the shooting. In late May, it was still standing at 68 percent. David Broder, one of the country’s most respected political journalists, wrote just two days after the assassination attempt that “what happened to Reagan on Monday is the stuff of which legends are made.” Broder went on: “As long as people remember the hospitalized president joshing his doctors and nurses—and they will remember—no critic will be able to portray Reagan as a cruel or callous or heartless man.” Three decades later, Broder stood by that assessment. “He was politically untouchable from that point on,” Broder said in an interview. “He became a mythic figure.”

Lou Cannon, Reagan’s most esteemed biographer, came to a similar conclusion. In a recent interview, Cannon said that Reagan’s actions after the assassination attempt “cemented a bond with the American people that never dissolved. And that’s because they saw a genuine person that day. They began to feel for him the way they would feel for a friend or someone close to them, not just some politician.”

Of course, Reagan’s popularity fluctuated throughout his eight years in office, rising and falling in response to his actions and to events beyond his control. He and his policies were roundly criticized by liberals and moderates, and he often frustrated even his most loyal supporters by compromising on core issues. He preached the importance of balancing the budget but left behind massive deficits. He railed against the evils of taxes but supported substantial tax increases to save Social Security and prevent the budget deficit from spiraling further out of control. He pledged to rid the government of waste, fraud, and abuse but stood by passively as many of his closest aides became ensnared in ethics probes and criminal investigations.

Reagan clearly enjoyed the role of president, but he was disparaged for sometimes seeming less than engaged with his presidential duties and for providing minimal supervision of his staff. That hands-off approach paid dividends in his first term, when he succeeded in his effort to avoid becoming mired in the details of governing. But it contributed to near catastrophe in his second, when the most difficult crisis of his presidency—the Iran-contra scandal—severely tested his reputation for integrity. Even then, Reagan never faced a serious threat of removal from office. The American public would not have stood for it: most people had come to genuinely like the man, even if they didn’t always support his decisions or policies.

By the time he left office in January 1989, Reagan had the highest approval rating of any departing president since Harry Truman. In November 1988, his vice president, George H. W. Bush, was elected president, a clear sign that the country wanted to keep the Reagan legacy alive.

History has come to regard Ronald Reagan fondly. A survey by C-SPAN of historians that was released in 2009 ranked Reagan as the tenth most successful president out of the forty-two men who had held the office to that point. He was rated the eighth most successful president in international relations and the seventh most successful in “performance within the context of the times.” And Reagan is widely credited with reinvigorating the conservative movement at a particularly perilous moment in its history; many of today’s most prominent Republicans consider him their party’s most inspiring and transformational figure of the past several decades.

*   *   *

N
OT ALL OF
the president’s advisors fared as well. Mike Deaver, who did more to shape the public’s perception of Reagan than any other aide, left the White House in 1985 and was later convicted of lying to Congress and to a grand jury investigating his lobbying practices. Ultimately, Deaver became involved in several philanthropic organizations and regained his stature as a powerful Washington insider; he died in 2007. Ed Meese remained presidential counselor until 1985, when he became attorney general. Several months before the end of Reagan’s second term, however, Meese resigned after a lengthy but inconclusive investigation by an independent counsel (he was never charged with a crime). Meese has since become one of the country’s most influential advocates for conservative causes. Jim Baker, widely admired as an excellent chief of staff, became secretary of the Treasury during Reagan’s second term. He then served as secretary of state in the presidential administration of his good friend George H. W. Bush.

Within months of the assassination attempt, National Security Advisor Richard Allen became ensnared in an investigation into whether he improperly accepted a $1,000 honorarium from a Japanese journalist who interviewed Nancy Reagan shortly after the inauguration. In fact, Allen had simply intercepted the payment, turned it over to a secretary to forward to White House lawyers, and forgotten about it. (The cash was rediscovered later in a White House safe, prompting an FBI investigation.) Although cleared of wrongdoing by the White House and Justice Department, Allen resigned anyway, saying that his relationship with Reagan had been sabotaged by other White House aides for unrelated reasons. Allen, who had used a personal tape recorder to document what happened in the Situation Room that day, recently decided to turn his tapes over to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Alexander Haig’s tenure in the Reagan administration remained stormy; after a number of other clashes with White House aides, he left the administration in June 1982. In 1988, he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination. For the rest of his life—he died in February 2010—he was most often remembered as the official who, on the day of the assassination attempt, asserted on national television that he was “in control” and then provided a mangled version of presidential succession.

*   *   *

P
RESS SECRETARY
J
AMES
Brady survived his terrible wound, but he never fully recovered. He spent 239 days at George Washington University Hospital; during that time, he underwent three additional operations to prevent blood clots from reaching his lungs and heart and to stop leakage of spinal fluid. He suffered from pneumonia, fevers, and other infections. Partially paralyzed, he endured hundreds of hours of excruciating physical therapy so he could learn to walk again; nevertheless, he was largely confined to a wheelchair for the next three decades. Despite the damage to his brain, however, he never lost his trademark wit. “When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade,” he told a reporter in 2006. “I have several stands around here.”

In the wake of the shooting—and after spotting her five-year-old son holding a loaded handgun at a friend’s house four years after the assassination attempt—Sarah Brady became a major proponent of stiffer gun-control laws. After Reagan left office, Jim Brady joined his wife in that effort, which culminated in the passage of the Brady Law in 1993. The law requires background checks of anyone buying a firearm from a licensed dealer.

Officer Thomas K. Delahanty, an eighteen-year veteran of the Washington police force, retired on full disability in November 1981; the bullet that struck him in the back caused nerve damage too severe to allow him to return to duty. Though doctors had at first decided not to operate because the round lay so close to his spine, they changed their minds after learning that the bullet was a Devastator: it retained the potential to explode or leach toxins within the officer’s body even after the shooting. Surgeons wearing bulletproof vests successfully removed the bullet three days after the assassination attempt. FBI agents would later determine that only one of the Devastator rounds actually exploded. That one struck Jim Brady.

Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy was the first of the wounded men to be discharged from the hospital. Before leaving GW on April 7, he paid a visit to the president, who had asked to see him so that he could thank the agent for saving his life. “Hey, Tim,” Reagan said, his eyes twinkling. “You know—Brady, Delahanty, McCarthy, and Reagan. What did this guy have against the Irish?” McCarthy laughed, and later realized that the joke was really a lesson: if the president could put the shooting behind him, he could, too.

The first lady, however, had a difficult time in the aftermath of the assassination. A natural worrier, Nancy Reagan found herself sobbing uncontrollably at times. She lost weight and became panicky whenever her husband left the White House gates. She finally gained solace from an unconventional quarter: an astrologer who claimed that she could have warned Reagan not to leave the White House on March 30. In her autobiography, the former first lady wrote that she came to rely on the astrologer as much for her “personal concern and support” as for her interpretation of the stars. To this day, friends say, Mrs. Reagan has trouble discussing the shooting and chokes up when she is forced to relive those first terrible moments at the hospital when she didn’t know whether her husband would live or die.