Reagan: The Life (44 page)

On this day the president appealed to the work ethic he said he shared with union members. He reminded them of his life membership in the AFL-CIO, and he cited
Samuel Gompers, the founder of the AFL, on the subject of individual initiative. “
Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment,” Reagan quoted Gompers. “In the last analysis the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or
social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers.” Reagan noted that Gompers was speaking against
socialism, but he believed the same might be said of the welfare state. “America depends on the work of labor, and the economy we build should reward and encourage that labor as our hope for the future,” he said. “We’ve strayed far from the path that was charted by this man who believed so much in the freedom and dignity of the worker.” The goal of the administration’s economic reforms was to reengage the American spirit of enterprise, Reagan said. “The idea is to unleash the American worker, encourage the American investor, and let each of us produce more to make a better life for all.” He hoped he could count on the unionists. “You and your forebears built this nation. Now please help us rebuild it.”

The union leaders listened respectfully but skeptically. One of their chiefs had already warned the president that labor must not be made a scapegoat in the administration’s efforts to reform the economy. After Reagan’s speech several delegates interviewed by reporters expressed disappointment that the president had refused to endorse federal funding for mass transit and energy projects that might provide employment for some of the nation’s 660,000 idle construction workers. They gave him credit for coming to address them, but if he wanted their support, he would have to do more to earn it.

N
ANCY
R
EAGAN HAD
a lunch engagement of her own that day, and she had just arrived back at the White House when the head of her Secret Service detail,
George Opfer, drew her aside. “
There’s been a shooting at the hotel,” he said. “Some people were wounded, but your husband wasn’t hit. Everybody’s at the hospital.”

Nancy at once declared that she was going to the hospital. Opfer said it wasn’t necessary or desirable. The place was chaotic enough without the addition of the First Lady. She insisted, saying she would go even if she had to walk. He grudgingly ordered a car.

Their approach to the George Washington University Hospital was blocked by police cars, emergency vehicles, reporters, and a crowd of curious onlookers. Nancy became increasingly agitated. “I was frantic,” she recalled. She told Opfer, “If this traffic doesn’t open up, I’m going to run the rest of the way.”

Opfer kept her in the car, and eventually they reached the hospital. Mike Deaver, who had been informed by the Secret Service that she was on the way, met her at the door. “He’s been hit,” he said.

“But they told me he
wasn’t
hit,” she objected, growing more fearful by the moment.

Deaver and others recounted the events of the previous hour. On leaving the Washington Hilton, Reagan was about to enter his car. Several shots were fired. Reagan later said they sounded like firecrackers, but the Secret Service and the police on the scene immediately recognized them as pistol shots.

One bullet hit James Brady, Reagan’s press secretary, in the head. He fell to the ground, grievously wounded. A second bullet struck police officer
Thomas Delahanty in the back. A third hit Secret Service agent
Tim McCarthy in the chest. Three other bullets seemingly did no damage other than to the president’s limousine and the pavement.

Immediately on hearing the first shot, Secret Service agent
Jerry Parr pushed Reagan unceremoniously into the limousine, shoving him onto the floor of the back part of the car. Another agent shoved Parr in on top of the president and slammed the door behind them. Parr ordered the driver to get out of the area as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, he reported that the president had not been hit. “
Rawhide is okay,” he radioed to the Secret Service command post, using Reagan’s code name. He repeated: “Rawhide is okay.”

Reagan did not feel okay. “
I felt a blow in my upper back that was unbelievably painful,” he wrote several days later. “I was sure he’d broken my rib.” As the car sped away from the hotel toward the White House, Reagan tried to find a more comfortable position, to no avail. “I sat up on the edge of the seat almost paralyzed by pain,” he recalled. “Then I began coughing up blood which made both of us think, yes, I had a broken rib and it had punctured a lung.”

Parr ordered the driver to change course, to the hospital at George Washington University, several blocks northwest of the White House. The drive took just a few minutes, but during that time Reagan’s condition worsened. “I was having great trouble getting enough air,” he recalled. Even so, he insisted on walking from the car to the emergency room. But just inside the double doors he passed out and collapsed. He might have hit his head on the floor, but Parr and another Secret Service agent caught him. They and some hospital attendants carried him the rest of the way to the emergency room and laid him on a gurney.

The hospital staff initially thought Reagan was having a heart attack. They cut off his clothes and prepared to insert intravenous lines.

Reagan regained consciousness. “
I’m having a hard time breathing,” he said haltingly.

An intern placed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

“Am I dying?” Reagan asked.

“No, you’re going to be fine,” the intern said.

The oxygen did little good. “I can’t breathe,” Reagan repeated. “My chest hurts.”

The senior surgeon present listened to Reagan’s lungs with a stethoscope. The right lung sounded normal but the left wasn’t inflating. The surgeon instructed the attendants to roll Reagan onto his right side.

When they did, the surgeon noticed a small, bloody slit in the skin beneath Reagan’s left armpit. Emergency rooms in Washington received their share of gunshot victims, and the surgeon recognized this as a bullet wound, despite the odd shape. He didn’t take time to consider how the bullet had hit Reagan there, but what apparently happened was that one of the bullets had ricocheted off the bulletproof glass or armor of the limousine, flattening in the impact, and then sliced into Reagan. The wicked disk evidently remained within the president’s body, for there was no exit wound.

Discovering the cause of Reagan’s distress cued the trauma team as to how to alleviate it. A chest tube began draining the blood that had filled the chest cavity and was hampering Reagan’s breathing. Intravenous fluids helped restore his blood pressure.

As the blood drained from around his lung, Reagan breathed more easily. The trouper’s spirit in him revived. Noting the people hovering around him, he quipped to
Jerry Parr, “
I hope they are all Republicans.”

An X-ray was taken to find the bullet. The image was imprecise, but the bullet appeared close to the heart. Conceivably, it had grazed the aorta, which might be near rupture.

Sometimes bullets are left inside shooting victims. Surgery is always risky, and a bullet can remain inside a person’s body for years without incident. One of Reagan’s predecessors,
Andrew Jackson, carried souvenirs from a duel and a separate gunfight encysted within his body. But surgery’s survival rate had improved since the nineteenth century, and the chief surgeon, on reflection, decided not to leave a bullet lying next to the heart of the leader of the Free World.

N
ANCY
R
EAGAN PACED
and worried in the waiting room while the trauma team was stabilizing her husband. At length they let her see him. “
I walked in on a horrible scene—discarded bandages, tubes, blood,” she recalled. “In the corner were the remains of Ronnie’s new blue pin-stripe suit, which he had worn that day for the first time. I had seen emergency rooms before, but I had never seen one like this—with my husband in it.”

Reagan, ashen and weary, brightened on seeing her. He pulled his oxygen mask to the side and said, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” She fought back the tears and tried to smile. She kissed him and said, “Please don’t try to talk.”

She walked beside the cart as they wheeled him to the operating room. The crowd in the hallway included Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver. Reagan, recognizing his troika, asked Baker, with what passed for a smile beneath the oxygen mask, “
Who’s minding the store?” At the entrance to the operating room, Nancy and the others had to stay behind. She kissed him and said, “
I love you.”

Inside the room Reagan was transferred from the cart to the operating table. The operating team gathered around him, and the anesthesiologist prepared to put him under. Realizing he had a fresh audience, Reagan recycled his earlier line. “I hope you are all Republicans,” he said.

The head of the team responded, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.”

T
HE FIRST NEWS
of the shooting had thrown the White House into confusion as Jim Baker and the others there attempted to learn what was happening. Baker had declined to join Reagan at the Washington Hilton, pleading the press of work. He was in his office when he heard of the shooting; Ed Meese soon joined him there. For several minutes they couldn’t tell who had been shot or how badly. Mike Deaver called from the hospital, saying that Jim Brady had been badly wounded and Reagan had taken a bullet in the side. One of the doctors joined Deaver’s call and said the president had lost a great deal of blood. His condition was very serious.

Baker and Meese decided to join Deaver at the hospital. Just before Baker left his office, he got a call from Al Haig. The secretary of state was alarmed that the president was incapacitated, if perhaps only temporarily, while the vice president was out of the city, in Texas. Haig’s military training kicked in, and he stressed the need to ensure the chain of command. He told Baker he would gather the cabinet members most crucial to national security: Weinberger from Defense, Regan from Treasury, Casey from the CIA,
William French Smith from Justice, Dick Allen from the NSC. Haig said he would get in touch with George Bush.

To Baker as chief of staff fell the initiative in determining whether to invoke the
Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which provides for a transfer of authority to the vice president in case of presidential incapacity. By the time he had sufficient facts to make a reasoned decision, the doctors had stabilized Reagan. The only question was whether his sedation during surgery would constitute sufficient incapacity to warrant invoking the amendment.

He decided it did not. It would be temporary, for one thing. For another, it would make Bush acting president. Baker had no qualms about Bush, but he knew that many of Reagan’s supporters still doubted Bush’s conservative bona fides. And those supporters were leery of Baker as Bush’s best friend and former campaign manager. “
They might view the transfer as something just short of a Bush-Baker
coup d’etat
,” Baker remembered.

Baker’s diffidence wasn’t matched back at the White House. Jim Brady’s injury compelled
Larry Speakes, his assistant, to be the administration’s chief liaison to the media. The reporters clamored for more information than Speakes had received, and under the glare of the television lights he inadvertently gave the impression that the president’s condition left no one in charge of the government.

Al Haig and Dick Allen were watching Speakes’s performance. They agreed that he was struggling, and they worried that this would send the wrong impression to the world. They had no reason to think that the shooter—by this time identified by Washington police as John Hinckley Jr., who would turn out to be an emotionally unbalanced fan of actress
Jodie Foster, whom he hoped to impress by assassinating the president—was part of a conspiracy. But they couldn’t be sure he was
not
part of a conspiracy, perhaps one with Soviet connections, and they didn’t want to take any chances.

“
This is very bad,” Allen said to Haig. “We have to do something.” Haig agreed. “We’ve got to get him off,” he said, referring to Speakes. As Haig explained later, “It was essential to reassure the country and the world that we had an effective government.” He asked Allen to join him. “Together, Allen and I dashed out of the Situation Room and ran headlong up the narrow stairs. Then we hurried along the jigsaw passageways of the West Wing and into the press room.”

They arrived flushed and out of breath. Haig commandeered the podium to update the reporters on Reagan’s condition. One reporter asked who was making the decisions for the executive branch.

“
Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order,” Haig replied. “Should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm, he will do so. He has not done that. 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.”

Haig had intended to calm the country and reassure the world, but
his red face, his breathlessness, and his words had just the opposite effect. The secretary of state was not third in line for the presidency; the speaker of the House and the president pro tem of the Senate came before him. Haig’s proclamation “I am in control here” was too easily excerpted for the news networks to resist, and it made him look like a power grabber. “
Perhaps the camera and microphone magnified the effects of my sprint up the stairs,” he reflected later. “Possibly I should have washed my face or taken half a dozen deep breaths before going on camera … Certainly I was guilty of a poor choice of words.” But he defended the point he was trying to make about the chain of command at the White House, awaiting the return of the vice president. “I was the senior cabinet officer present.”

R
EAGAN
’
S SURGERY BEGAN
smoothly. Fresh blood replaced the large quantity he had lost, a breathing tube kept him oxygenated, and his vital signs were stable. The surgeons on his team had extracted many bullets in their various practices, and this bullet seemed unlikely to be more elusive than most of those. The X-rays told them where to look, if not precisely where the bullet was located.