Killing Reagan (22 page)

The fifth shot bounces off the limousine.

The sixth also hits the Lincoln, but ricochets—piercing Ronald Reagan's body under his left arm. The bullet enters his lung, coming to rest just one inch from his heart.

The president of the United States staggers.

*   *   *

It takes just 1.7 seconds for Hinckley to fire all six Devastators.

The assassin is immediately punched in the head by a nearby spectator, then gang-tackled by the crowd. Hinckley is buried beneath several hundred pounds of angry citizens as Secret Service agents try to take him alive. Ironically, their job is to now protect Hinckley with the same vigor they devote to protecting the president.

John Hinckley Jr. being tackled by Secret Service agents and other onlookers after his attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, March 30, 1981

As Hinckley is subdued, three men are fighting for their lives.

One of them is Ronald Wilson Reagan.

*   *   *

At the sound of the first bullet, agent Jerry Parr grabs Reagan by the waist, shoving him hard into the back of the limo. The two men land in a heap, with Parr on top. As Reagan's face hits the armrest dividing the backseat, an intense wave of pain shoots through his body.

“Jerry,” he cries. “Get off. I think you broke one of my ribs.” The president is angry, believing Parr was unnecessarily rough.

Parr is not interested in delicacy. He needs to get the president to safety immediately. Long ago, as a boy, it was the 1939 Ronald Reagan movie
Code of the Secret Service
that inspired Parr to become an agent. Now, through a brutal coincidence, Jerry Parr has become the most important person in Reagan's life. “White House,” he barks at Agent Drew Unrue, who sits at the wheel. “Let's get out of here! Haul ass!”

Parr climbs off the president. Neither man knows that Ronald Reagan has been shot. But as Reagan tries to sit up, he is “almost paralyzed by pain.” He coughs hard, sending a stream of bright red blood onto his hand.

“You not only broke a rib,” he tells Parr as the presidential limousine races to the safety of the White House, “I think the rib punctured my lung.”

“Were you hit?” asks a concerned Parr.

“No, I don't think so.”

Parr runs his hands over the president's shoulders, chest, and head. He sees no sign of blood. Reagan can barely sit up, his face ashen. He begins pressing his left arm against his chest as if having a heart attack. Reagan tastes blood and tells Parr that he might have also cut his mouth. The agent looks closely, seeing that the bright red blood on Reagan's lips contains numerous air bubbles, which is the sign of a lung injury.

“I think we should go to the hospital,” Parr tells Reagan.

“Okay,” Reagan answers, still believing that Parr broke his rib.

*   *   *

At the same time, in the third-floor White House solarium, Secret Service agent Opfer calmly enters the room and interrupts Nancy Reagan's conversation with the White House's chief usher. “There was a shooting,” Opfer informs the First Lady. “The president is going to the hospital.”

Immediately distraught, Nancy Reagan is led out of the White House. Her Secret Service code name is Rainbow, in reference to the many colors of her fiery personality. But there is no evidence of that on display right now. She is quiet and terrified. A car is brought around, and Nancy's frustration intensifies as the two-limousine motorcade gets caught in Washington gridlock on its ten-block journey. “I'm going to get out and walk,” she yells. “I need to walk. I have to get there.”

Traffic begins to flow, and fifteen minutes after leaving the White House, Nancy Reagan's limousine pulls up to the George Washington University Hospital. As soon as the vehicle stops at the emergency entrance of the gray cinder-block building, she sprints toward the emergency room. Waiting at the door is Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver.

“He's been hit,” Deaver tells her.

“But they told me he wasn't hit,” replies a shocked Nancy Reagan. “I want to see my husband,” she pleads.

*   *   *

It takes Ronald Reagan's limousine four minutes to get to the hospital. He walks through the front door under his own power, then passes out and collapses hard to the floor. He is immediately transported to the emergency room. “I feel so bad,” Ronald Reagan tells the paramedic, who quickly begins cutting the clothes off the president's body. “I feel really awful. I can't breathe.”

This is the first indication that something is very wrong with Ronald Reagan. At first, doctors believe Reagan may die. Now an attempt to take his blood pressure has not yielded a systolic reading, meaning that his heart is barely pumping.

All around Reagan, the emergency room is a frantic scene of doctors, nurses, and well-armed Secret Service agents. Dr. Joseph Giordano, a surgeon who heads the hospital's trauma team, is inserting a clear plastic chest tube into Reagan, hoping to drain the blood from his chest cavity. “This better go well,” Giordano tells himself as he slices open the president's skin.

“He was seriously injured,” Giordano will later remember. “He was close to dying.”

Ronald Reagan is a seventy-year-old man who has just suffered a devastating trauma. Not only was he shot, but he was thrown bodily into a car, and his head slammed hard into an armrest. His body may not have the ability to endure much more.

Reagan is conscious throughout the trauma procedure. Once he is stabilized, the next step will be surgery to remove the bullet. Spotting Jerry Parr just before being wheeled to the operating room, Reagan shows the first signs that he might make it: “I hope they're all Republicans,” he tells the Secret Service agent who saved his life less than thirty minutes ago.

“Mr. President,” Dr. Giordano, a lifelong Democrat, tells Reagan, “today we are all Republicans.”

*   *   *

A pained but lucid Ronald Reagan is being prepped for surgery. Lying on the gurney, he looks up to find Nancy Reagan gazing down at him. She is unsteady. Blood loss has made her husband's skin the palest white she has ever seen. A nurse removes the president's oxygen mask from his mouth. “Honey,” he tells her, hoping that a joke will erase the fear from her face, “I forgot to duck.”

Nancy fights tears as she bends down to kiss him. “Please don't try to talk,” she whispers.

Later, Nancy will remember this moment with sadness and fear. “I saw him lying naked, with strangers looking down at his naked body and watching the life ebb from him, and as a doctor's daughter I knew that he was dying,” she will recount to her friends.

But Ronald Reagan is experiencing another reaction. He will later write of the joy this moment gives him. “Seeing Nancy in the hospital gave me an enormous lift. As long as I live, I will never forget the thought that rushed into my head as I looked up into her face. Later, I wrote it down in my diary: ‘I pray I'll never face a day when she isn't there … [O]f all the ways God had blessed me, giving her to me was the greatest—beyond anything I can ever hope to deserve.”

Reagan is wheeled into surgery. Nancy clings to the bed's handrail the whole while, walking with the team of doctors and the now surgically gowned Secret Service agents who will accompany her husband into Operating Room Two.

“Who's minding the store?” Reagan asks Ed Meese as the gurney passes the White House counselor.

At the double doors leading into the surgery center, Nancy is told she cannot accompany her husband any farther.

The time is 3:24 p.m.

All she can do is wait.
2

*   *   *

At 4:00 p.m., Ronald Reagan lies unconscious on the operating table. A rib spreader pulls his fifth and sixth ribs apart, allowing Dr. Ben Aaron to see clearly inside Reagan's chest. The seventh rib is indeed fractured, thanks to the bullet glancing off it. More troublesome is the blood filling the chest cavity. The president has lost half his total blood supply. Tubes running into Reagan's body fill him with new blood, antibiotics, and hydration fluid.

Dr. Aaron's goal is to remove the bullet from Reagan's body, but there is a big problem. While he can trace its path through the half-inch-wide hole it has left in the tissue and lung, he cannot find the location of the .22-caliber round.

Using his fingers, Aaron reaches inside the president's body and feels for the bullet, delicately working around Reagan's slowly beating heart as he does so. “I might call it quits,” the surgeon says, frustrated he can find no sign of the bullet.

*   *   *

Frustration also reigns one mile away, at the White House.

“Who is running the government in the absence of President Reagan?” a journalist asks Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes on live television.

All across America, millions are glued to their TV sets as regular programming has been interrupted. A somber America awaits news about the severely wounded Ronald Reagan.

But if viewers are looking for reassurance, Speakes's words do not provide it.

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

One floor below where the press conference is taking place, members of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet huddle in the White House Situation Room, horrified at Speakes's response. Even worse, they know something that the press secretary does not: the Soviets are taking advantage of Reagan's condition by moving their submarines alarmingly close to America's East Coast. A nuclear missile could strike Washington in just eleven minutes. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger has ordered America's bomber crews to go on high standby alert. Yet with the president now unconscious and Vice President George H. W. Bush in the air somewhere over Texas, no one at the White House has the direct authority to respond to the Soviet threat.
3

Fearing the worst, National Security Adviser Richard Allen has ordered that the special briefcase known as “the football,” which contains the nuclear launch codes that could begin World War III, be brought to him. It now sits on a conference table here in the Situation Room, safely concealed beneath a small pile of papers.

Suddenly, Gen. Alexander Haig takes charge. The secretary of state, who has long sought to expand his power, appoints himself temporary president.

“The helm is right here,” he declares to the startled Cabinet members. “And that means in this chair, right now, constitutionally until the vice president gets here.”

Haig, an intimidating man, looks around, daring anyone to dispute him. Constitutionally, the general is incorrect. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill should be next in line. But no one in the Situation Room cares to defy the former four-star army general who fought in Vietnam and Korea.

“How do you get to the press room?” he asks, rising from his chair.

The room goes silent. Before anyone can stop him, Haig races upstairs and barges into the press center. Knees buckling, voice cracking, and hands grasping the lectern so hard his knuckles turn white, Alexander Haig proclaims his authority to the nation on live TV.

“As of now, I am in control here in the White House.”

*   *   *

Nancy Reagan is not in control. She is desperately praying. She sits in the hospital chapel along with the wives of Press Secretary James Brady and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy. All three of their husbands are currently in surgery. The women are unaware that the media will soon report that James Brady is dead.

The women are not alone in this small second-floor sanctuary. White House chief of staff James Baker kneels in prayer, while Mike Deaver and Ed Meese join the vigil. They are as close to the president as any group of advisers could be, and the wait is torturous.

*   *   *

Finally, at 5:25 p.m., thanks to a set of X-rays that show the bullet's location, Dr. Aaron feels the dime-size chunk of metal. The surgeon plucks the bullet from Reagan's lung with his fingertips.

“I've got it,” he tells the surgical team, which includes a member of the Secret Service, who now steps forward to retrieve the bullet as evidence.

Dr. Aaron now turns his attention to the nonstop internal bleeding that still might kill Ronald Reagan.

Finally, at 6:46 p.m., an unconscious Reagan is closed up and wheeled from the operating room. The greatest crisis has passed, but danger remains.

Within an hour, Reagan is awake, though groggy. A breathing tube in his throat makes it impossible for him to talk, so he scribbles a note to his nurse. “If I'd had this much attention in Hollywood, I'd have stayed there.”

*   *   *

Twenty miles away, at Andrews Air Force Base, the plane carrying Vice President George H. W. Bush has finally touched down on the runway. His return marks the end of Alexander Haig's self-declared three-hour reign as leader of the free world. And while Haig was legally wrong to declare himself in charge, his blunt behavior has had one positive effect: Soviet forces are backing down.