Rawhide Down (25 page)

“Al, don’t elevate it,” interjected Treasury Secretary Donald Regan. “Be careful!”

“Absolutely,” Haig said. “Absolutely. That’s why I toned down the message going out,” he said, referring to the cable sent to foreign governments.

A moment later, prompted by a question from another official, Weinberger explained that he wanted the military to be ready for potential action but was not planning on taking the more drastic step of raising the country’s official alert posture, which was indicated by its defense condition (DEFCON) levels. The U.S. military was currently at DEFCON 5, which signified that the world was at peace. DEFCON 1, on the other hand, would mean that the United States expected an imminent attack. The only time the military had even approached that level was during the Cuban missile crisis. But it soon became clear that Weinberger was confused about DEFCON levels; when asked about whether his proposed alerts would equate to DEFCON 3 or 4, he said, “No, no. It’s a matter of being ready for some later call. It’s probably DEFCON 2.”

Haig was shocked: the defense secretary had referred to one of the highest alert levels instead of one of the lowest. Did he really not even understand DEFCON levels? Weinberger’s only previous experience in the military was as an intelligence officer in World War II, and from the start Haig had had doubts about giving someone with so little national security experience such a critical job.

Apparently hoping to put an end to the talk of alerts once and for all, Haig said, “Yeah, I think the important thing, fellows, is that these things always generate a lot of dope stories, and everybody is running around telling everybody everything that they can get out of their gut, and I think it’s goddamn important that none of that happens. That the president, uh, as long as he is conscious and can function…”

Allen stared at Haig in disbelief—he had told the secretary of state not ten minutes earlier that Reagan was on the operating table.

“Well,” Allen said, “just let me point out to you that the president is not now conscious.”

“No, of course not,” Haig replied.

*   *   *

D
OCTORS
G
IORDANO
, G
ENS
, and Price watched saline solution drain from the catheter into a small plastic container. The liquid was crystal clear. The belly tap seemed to confirm that Reagan did not have an abdominal injury, but to be certain they sent the fluid to the laboratory for testing. Now Giordano pulled out the tube, stitched together the various layers of tissue, and allowed Gens to suture the skin. As Gens tied up the small incision with nylon thread, the young doctor was struck—for the first time—by the magnitude of the occasion. He was closing the abdominal incision of the president of the United States.

Gens lifted his head and surveyed the crowded operating room. He’d never seen such a congested OR: it was filled with doctors, nurses, technicians, and at least half a dozen Secret Service agents. Yet except for a cough or two and the beeping of the heart monitor and the
whoosh
of the respirator, it was quiet and still, almost peaceful.

“Does anybody know what’s going on out there?” Gens asked.

The medical team was so focused on their patient that no one had thought to find out what was happening outside the hospital—whether other people had been wounded or killed, whether assassins had targeted others in the capital, whether the world was at war. They knew nothing. And if the Secret Service agents knew, they didn’t respond to Gens’s query.

About half an hour after the belly tap procedure began, Gens sewed up the final bit of skin; then he extracted the chest tube so Aaron and his team could begin their surgery. After pulling out the tube, Gens checked the Pleur-evac container, which had filled with 325 milliliters of fluid in the past hour or so—a significant amount of additional blood and further evidence that the chest tube had not stanched the hemorrhaging. As of 4:30 p.m., the president’s total blood loss was 2.6 liters, about 40 percent of his blood volume. Since his arrival in the hospital, doctors had been keeping pace with Reagan’s bleeding by pumping donated blood and fluids into his system. So far, the tactic was working and his vital signs were stable. But this compensatory approach couldn’t continue forever. They would have to stop the bleeding surgically.

After finishing the belly tap, Giordano and Gens stepped out of the OR to brief the first lady in a small office near the operating rooms. The office was so cramped they sat knee to knee. Giordano explained the significance of the fact that the president’s abdomen was clear of blood. The next step, he told Mrs. Reagan, was for Ben Aaron to perform chest surgery and stop the bleeding. The surgery would last a couple of hours, but they expected the president to emerge from it in fine shape.

*   *   *

W
HILE HER HUSBAND
was in surgery, Nancy Reagan found Sarah Brady sitting quietly in an ER break room. The nurses and social workers had kept the television off to spare Mrs. Brady the trauma of watching the video of her husband getting shot. The room was almost eerily silent, a refuge from the hallways swarming with medical and law enforcement personnel.

The first lady gave the press secretary’s wife a gentle hug.

“I’m so scared,” Sarah Brady said.

“So am I,” Nancy Reagan said.

The first lady then followed George Opfer to a small chapel on the second floor of the hospital. A few minutes earlier, a doctor had mentioned the hospital’s chapel to Agent Opfer, thinking that it could provide a refuge. The chapel had plain walls, a wooden altar, and a single piece of stained glass illuminated by artificial light.

At first, Mrs. Reagan and Opfer were alone in the simple and quiet space. The agent held the first lady’s hand, and they both kneeled as Opfer said, “All we can do is pray.”

A little later, Sarah Brady joined them in the chapel, as did the wife of the wounded Secret Service agent, Tim McCarthy. They were soon followed by Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver. Baker, a devout Episcopalian, kneeled and prayed.

*   *   *

B
AKER AND
M
EESE
left the chapel and found another sanctuary—an out-of-the-way janitor’s closet—where they could discuss matters of state. Huddled in the closet, they debated whether to temporarily transfer presidential authority to Vice President Bush under the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution. It was an option both were loath to take. White House officials had been laboring to reassure the public that the government was functioning normally, and Baker and Meese agreed that transferring power to Bush would send the opposite signal. Moreover, since Bush was on a plane that didn’t have secure voice communications, it would be difficult to execute the transfer.

The question of presidential authority also posed personal and political challenges, especially for Baker. Conservatives and Reagan loyalists considered the chief of staff, like the vice president, a moderate, and they therefore viewed him with considerable suspicion. Some thought Baker had too much influence in the White House and was already curtailing Reagan’s conservative agenda. Sensitive to these concerns, Baker did not want to be seen as overly eager to hand presidential powers to his close friend.

Baker and Meese understood that even a brief transfer of power would invite further questions about Reagan’s age and vigor. Further, they had reason to hope that the president would recover fairly quickly.

After wheeling Reagan into the operating room, doctors had told Baker and Meese that they expected the president to survive the surgery and expressed cautious optimism that Reagan would be able to make decisions by the following day.

Taking all these factors into consideration, Baker and Meese decided that it would be wisest not to transfer presidential authority to Bush, at least not yet. Before leaving the closet, they agreed to closely monitor the president’s progress and reassess their decision if he took a turn for the worse.

*   *   *

O
THERS WERE ALSO
wrestling with the political and legal implications of Reagan’s incapacitation. Before leaving for the Situation Room, Attorney General William French Smith had summoned his top legal advisor, Theodore Olson, to his office at the Justice Department. As they watched television replays of the shooting and received updates from the White House, Smith told Olson that he “better go find out what procedures are necessary if we have to transfer power to the vice president.”

Olson, the assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, had no idea how the process worked. He only vaguely recalled the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which established the procedure for a transfer of power to the vice president. Walking back to his office, Olson pulled his worn paperback copy of the U.S. Constitution from his jacket pocket and began flipping through the dog-eared pages hunting for the Twenty-fifth Amendment. He couldn’t find it, even when he searched the booklet a second time. Then he realized that his copy of the Constitution had apparently been printed before 1967, the year the Twenty-fifth Amendment had been ratified.

Olson summoned his staff to his office. Presidential power had never been transferred from an incapacitated president to a vice president under the amendment. There were no precedents, no legal opinions, no briefing materials. They would have to devise their own directives on the fly.

But at least the amendment gave them a place to start. The framers of the Constitution, by contrast, had provided little guidance about how the government should respond in the event that the president was incapacitated. In the years before the Twenty-fifth Amendment was ratified, there had been several instances when a president was too ill or injured to function. James Garfield, who survived for eighty days after being shot, suffered hallucinations, and his doctors forbade him to work. Even so, his vice president refused to step in. After Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke, his wife, his doctor, and his personal secretary essentially ran the country for eight months. And Dwight Eisenhower suffered three major illnesses, including a heart attack and a stroke, during his two terms.

After John F. Kennedy was assassinated, lawmakers realized that it was necessary to create a clear procedure, especially in the age of nuclear weapons. The new constitutional amendment, once written and ratified, declared that the president could temporarily transfer powers to the vice president by submitting letters to the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate. The amendment also stated that the vice president and a “majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or such other body as Congress may by law provide” could transmit letters to the Speaker and the president pro tempore declaring that the president was unable to discharge the powers of his office. The president could resume office by submitting another letter to the same lawmakers informing them that he was again able to perform his duties.

*   *   *

A
S THE
J
USTICE
Department lawyers began drafting a memo for Olson, Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, was already several steps ahead of them. Sitting at the conference table in the Situation Room and smoking cigarette after cigarette, he waited for an aide to bring him a sheaf of papers addressing the procedures required for a transfer of power. Intelligent and soft-spoken, the forty-two-year-old Fielding was widely respected for his careful research of complex legal topics and his keen analysis of ethical quandaries. Within days of Reagan’s swearing in, Fielding and his team of lawyers had begun drafting an emergency briefing packet that explained what to do in the event that Reagan was killed or badly injured. Fielding’s objective was to create a binder filled with draft letters, memos, and a checklist; even in the absence of White House lawyers, it could be plucked off a shelf and used as a guide to transfer presidential power to Bush. Fielding and his staff hadn’t completed the binder, but they had put together much of the needed paperwork.

Even without reviewing the documents, Fielding knew the White House’s options were limited. At the moment, Reagan was unconscious, so he couldn’t sign a letter transferring power. This meant that if a transfer proved necessary, Bush and a majority of cabinet secretaries would have to sign the required letter and declare the president unable to discharge his duties. Fielding realized that he needed to prepare the men around the table for that possibility.

In a voice only a few decibels above a whisper, Fielding addressed Haig: “A rather technical thing is that the president can pass the baton temporarily under the law and we’re preparing that right now.”

“That’s pass the baton to the vice president?” Haig asked.

“On a temporary basis,” Fielding said. “It passes to him in writing from the president until the president rescinds it.”

“Has somebody gone into the Eisenhower precedent on this?” Haig asked. “I think we need that from a public relations point of view. The things you want to make note of are first: precisely what happened, the notification of the vice president, the assembly of the key crisis cabinet.”

David Gergen approached the table and queried Haig about the president’s condition. “Is he under sedation now?” Gergen asked. “Is he conscious?”