Rawhide Down (31 page)

“The president is in the recovery room,” O’Leary began. “He is in stable condition and he is awake.”

The rest of the brief statement was accurate except in one instance. O’Leary said that the president “was at no time in any serious danger,” which was clearly incorrect. If Jerry Parr hadn’t decided to redirect the limousine from the White House to the hospital, Reagan would likely have died; if Reagan had arrived in GW’s emergency room even five or ten minutes later, his chances of survival would have been slim. But in O’Leary’s defense, he had not been told what had transpired during Reagan’s most perilous moments in the ER.

When responding to questions from reporters, however, O’Leary’s answers were sometimes wrong. To a shouted query about transfusions given to the president, O’Leary understated the amount of blood Reagan received by three units, an important difference. Then he understated the amount of blood loss by about 1.5 liters. If medical experts had heard the truth about how much blood Reagan had lost and how much had been replaced, they might have raised serious questions about the severity of the president’s injuries.

In response to another question, O’Leary said the bullet “was really not very close to any vital structure,” and added that it was “several inches” from the president’s heart. In fact, the bullet had mangled Reagan’s lung and come to rest just an inch from his heart.

O’Leary was also asked about the president’s arrival at the hospital, but he failed to mention that Reagan had collapsed upon entering the emergency room. “He got out of the car and stood up and walked in on his own,” O’Leary said. “As I say, he was alert and awake all the time.”

When asked whether he found it “extraordinary that a 70-year-old man could be shot in the lung and then brought to the hospital and walk in under his own power,” O’Leary paused and replied: “I think it speaks well for the physiologic health of the president. We do have elderly people—much more elderly than the president is—who do undergo chest surgery, but he certainly sailed through it.”

“Do you find that medically extraordinary?” someone asked.

“Maybe not medically extraordinary,” O’Leary responded, “but just short of that, okay?”

*   *   *

S
ITTING AROUND THE
conference table in the Situation Room, George Bush and the administration’s top officials watched O’Leary’s performance and felt enormous relief. “This guy is good,” said the vice president.

When the press conference was over, Bush led a discussion about whether he should give a statement. “I think I could,” Bush said. “And just say we are very pleased. I don’t think we need questions, either.”

The meeting adjourned at eight p.m., at which point the vice president and several officials moved upstairs to Bush’s small office, down the hall from Reagan’s. Baker, Meese, and the others clustered around Bush’s desk and talked through a range of issues, from national security to the vice president’s schedule. Just outside the office, one of Bush’s aides attempted to draft a statement for the media. Frazzled, he couldn’t find the words. Ken Khachigian, the president’s chief speechwriter, put a piece of paper in a secretary’s typewriter and quickly produced a brief and confident statement that papered over the day’s trials and problems.

A few minutes later, Bush entered the White House press room and stepped up to the podium.

“I am deeply heartened by Dr. O’Leary’s report on the president’s condition, that he has emerged from this experience with flying colors and with the most optimistic prospects for a complete recovery,” the vice president said. “I can reassure this nation and the watching world that the American government is functioning fully and effectively. We’ve had full and complete communication throughout the day and the officers of the federal government have been fulfilling their obligations with skill and with care.”

Then, having taken no questions, Bush was gone.

*   *   *

B
EFORE HEADING HOME
that evening, Joe Giordano, the head of the trauma team, stopped by Reagan’s bedside to check on his patient. He was pleased to see that the president was improving and didn’t seem to have suffered any adverse effects from the surgery or the anesthesia. During the operation, Giordano had thought about how much the outcome mattered—for every doctor in the room, for the hospital, and for the nation. As he stood at the president’s bedside and looked through his chart, Giordano was relieved to reach an unambiguous conclusion: the surgery had gone perfectly.

A little after nine, David Gens—who had spent the past hour and a half removing a patient’s ruptured appendix—sat down next to Reagan. As he had once before, Gens wondered whether anyone had told the president what had happened that day.

“Mr. President, do you remember me from the ER?” Gens asked.

The president nodded.

“Do you know what happened?”

Reagan shook his head.

“Your lung had been torn by the bullet,” Gens said. “And we repaired that. We took out the bullet. But everything is going to be all right.”

Reagan nodded again.

“Mrs. Reagan did fine throughout all the excitement,” Gens said with a grin.

Reagan smiled. Gens could see that the president was doing much better. Even as doctors continued to reduce the proportion of oxygen in his air supply, his color and his blood oxygen levels were improving. Gens left the recovery room and tried to catch a nap in a comfortable chair in the dialysis unit. But the day’s adrenaline hadn’t worn off and he couldn’t sleep.

*   *   *

D
ENISE
S
ULLIVAN AND
Cathy Edmondson were impressed by how compliant the president was—he was so unlike most VIP and celebrity patients. Despite his pain and his weakened condition, he followed instructions and showed remarkably good cheer. He even seemed apologetic about causing them undue stress.

But Reagan had long felt a great respect for nurses, especially since a near-death experience more than three decades earlier. After a movie premiere in 1947, he had suddenly become very ill. He was taken to a hospital where he was diagnosed with a dangerous strain of viral pneumonia. He burned with fever, then froze with chills. Medications seemed to have no effect. One night, Humphrey Bogart appeared in his dreams, and together they acted out a scene under a streetlamp on a dark and lonely patch of sidewalk.

The attending nurses wrapped Reagan in blankets and fed him hot tea through a glass tube. Each breath hurt so much that he reached a point where he wanted to die. But one nurse in particular wouldn’t let him. She gripped his hand and urged him to inhale and exhale. “Come on now, breathe in once more,” she said, leaning over him. “Now, let it out.” Reagan followed the nurse’s gentle instruction. He breathed and he survived.

Now here he was again, this time putting his trust in two nurses who refused to leave his side. They, too, held his hand and coaxed him to relax. They told him that they would stay right there with him and that everything would be fine. He just needed to let the machine breathe for him.

“Don’t fight it,” they said over and over again.

“I keep on breathing?” he wrote.

Yes, they said. And so he did.

*   *   *

A
FTER
J
ERRY
P
ARR
left the hospital that evening, he grabbed a bite to eat at the White House mess, where he also sipped a glass of vodka, straight up. He felt at once excited and devastated. He could feel the adrenaline still coursing through his system, and he kept trying to sort out what had gone both right and wrong. He knew he had saved the president’s life, but he also understood that the Secret Service had failed by allowing the gunman to get so close to the president. He was head of the presidential detail; this was his error to bear.

As he replayed the shooting in his head, Parr realized that he and his agents had been lulled into complacency by the routine nature of trips to the Hilton and other sites like it in Washington. If the president had given a speech in Baltimore or Philadelphia or New York, everyone would have been more alert—the agents, the police, even the spectators—because of the less familiar settings. Nursing his drink, Parr wondered whether he and the other agents would be portrayed as goats or heroes. When he finally got home, Parr hugged his wife and crawled into bed. He was exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come.

Back at the White House, George Opfer sat in the command post below the Oval Office; folded uncomfortably in a chair, he tried to catch some sleep. Though agency supervisors had told him to go home, he’d refused. If something went wrong in the recovery room, he wanted to be the agent who brought the first lady to the hospital.

Upstairs, in the residence, Nancy Reagan was curled up in a ball on her husband’s side of their bed, fast asleep. She clutched one of the president’s white T-shirts in her hands.

*   *   *

T
HAT NIGHT
, GW’
S
doctors gave Jim Brady only a 50 percent chance of survival. Arthur Kobrine had done everything possible to save the press secretary’s life. He and the other surgeons plucked out all the shrapnel they could reach and removed the dead and damaged brain tissue. They irrigated and cleaned the wound with particular care.

As he finished up the surgery, Kobrine faced a dilemma: should he reattach the bone flap, the section of Brady’s skull he had removed to gain access to the brain? Leaving the flap off was the safer course. Although it had been soaking in a pool of antiseptic, it had inevitably collected germs and replacing it could lead to a serious infection. Besides, Brady could live without it, though his head would be misshapen until the gap could be covered with a ceramic plate. Then, not uncharacteristically, Kobrine had a macabre thought: if he didn’t replace the bone flap and Brady later died, the press secretary’s head would be so disfigured that his casket would have to be closed at his funeral.

Kobrine weighed his options and then made his decision. He replaced the bone flap and stitched up Brady’s head. After a brief stop in the recovery room, the press secretary was sent to the intensive care unit on the hospital’s fourth floor.

Sarah Brady stayed at her husband’s side all through the night. Several visitors came by, including Richard Allen, Brady’s friend and fellow commuter. Allen, whose wife, Pat, joined him at the hospital, was devastated by the press secretary’s condition. Blood seeped through the bandages on Brady’s head, which had swollen to the size of a basketball. The left side of his friend’s body twitched uncontrollably. Allen and his wife both hugged Sarah Brady, who then leaned over her husband and, calling him by his nickname, whispered in his ear, “Bear! Bear! It’s Dick and Pat—they’re here, Bear!”

Allen took Brady’s right hand in his own. He was stunned when the wounded press secretary squeezed back so hard it hurt. Emotion swept over him; for the first time that day, tears streamed down Allen’s face.

*   *   *

H
OUR BY HOUR
, the president’s condition improved. As if to keep his small audience entertained, he continued writing notes. In a barely legible chicken scratch, he quoted Winston Churchill’s famous line about how there was “nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” And in his innocent, movie-star way, he flirted with the nurses. A little after 11:30, he wrote to Denise Sullivan, “Does Nancy know about us?” Sullivan, a hazel-eyed thirty-four-year-old, laughed. She tried to put the note in her pocket, but a gruff Secret Service agent snatched it from her hands.

When the night shift began, two new nurses, Marisa Mize and Joanne Bell, took over the president’s care. While Bell monitored Reagan’s vital signs and updated his chart, Mize sat at the right side of his bed and held his hand. A few minutes after taking her seat, she saw that phlegm had become stuck in the president’s throat. Anxious and uncomfortable, he clutched at his breathing tube. After Mize patted his head and told him it was okay to be scared, she persuaded him to let go of the tube. Just as the other nurses did, she told him to let the machine breathe for him. And she, too, promised to stay with him.

“I’m going to hold your hand and not leave you,” she said.

Reagan gripped her right hand and didn’t let go. He wouldn’t take his eyes off her. His lids would droop and then shut, only to snap open again a moment later.

“Go to sleep,” Mize told him again and again. “I’m right here. I haven’t left.”

After finishing his latest surgery, Ben Aaron returned, still wearing his blood-tinged scrubs. He reviewed Reagan’s chart, talked for a moment with a nurse and another doctor, and then said something the president couldn’t quite make out.

Suddenly Reagan seemed frantic. “What did he mean ‘this is it’?” he wrote to Mize. “Will I like it?”

Mize could see that the president was frightened by whatever he thought Aaron had said. She guessed that Reagan believed that “this is it” meant that something terrible was about to happen.

“No, no, you are fine,” Mize said. “They are going to remove your breathing tube soon.”

Aaron told Zimmerman he was going to take a nap; he lay down on a nearby cot and fell instantly asleep. Zimmerman, too anxious to sleep, guzzled his sixth cup of coffee.