Rawhide Down (32 page)

A few minutes later, Reagan struggled with the tube again. Calmly, Mize took his hand. “You have to let this machine breathe for you,” she reminded him.

Hoping to distract the president, Mize began talking a bit about herself. She told Reagan that she was from southern California and had gone to college in San Francisco, where she’d studied music before getting into nursing.

The mention of his home state seemed to perk up the president. Once again he reached for the clipboard and wrote, “Send me to L.A. where I can see the air I’m breathing.”

A seemingly endless series of doctors and nurses came by the president’s bed. Soon Reagan wrote another note to Mize: “If I had this much attention in Hollywood I’d have stayed there.”

A bit later, he wrote that he felt “like I’ve done a remake of
Lost Weekend,
” referring to the Oscar-winning film about an alcoholic who goes on a bender and loses all sense of time.

Mize chuckled. She was surprised that Reagan was able to joke with her so soon after his surgery; still, he sometimes seemed confused.

“Do you know where you are?” she asked him.

He shook his head.

“You are in the GW recovery room,” she said, adding that it was early in the morning of March 31.

“I thought it was still afternoon,” he wrote back.

A little after two a.m., Mize noticed a perturbed look on Reagan’s face. Suspecting that he was feeling anxious about something, she tried to lighten the mood. “What, do you think your wife is holding dinner or something?”

“No,” he wrote, “I’m not really hungry for some reason.”

Then, on the same sheet of paper, he wrote: “What does the future hold?”

Mize wasn’t quite sure what he meant, nor did she know how to answer. As she thought about how to respond, Reagan scribbled, “Will I be able to do ranch work, ride, etc.?”

“Sure,” Mize told him. “Give yourself three months and you’ll be able to do those things again.”

“How long in the hospital?” he wrote a minute or two later.

“Three weeks,” Mize said.

By this point, Reagan’s oxygen levels were acceptable and his lungs were working more efficiently. Mize and the other nurses thought he could breathe on his own; so did the doctors who were monitoring his care. At three a.m., they removed the breathing tube. Then, as Reagan caught his breath, they waited by his bedside—they all wanted to hear the president’s first words.

When Reagan finally cleared his throat and spoke in a hoarse voice, he was characteristically jaunty. “What was that guy’s beef?” he quipped.

For the next forty minutes, the president held court, telling stories and jokes. Everyone was amused by his performance and amazed at his stamina.

After his audience filtered away, it was just Reagan, Mize, and Joanne Bell, who continued to monitor Reagan’s vital signs and make notes on his chart. The president and Mize chatted back and forth for a while, talking about everything from his work schedule to his advisors. As they spoke, Mize realized that Reagan didn’t seem to hear everything she was saying; he also seemed to be trying to read her lips. When she asked whether he was hard of hearing, Reagan said he was, in his right ear. “But I’m too vain to wear a hearing aid,” he told her.

At one point, referring to the White House, the president asked who was “running the show.”

Mize intuitively understood that she should avoid mentioning the controversy about Alexander Haig’s news conference, which was already getting a lot of attention. Instead, she answered, “The vice president caught a plane back to Washington.” She felt foolish for making it sound as if Bush had hopped on an American Airlines flight; then, feeling even sillier, she said, “In situations like this the vice president is in charge.”

But the question led Mize to wonder whether Reagan’s many duties as president were on his mind. Gently, she said, “I bet you are pretty anxious with everything you have to do.”

No, not really, Reagan said. He told her he had a great routine: he walked to the office before nine and was home in the residence by five or five-thirty. He ate dinner and often watched a movie with his wife, then went to bed. “I have three guys who mostly run things for me,” he said modestly.

As the hour passed four a.m., Joanne Bell became increasingly frustrated. She knew the president needed to rest, and she wanted him to stop talking to Marisa Mize and everyone else. Finally, deciding it was time for decisive action, she placed a moist washcloth over Reagan’s eyes.

“Now, Mr. President,” Bell said, “you need to get some sleep. In the most polite way I know how, I’m putting this cover over your eyes, and I want you to shut up and go to sleep.”

For the first time in almost twenty-four hours, the world around the president came to a stop. Someone turned off the overhead lights. Nurses read charts by flashlight; doctors quietly finished their reports. Around the recovery room, Secret Service agents stood sentry. Only one sound could be heard—the
beep-beep-beep
of the machine monitoring the president’s steadily beating heart.

EPILOGUE

After a fitful hour of sleep and a sponge bath, Ronald Reagan was wheeled from the recovery room into an elevator for the ride to the hospital’s intensive care unit on the fourth floor. There, as Secret Service agents and police officers stood at attention, he was rolled down a hallway until he reached room 4025-N, one of the largest in the ward. The plain white room had been scrubbed clean for the president, and his bed was placed headfirst against a wall. To his right, sunlight from a bright new day seeped around the edges of the stuffy room’s thick window shade.

The door closed, and now the president was alone with two nurses and a Secret Service agent who stood guard behind a drawn green curtain. For the rest of Reagan’s stay in the hospital, an agent was always stationed in his room.

Nurse Maureen McCann, wearing a yellow scrub dress, introduced herself. Though he was still weak and in pain, Reagan smiled and said, “I have a daughter named Maureen.”

McCann and the second nurse, Carolyn Ramos, then conducted a basic medical assessment, checking the president’s blood pressure, his pulse, his temperature, the position of his chest tubes and dressings, and his IV lines. Everything was fine. Ramos asked Reagan a series of questions to test his mental acuity. After querying him about the year and whether he knew his whereabouts, she paused and said, “I was going to ask you who is president, but I don’t think that is necessary.”

Reagan laughed, and Ramos went on to say that when she had asked the same question of a patient a few weeks earlier, the patient replied, “It’s that actor fellow—Jimmy Stewart.” Again Reagan was amused, and he responded with one of his favorite yarns about being mistaken on a New York City street for his fellow movie actor Ray Milland. Not wanting to disappoint the fan, Reagan had signed an autograph in Milland’s name.

The nurses were impressed that Reagan could joke after his ordeal, but the laughter stopped when they began performing respiratory therapy, which involved pounding on the president’s back with cupped hands and then forcing him to cough up debris from his lungs. The therapy was so vigorous that it could be heard by anyone in the vicinity; later, when Nancy Reagan spent time in a nearby room while the therapy was administered, she described it as sounding like someone was “slapping a side of beef” next door.

The therapy session exhausted the president and made him sweat; to help him cool down and to quench his thirst, McCann gave him some ice chips to chew on. Then, knowing that he would soon have visitors, she asked whether she could brush his tangled hair to make him look a bit more presentable. “I meant to have it cut,” Reagan said, adding that he hadn’t washed it in a couple of days. She gently combed and parted the president’s hair.

Ramos offered to brush Reagan’s teeth for him. Looking puzzled, the president said, “But they’re mine.” Ramos was embarrassed—most ICU patients around Reagan’s age had dentures. She gave him what he needed to brush his own teeth.

At 7:15, the president’s official day began. Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver filed into the room. “I should have known I wasn’t going to avoid a staff meeting,” Reagan quipped, drawing laughter from his top advisors. Someone handed the president the dairy bill to sign. Borrowing a pen, Reagan scrawled his signature in the proper place and the bill became law. The men discussed the shooting briefly, and one of the members of the Troika told the president that the gunman was “a kid from a good family in Colorado who just happened to be crazy.”

This was the first Reagan had been told anything about his assailant, and he reflected on the news for a moment. “I had hoped it was a KGB agent,” the president said, referring to the Soviet spy agency. “On second thought,” he added, “he wouldn’t have missed then.”

For most of the rest of the day, the president napped, read the newspapers, and visited with Mrs. Reagan and the children, all four of whom were now in Washington. At one point, joking with his son Michael, Reagan said, “If you ever get shot, make sure you’re not wearing a new suit.” But that afternoon, the one-liners and the stories came to an abrupt halt when Dan Ruge, the White House physician, stopped by and broke the sad news about the shooting of Jim Brady, who was still fighting for his life just around the corner.

“Oh, damn,” Reagan said, his eyes welling up with tears.

*   *   *

T
HE FIRST SEVERAL
days of Reagan’s recovery went better than the doctors could have hoped. The president regained his color and grew steadily stronger. He successfully spat up dark blood, a sign that his body was working to clear his lungs. To ensure that he got plenty of rest, his White House staff strictly limited the number of visitors. Not until April 6 was anyone outside the president’s closest circle permitted to see him; that afternoon, Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, came by to pay his regards. O’Neill—Reagan’s political nemesis—entered the room and walked straight to the bed, where he grabbed the president’s hand and kissed his head. Then the Speaker knelt and together they recited the Twenty-third Psalm—“The lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Speaking through tears, O’Neill said, “God bless you, Mr. President. We’re all praying for you.”

A temporary setback—a high fever of mysterious origin—puzzled and worried Reagan’s medical team, but it eventually dissipated. On April 11, his thirteenth day in the hospital, the president was released from GW. Doctors, citing hospital protocol, tried to insist that Reagan be taken by wheelchair to his waiting limousine. But Reagan refused. “I walked in,” the president said. “I’m walking out.”

As he shuffled stiffly out the hospital’s doors at 10:43 a.m. that day, Reagan smiled, masking his obvious pain as he slipped into the limousine. At the South Lawn of the White House, he was greeted by a cheering crowd of several hundred people. Wearing a bright red sweater over a white shirt, the president waved to the spectators and turned to walk into the White House, resembling, as an aide later put it, a “championship golfer strolling toward the eighteenth green.”

For the next two weeks, Reagan rested and worked a few hours each day from the White House residence; he returned to the Oval Office for the first time on April 24. Though a number of his aides were stunned by how weak he seemed, he continued to gain strength. On April 28, he traveled to Capitol Hill to give his first public address since the shooting, a speech advocating the passage of his economic package. Favoring his left arm and appearing thinner, the president walked into the House chamber to what one reporter described as a three-minute “rafter-shaking ovation.”

When the applause finally died down, Reagan began by thanking everyone for their prayers and messages of support in the wake of the assassination attempt. Then, speaking about “those others who fell beside me,” the president said:

Sick societies don’t produce young men like Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, who placed his body between mine and the man with the gun simply because he felt that’s what his duty called for him to do. Sick societies don’t produce dedicated police officers like Tom Delahanty or able and devoted public servants like James Brady. Sick societies don’t make people like us so proud to be Americans and so very proud of our fellow citizens.

Applause broke out each time he named one of the wounded men. In all, his twenty-minute address was interrupted twelve times by applause.

With his behavior immediately after the shooting and his speech that day, Reagan turned a near tragedy into a political triumph, helping to ensure passage of his ambitious economic program several months later. As one top Democrat wrote in his journal the night of the president’s address, “We’ve been outflanked and outgunned.”

*   *   *

R
EAGAN WAS NOT
one to dwell on the negative and, unless asked, he rarely spoke about the assassination attempt. He slept fine; he ate fine; he didn’t startle when he heard a bang. He wasn’t afraid to travel or to leave the White House grounds, although for the rest of his two terms security tightened significantly, keeping him farther from reporters and the public.

Reagan kept a diary throughout his presidency. On April 11, 1981, his first day back in the White House, he described the shooting. His prose was typically spare: