Rawhide Down (28 page)

Just before five p.m., Don Regan, the Treasury secretary, received a note from the Secret Service describing the president’s condition. Regan stared at the paper as if he couldn’t believe what it said; below the note about the president, someone had jotted two words: “Brady died.”

Passing the note to Richard Allen, Regan said sadly, “Jim Brady is dead.”

Allen felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. He stared at the note in disbelief and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. He couldn’t believe that the man he’d come to call his friend had passed away, just like that.

“We just learned Jim Brady has died,” Allen told the room.

“We better get a statement ready on that,” Regan said.

“We better just have a moment of prayer and silence,” Allen replied.

The room went quiet while everyone present mourned the press secretary’s death.

The silence lasted for just seven seconds. There was still much work to do.

*   *   *

D
R.
A
RTHUR
K
OBRINE
was by nature an aggressive and confident surgeon, and at the moment he was even more determined than usual: he had made it his mission to save Jim Brady’s life. Before beginning the surgery on the press secretary’s brain, he gathered his troops in Operating Room 4, one door down from the room where surgeons were trying to find the bullet lodged in Reagan’s lung. Hoping to rally his team before a very difficult operation, Kobrine told them, “We are not going to let this fucking guy die.”

Brady had been hit above his left eye, and fragments of the bullet had scattered all the way across the right side of his brain. Using a disposable razor, Kobrine shaved the press secretary’s head and bathed his scalp in antiseptic. He rested Brady’s head on a circular roll of white gauze and drilled several small holes through the skull. After sawing from hole to hole, Kobrine removed a large section of skull. Before he could pluck out any bullet fragments, however, he and Ed Engle, a neurosurgical resident, would have to suction out blood and damaged brain tissue with vacuum tubes so they could see what they were doing. They needed to be extremely careful not to remove any healthy tissue by mistake; since the brain’s consistency is that of barely jelled tapioca, even the healthy portions could easily disappear up the tubes.

Just as Kobrine and Engle were about to start vacuuming the debris, a clot in Brady’s brain burst, sending a geyser of blood two feet into the air. The eruption proved to be a piece of good luck; not only did it relieve pressure on Brady’s brain, it also opened a hole that allowed Kobrine to explore for damage.

While a third member of the surgical team retracted the scalp and rinsed the wound with saline solution, Kobrine and Engle used the vacuum tubes to clear the brain of blood and injured tissue. When Kobrine spotted two bleeding arteries, he clipped them shut. Then he began gently probing the brain with a gloved finger, feeling for bullet fragments. Using forceps, he removed every fragment he could find.

At one point during the surgery, someone ran into the room and said that the radio was reporting that Brady had died. A nurse turned on the room’s stereo system so they could listen to the broadcast.

“Those fuckers,” Kobrine said. “What do they think we’re operating on, a corpse?”

*   *   *

A
T
5:25
P.M.
, a radiology technician finished taking a new X-ray of the president’s chest. David Gens trailed the technician to radiology and waited for the cassette to be developed. As soon as it was, he returned to OR 2 and put the film on a backlighted board hanging on one wall.

Ben Aaron studied the image carefully. He was relieved to see that the bullet still appeared to be in the lung; he also noted that it was just a bit lower than where he had been looking. He turned back to the operating table and began hunting again, compressing lung tissue in his fingers, feeling for the small piece of metal. When it didn’t turn up right away, he was surprised—after all, now he knew exactly where to look.

Thinking about why the bullet was so elusive, Aaron realized that it must be sliding away every time he squeezed the spongy tissue. He asked for a Robinson catheter, a flexible rubber tube usually used to drain urine, and inserted it into the wound track. Then, using the tube as a barrier to prevent the bullet from slithering away from his fingers, he pressed the lung tissue around the catheter.

After a few minutes, he felt something hard. He wanted to smile but didn’t; instead, he asked for a No. 15 blade and then sliced open the lung directly above the bullet. Reaching into the incision with his right thumb and forefinger, he felt for the bit of metal and plucked it out. Smashed but intact, the bullet was clearly too small to be a .38 caliber. Oddly, it had been flattened into a disk about the size of a dime. Its edges were smooth, and one side was silver, the other black.

Over the years, Aaron had retrieved plenty of bullets from patients, and he knew instantly that this one had struck something hard and then ricocheted into the president.

“I’ve got it,” Aaron said, as he held the bullet aloft for everyone to see. Then he dropped it into a paper cup held by a Secret Service agent.

It was 5:40 p.m., a little more than three hours since the president had been shot.

The flattened .22-caliber Devastator bullet extracted from President Reagan’s chest.

CHAPTER 14

THE WAITING ROOM

While awaiting further word about the president’s surgery, Nancy Reagan and several advisors and friends were led to a large waiting room, where they were buffered from the bustle of the hospital. Throughout the afternoon, Mrs. Reagan had kept an eye on the nonstop television coverage of the shooting and its aftermath. The first lady found some small comfort in the networks’ steady stream of words and pictures; she was desperate for any information, and at least the television offered a semblance of news. Still, most of the reports were not good, and some of them weren’t even accurate. One network incorrectly stated that Reagan was undergoing open-heart surgery. Then all three major networks reported that Jim Brady had died. A few minutes later, the ABC News anchor Frank Reynolds corrected his earlier report and said that the press secretary was in fact alive. Frustrated, he yelled to his producers off camera: “Let’s get it nailed down, somebody!”

At one point, Mrs. Reagan moved to a window in the waiting room and stared down at the crowd gathered in the streets below. Agent George Opfer gently took the first lady’s arm, drew her into the room, and closed the blinds. He warned her that standing in front of a window simply wasn’t safe, especially since a conspiracy hadn’t been ruled out yet.

Waiting with Mrs. Reagan was Mike Deaver, who was unhappy with the way White House officials had responded to the crisis. The performance by Speakes had been dreadful; Haig’s appearance in front of the press corps was an utter disaster. Not long after Haig’s debacle, Deaver went to find Jim Baker, who had spent much of the afternoon in a temporary command post that had been set up in a hospital conference room. “That thing is out of control over there,” Deaver told Baker, urging the chief of staff to return to the White House as soon as possible.

Before leaving the hospital, Baker once again turned to Lyn Nofziger for help. Earlier, Nofziger had proven his ability to set the record straight while providing only a limited amount of information; now, at 5:10 p.m., he stepped to a podium in the main lecture hall at George Washington University School of Medicine, just across the street from the hospital. Speaking in his gruff but authoritative way, Nofziger announced that Reagan was undergoing surgery and confirmed that Jim Brady, though alive, had suffered a serious head wound. He deflected questions about the president’s medical condition but said there was no indication that the bullet had nicked his heart.

As he stepped away from the microphones, Nofziger heard a reporter ask one last question.

“Did he say anything?”

Nofziger turned back to the podium, feeling as if God had just sent him an angel.

“Oh, yes,” Nofziger replied, barely able to suppress a grin. Pulling out his notes about what the president had said in the emergency room and just before going into surgery, he put on his reading glasses and stared carefully at his scribbled words. Then, gesticulating with his right hand for emphasis, he regaled the journalists with the president’s one-liners and quips. He told them about the wink that Reagan had given Baker while heading to the operating room; he read the president’s joke about hoping the surgeons were Republicans. And Nofziger made certain to pass on Reagan’s first words to his wife: “He told Mrs. Reagan, ‘Honey, I forgot to duck.’”

Nofziger’s words were enormously reassuring. How could the president be seriously hurt if he was able to crack jokes? For the White House and the nation, Nofziger’s comments could not have come at a better moment.

*   *   *

B
EN
A
ARON HAD
removed the bullet from the president’s lung, but his work wasn’t done. First he needed to stop all the bleeding in Reagan’s chest; when he spotted an artery the diameter of a pencil that had been damaged by the bullet, he stitched it closed, and that problem was finally solved. Next he had to make a decision about the left lung. Should he remove the entire lower lobe, which had suffered the most damage? Aaron wasn’t sure the lobe would fully heal. If left in place it might invite dangerous infections. On the other hand, removal would require another hour or two of surgery, and the procedure was hardly simple. Hoping he was making the right choice, Aaron decided to leave the lower lobe in place.

Aaron began the process of sewing up the president just before six p.m. He cleaned the wound thoroughly with saline and then stitched the hole in the lung with chromic catgut, an absorbable and sterile suture derived from beef or sheep intestine. He cleaned the bullet track through the chest and then began sewing up the gaps in the tissues and muscles. After placing two tubes in Reagan’s chest to drain more blood—they would remain for several days—he sewed the rib cage shut and asked his two assistants, Doctors Cheyney and Adelberg, to stitch up the president’s skin. Turning the final bit of work over to Cheyney and Adelberg was a small deed, but it showed both his confidence in them and his belief that it was important to treat the president as he would any other patient.

A nurse who had been handing Aaron instruments at the operating table began collecting scalpels, sponges, and blades. She and a colleague counted and recounted them to ensure that they didn’t leave anything inside the president. Then she turned to a Secret Service agent who had been standing a few feet from her during the entire surgery. He had watched her every move with an intense, serious stare. Smiling, she raised her middle finger at him. He grinned back, breaking any lingering tension in the operating room.

Aaron and his fellow doctors were optimistic about Reagan’s prognosis. His vital signs were solid; he seemed to have weathered both the shooting and the grueling surgery remarkably well. Even so, it had been a rough few hours. Since his arrival at the hospital, the president had lost about 3.5 liters of blood. He had received eight units of red blood cells and a significant quantity of plasma and platelets. All told, doctors had pumped a total of 5.7 liters of fluids into his veins. His lungs were not working efficiently yet, so he was receiving an air mixture that was about 40 to 50 percent oxygen, in comparison with the 21 percent in ordinary air.

Still, the three-hour operation had been a success. As his surgical team prepared to roll his patient to the recovery room for the night, Aaron was confident that the president’s darkest hours were behind him.

*   *   *

S
OON AFTER
L
YN
Nofziger’s successful news conference, the attention of those in the Situation Room turned to yet another urgent matter—a dairy bill, of all things. The next day, the president had to sign a bill that would halt $147 million in subsidies for the dairy industry; if he didn’t, the money would start to flow on April 1, and Reagan’s first congressional victory in his assault on federal spending would be lost. For several minutes, the secretaries of state, defense, and Treasury, the attorney general, and several others proposed ways around the problem. Could the president delegate the signing to Bush? Could he give up some of his powers without giving up all of them? Attorney General William French Smith, for one, was dubious. “He either is president or he isn’t.”