Reagan: The Life (45 page)

But the bullet seemed not to want to be found. The lead surgeon probed around the president’s left lung and discovered nothing solid. He tried again and then again. He turned to his assistant and asked her to try. She had no better luck. The lead surgeon, puzzled, ordered a new X-ray while wondering whether he might have to leave the bullet in the president after all.

The X-ray showed the slug, about where it had appeared to be earlier and where the surgeon had been looking. He concluded that his probing fingers were causing it to move, always just out of his reach. Now, taking precautions to prevent the motion, he finally located it. A scalpel cut it free, and it was extracted.

The rest of the surgery was straightforward, though not free from risk. A damaged artery, the one that had caused most of the bleeding, was repaired. The wound to the lung was sutured, as were the incisions produced by the surgery. The patient was cleaned up and sent to recovery.

R
ON
R
EAGAN WAS
the first of the children to arrive. He had been in Nebraska when he heard of the shooting. No scheduled flights east were leaving soon, so he chartered a plane for himself and his wife, Doria. He
got to the hospital while his father was still in surgery. His mother was nearly in shock. “I’m so frightened,” she said, reaching out to him. “I know, Mom,” he replied. “But hold on.”

At about seven thirty in the evening, five hours after the shooting, Nancy and Ron were allowed into the recovery room. Reagan looked like many patients after major trauma and surgery: drained of color and energy, tubes down his throat and in his arms, wires connecting him to monitors. Nancy began crying at the sight. “I love you,” she told him through her tears.

He groggily returned her gaze, but fear crept into his eyes. He fumbled for a pad and pencil. “
I can’t breathe,” he wrote.

“He can’t
breathe
!” she shouted to the room.

A doctor told her not to worry. The respirator took some getting used to, but it supplied the president all the air he needed.

“
It’s okay, Dad,” Ron Reagan told his father. “You’ve got a tube in your throat. It’s like scuba diving. Just let the machine breathe for you.” Afterward Ron wondered why he had employed this analogy. “Dad had never been diving; I had barely been diving myself. And having a plastic hose lodged in your throat is probably entirely different and quite a bit more unpleasant than breathing pressurized oxygen from a tank while communing with brightly colored fish. Nevertheless, this non sequitur seemed to calm everyone who needed calming—except, perhaps, my father, though I doubt it did him any harm.”

The visit was brief. Reagan drifted in and out of consciousness. The doctor told them to go and let him rest.

As they drove from the hospital to the White House, they passed crowds of people standing vigil and holding signs conveying encouragement. “
Get Well Soon” and “Tonight We Are All Republicans,” the signs said.

At the White House, Nancy couldn’t sleep. “Nothing can happen to my Ronnie,” she wrote in her diary. “My life would be over.”

R
EAGAN RECOVERED, BUT
Nancy never did. Four days after the shooting he developed a fever. The doctors couldn’t discern its cause, but they put him on antibiotics in case it signaled an infection. The fever gradually subsided.

The list of his visitors expanded from family members to staff. Eight
days after the shooting Tip O’Neill, the Democratic speaker of the House, was allowed in. “
God bless you, Mr. President,” O’Neill said. He began reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” Reagan joined him in a voice a bit above a whisper.

As he gained strength, Reagan reflected on the meaning of his near-death experience. “
It heightened his sense of mission,” Ron Reagan said later. “He thought God had saved his life and so he had a greater responsibility.” Reagan himself wrote in his diary, “
Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.”

After thirteen days Reagan was released from the hospital. Knowing there would be cameras, he refused the wheelchair required of most non-presidential patients and insisted on walking out. He managed a smile and a wave.

He recuperated at the White House during the next two weeks. Nancy arranged the solarium so he could spend his days there in the spring sunshine. On the warmest afternoons they sat outside on the terrace. Soon he began to laugh off his ordeal. “
I don’t know what you’re worried about,” he told Nancy, who still fretted. “I knew all along that I’d be fine.”

But she couldn’t stop worrying. “I was devastated after the shooting,” she recalled. “Ronnie recovered, but I’m a worrier, and now I really had something to worry about: that it might happen again, and that this time I would lose him forever.” She thought time might ease her distress, but it didn’t. “I continued to be haunted by what had happened, as well as by what had almost happened,” she said. “For the rest of Ronnie’s presidency—almost eight more years—every time he left home, especially to go on a trip, it was as if my heart stopped until he got back.”

Subsequent events increased her foreboding. Six weeks after the attempt on Reagan’s life, a gunman shot and wounded the pope in Rome. Five months later, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was murdered in Cairo.

“
Everyone said it was just a coincidence,” Nancy recounted. “And yet I worried. How could any public figure be protected from acts of violence? And what if these three events were somehow connected in a way that would become known only at some future time?”

Nancy knew of the fatal pattern that had long afflicted presidents elected in years divisible by twenty. Since 1840 every chief executive so elected had died in office:
William Henry Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield,
McKinley, Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy. Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy had been assassinated. Now her husband had nearly been assassinated. Did death in office still await him?

The specter wouldn’t leave her. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t eat. Her thin frame grew gaunt. She prayed, to no lasting avail. “When Ronnie wasn’t around, I cried,” she remembered. “Sometimes I also cried when he
was
around, but I would usually manage to slip away into the bedroom or the bathroom so he wouldn’t see me.”

She sought the advice of friends she could trust. Some she saw in person; others she consulted by phone. “One afternoon I was on the phone with
Merv Griffin, an old friend from my Hollywood days,” she recalled. “He mentioned that he had recently talked with
Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer. I had seen her years ago on Merv’s television show, where she was part of a panel of astrologers. Later, Merv had apparently introduced us, although I don’t remember meeting her. Joan had then volunteered her advice during Ronnie’s 1980 campaign, and had called me several times to talk about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ times for Ronnie. I was interested in what she had to say, and I was pleased when she told me that Ronnie was going to win—that it was in his chart and in mine.”

Griffin said that he and Quigley had spoken about the attempt on Reagan’s life. “I remember as if it were yesterday my reaction to what Merv told me on the phone,” she said eight years later. “He had talked to Joan, who had said she could have warned me about March 30. According to Merv, Joan had said, ‘The president should have stayed home. I could see from my charts that this was going to be a dangerous day for him.’ ”

Nancy recalled her response to Griffin: “Oh, my God! I could have stopped it!”

She immediately hung up on Griffin and called Quigley. “Merv tells me you knew about March 30,” she said.

“Yes, I could see it was a very bad day for the president,” Quigley replied.

“I’m so scared,” Nancy said. “I’m scared every time he leaves the house, and I don’t think I breathe until he gets home. I cringe every time we step out of a car or leave a building. I’m afraid that one of these days somebody is going to shoot at him again.”

Quigley responded with sympathy. Nancy subsequently called her again, and again. She shared her fears and concerns not simply about her husband but about her children and her parents. “On all these matters, Joan was helpful and comforting,” Nancy said. “We had a professional
relationship, but I came to view her as a friend. I now see that she was also a kind of therapist.”

Quigley suggested that she could help Nancy by identifying days that were good or bad for her husband.

“Well, I thought, what’s the harm in that?” Nancy remembered. “And so once or twice a month I would talk with Joan (sometimes by appointment, sometimes not). I would have Ronnie’s schedule in front of me, and what I wanted to know was very simple: Were specific dates safe or dangerous? If, for example, Ronnie was scheduled to give a speech in Chicago on May 3, should he leave Washington that morning, or was he better off flying out on the previous afternoon?” Quigley would listen and take notes. She would consult the stars and whatever other sources she used, and she would call Nancy back with her recommendations. “I would, if necessary, call
Michael Deaver, who was in charge of Ronnie’s schedule,” Nancy said. “Sometimes a small change was made.” After Deaver left the White House and Don Regan became chief of staff with control of the schedule, Nancy worked through Regan.

“I knew, of course, that if this ever came out, it could prove embarrassing to Ronnie,” she observed. “But as long as I worked with Mike Deaver, I knew my secret was safe. Mike was discreet. He had known Ronnie and me for years and was one of my closest friends. I never even thought of asking him to keep a confidence. I just knew he would.”

F
OUR WEEKS AND
a day after the shooting, Reagan returned to the political arena. He requested permission to address Congress and duly received an invitation. When he entered the House chamber, the senators and representatives leaped to their feet in a politically mandatory but no less heartfelt expression of relief that democracy had not been derailed by a madman. Reagan had to fight his way through the arms and hands that reached out for his; like the celebrity he had been for half a century, he reveled in and reciprocated the good feeling. When he mounted the dais, the applause and cheers kept on and on. He smiled and waved and nodded, and smiled and waved and nodded again and again. The applause continued. Finally he quipped, in obvious reference to his close brush with death, “
You wouldn’t want to talk me into an encore, would you?”

He had come to speak about the business of government. But he had a personal message first. “I’d like to say a few words directly to all of you and to those who are watching and listening tonight, because this is the only way I know to express to all of you on behalf of Nancy and myself our appreciation for your messages and flowers and, most of all, your prayers, not only for me but for those others who fell beside me. The warmth of your words, the expression of friendship and, yes, love, meant more to us than you can ever know. You have given us a memory that we’ll treasure forever.”

Reagan’s audience was as moved as he himself obviously was. Applause again poured from both sides of the aisle. He told of the cards and letters he had received. He drew one such letter from his lapel pocket. The writer was a second grader in Rockville Centre, New York. “I hope you
get well quick,” Reagan read, “or you might have to make a speech in your pajamas.” Reagan’s words and delivery lifted the somberness that had infused the applause; all remembered what a funny fellow he was and were delighted to have him back. Reagan let the laughter flow and slowly ebb. He finished the story with his young correspondent’s closing line: “P.S. If you
have
to make a speech in your pajamas, I warned you.” The legislators roared again, the Democrats despite themselves.

He wasn’t finished with his prologue. Referring, as in the campaign, to Jimmy Carter’s lament at the malaise that afflicted Americans, augmented now by comments that only a sick society could produce a deranged gunman like John Hinckley, Reagan repeated what he himself had said, that there was nothing wrong or sick about America at all. He cited his own recent experience. “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.” The audience applauded, loudly and long. “Sick societies don’t produce dedicated police officers like Tom Delahanty.” More applause. “Or able and devoted public servants like Jim Brady.” Even more applause, and the eyes of the legislators turned, with the television cameras, to Brady’s wife, Sarah, seated in the gallery. “Sick societies don’t make people like us so proud to be Americans and so very proud of our fellow citizens.”

R
EAGAN ALWAYS KNEW
when he had an audience where he wanted it, and he knew he had this one. He launched into the job at hand. “Let’s talk about getting spending and
inflation under control and cutting your tax rates,” he said. “Thanks to some very fine people, my health is much improved. I’d like to be able to say that with regard to the health of the economy.” But he could not. Six months after the election, an election in which voters had clearly registered their desire for a change of course, the economy remained on life support. Inflation had scarcely abated;
interest rates were still punishingly high. Nearly eight million Americans were still unemployed. Real wages had fallen. “Six months is long enough. The American people now want us to act and not in half measures. They demand and they’ve earned a full and comprehensive effort to clean up our economic mess.”

The effort must begin with the budget. Reagan reiterated the message of the election: “Our government is too big, and it spends too much.” He was pleased to report that the Senate Budget Committee had just that
day approved a bipartisan budget resolution consistent with the recommendations the administration had issued. Unfortunately, the House was lagging. The House Budget Committee, controlled by Democrats, had presented a bill that was woefully deficient. It cut social programs too little and shortchanged defense. And rather than reduce taxes, it would raise them. “It adheres to the failed policy of trying to balance the budget on the taxpayer’s back,” Reagan said. The Democratic measure was conservative in the worst sense of the word: it would entrench the failed policies of the past. “High taxes and excess spending growth created our present economic mess; more of the same will not cure the hardship, anxiety, and discouragement it has imposed on the American people.”