Then the agent stepped up to the gurney and gently patted Reagan on the head. He didn’t want the president to feel alone, so he leaned over and looked him in the eyes. Let him live, Parr prayed. God, let him live!
CHAPTER 8
THE TRAUMA BAY
Agent George Opfer, the head of Nancy Reagan’s Secret Service detail, was looking forward to a productive afternoon. It had been an easy day so far, and the first lady wasn’t scheduled to leave the White House grounds again, which meant he would have time to catch up on paperwork. But as he eased into a chair at a desk in W-16, the Secret Service command post beneath the Oval Office, he wondered about the first lady’s abrupt departure from a lunch in Georgetown a little while earlier. Something had been bothering Mrs. Reagan—she didn’t seem sick, just anxious and unsettled—and she had told Opfer to take her home. He had promptly escorted her from the luncheon. By the time he drove inside the White House gates at about 2:20 p.m., Mrs. Reagan seemed calmer.
The first lady immediately went upstairs to meet with her decorator and the White House usher about her plans for renovating the residence. Opfer returned to the command post, where he planned to spend the next couple of hours scheduling his team of seven agents. Happily, the week ahead was fairly routine. The first lady’s next major engagement wasn’t for two days, when she would be attending a lunch with the wife of Lloyd Bentsen, a Democratic senator, at Mrs. Bentsen’s home.
Opfer—a lean, blond New Yorker who sometimes received fan mail from young women who’d spotted his photograph in the newspapers when he happened to be standing next to Mrs. Reagan—had been assigned to guard the eventual first lady even before the November election determined who that would be. When Reagan triumphed, one of the service’s top agents, John Simpson, asked Opfer to pay him a visit. In June 1968, Simpson had led a team assigned to protect Reagan when he was an undeclared candidate for the Republican nomination, and he’d become friendly with the Reagans over the years. He knew Opfer would be apprehensive about guarding Mrs. Reagan, who had a reputation for being demanding and sometimes less than understanding when things didn’t go her way, so he offered some advice: “Don’t listen to the stories, because they are wrong. Make your own evaluation when you get out there. And one more thing: the Reagans really are a modern-day love story. So be prepared for that.”
In November 1980, while protecting Nancy Reagan at the couple’s Pacific Palisades home, Opfer had his first encounter with the president-elect. Mrs. Reagan introduced the two men; Reagan looked Opfer in the eye and said, with a bit of an edge in his voice, “Well, George, make sure you take good care of her.”
The hair on the back of Opfer’s neck stood up. Intentionally or not, there was something a little threatening in Reagan’s delivery, as if to let Opfer know that mistakes would not be tolerated. Opfer imagined being shipped off to some remote field office if he screwed up.
Now, as he sat in the command post and jotted notes on his scheduling forms, his earpiece suddenly came alive with radio traffic: there had been a shooting at the Hilton and the president was being rushed back to the White House. Opfer looked up and saw a supervisor and an agent frantically working the radios and phones in the communications area.
Opfer bolted from his chair and rushed over to see what was happening. The agent at the bank of radios said the president “had shots fired at him,” and the supervisor told Opfer to inform Mrs. Reagan that there had been an incident at the Hilton. As he raced for the stairs, he heard over his radio that the motorcade had changed course and was heading to GW. He knew the agents wouldn’t divert to the hospital without a good reason, which meant the president was almost certainly injured.
Now Opfer was desperate to reach Mrs. Reagan before she heard about the incident from someone else. He was certain that if he arrived even a few seconds behind the news, he’d be chasing the first lady across the White House driveway as she ran for the hospital. If he had learned one thing in the past few months, it was that Mrs. Reagan was her own woman. Especially in a crisis, she would never take orders from him. So it was critical that he get to her right away, approach her with extreme care, and somehow manage the situation as it evolved. Above all, he had to protect her from acting impulsively and putting herself in harm’s way. He knew she would stop at nothing to be at her husband’s side.
Opfer’s heart pounded as he took the stairs two at a time to the third floor of the residence and the White House solarium. As he neared the door to the solarium, he tried to calm down. Then he put on his best poker face, opened the door, and walked up the ramp leading into the room.
As Opfer entered, the first lady was talking to Ted Garber, the Reagans’ decorator, and Rex Scouten, the chief White House usher. When Opfer caught Mrs. Reagan’s eye, the first lady seemed puzzled; then as she walked toward him, her expression became anxious, and suddenly he felt certain that she knew that something awful had just happened.
In his calmest and most measured voice, Opfer told her, “There was a shooting when the president was departing the Hilton hotel. My information is that your husband was not injured, but others have been shot. The president is going to the hospital.”
The first lady’s eyebrows furrowed and she instantly seized on the obvious question. “George, why would they be taking him to the hospital if he wasn’t hurt?”
“It’s just precautionary,” he replied, hoping that this invention would allay her fears until he could learn whether a trip to the hospital would even be safe. For one thing, he worried that other assailants might target Mrs. Reagan or anyone trying to approach the hospital; for another, he knew nothing about the president’s condition. If he’d been seriously wounded, it might be traumatic for the first lady to see him.
“Besides,” the agent added, “maybe he is insisting on seeing the condition of the other people who were wounded.”
Before Opfer could utter another word, he was looking at Nancy Reagan’s back. She was hurrying for the elevator.
“I’m going to the hospital,” she said. “If you don’t get me a car, I’m going to walk.”
“No, let’s wait and see what happens,” Opfer said, following her. “It’s a madhouse over there. He’ll probably be coming right back to the White House any minute.”
“No, I’m going to the hospital,” she said.
“Once we get the all clear, I’ll take you over,” he said.
“No, I’m going now,” she replied.
There was no point in arguing. “Okay,” Opfer said. “How about this, give me a couple of minutes to have the cars ready and we can go.”
“Fine,” she said.
With Opfer leading the way, they took the stairs down to the ground floor. Then they headed for the diplomatic entrance to the White House, where the first lady’s two-car motorcade would assemble. He could hear Mrs. Reagan right behind him—she was nearly clipping his heels.
“George, when are we going?” He heard a note of panic in her voice.
“As soon as the cars are ready,” he answered.
By now Opfer had radioed instructions to prepare the motorcade. When the two agency sedans pulled up outside the diplomatic entrance, Opfer took his place in the front passenger seat of the first black car. Mrs. Reagan, wearing her red raincoat, sat in the back and was joined by her spokeswoman. Opfer made sure the doors were locked, as much to keep the first lady in as to keep danger out.
The two cars pulled out of the White House and onto Pennsylvania Avenue for the short ride to the hospital. The radio in Opfer’s ear fed him a steady stream of information, but since the radio’s frequency was unsecured the reports weren’t very specific. He still didn’t know how badly the president had been hurt.
Only a block or two from the White House, the small motorcade encountered heavy traffic and came to a stop. They were stuck for just a few minutes, but to Opfer the wait seemed interminable.
Soon two hands gripped Opfer’s shoulders from behind. “When am I going to get there to see him?” the
first lady asked.
“We’re moving,” Opfer replied. “We’ll get there soon.”
A minute later, she seized his shoulders again. “George, I’m going to get out and walk. I need to get out and walk.”
“No, no, we can’t do that, it’s not safe,” Opfer said.
“I need to walk,” she said. “I have to get there.”
At last the traffic eased and they began making good progress. As soon as they reached the ER entrance, Opfer opened the car’s rear door. He watched a blur of red raincoat run for the emergency room doors and then hurried to catch up.
* * *
IN THE CHAOS of the emergency room, Dan Ruge, the gray-haired and decorous White House physician, remained remarkably composed. As soon as he saw an opening, he stepped up to the gurney carrying the president and used one of his delicate fingers to find an artery in one of Reagan’s feet. The president’s pulse was steady, a good sign.
Before coming to Washington, Ruge, a neurosurgeon by training, had been a colleague of Loyal Davis, Nancy Reagan’s stepfather. Ruge hadn’t wanted the job of White House physician, but he accepted it after Davis, a respected neurosurgeon in Chicago, convinced him that the Reagans needed an experienced doctor to prevent anything “foolish” from being done to the president during his time in office. Now Ruge was being put to the test, and though he worried that Reagan had suffered a heart attack, he didn’t have enough information to make a confident diagnosis. But it was not his job to treat the president; his first concern was that the doctors at GW not give Reagan special care. Exotic tests, diagnosis by committee, flying in experts from another city—such measures would take time and could put the president’s life at even greater risk. As he stepped back from the gurney, Ruge was determined to ensure that Reagan wasn’t treated like a VIP. He immediately began telling doctors to handle the president exactly as they would any other patient in his condition.
Only a few feet away, Mike Deaver and David Fischer were watching the unfolding emergency in stunned horror. The leader they both revered seemed to be in terrible trouble.
Seeing Ruge, Deaver signaled him to come over. “Tell me what’s happening,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Ruge replied. “Maybe he had a cardiac.”
Deaver and Fischer were dumbstruck. They’d both watched the president’s speech at the Hilton; he had been so vibrant and alive, and now he was pale and sickly and possibly having a heart attack. It was too much for Fischer; tears streaked down his face.
Watching the frenzied efforts of the trauma bay’s doctors and nurses, Deaver recalled hearing about the chaos at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, where John F. Kennedy had been rushed. Realizing that providing accurate information to the White House would be critical, he ran to find a phone so he could call Jim Baker; Fischer followed. Deaver had trouble getting through to the swamped White House switchboard, but an operator finally answered and transferred him to the office of the chief of staff. An assistant picked up the phone.
“Find Jim,” Deaver said. “Have someone hold this line open.”
A moment later, Baker got on the phone.
Deaver quickly recounted what had happened at the Hilton and then said, “We don’t know what the problem is. It may be a heart attack.”
Deaver turned to Fischer. “Go find out what’s going on in there.”
After Fischer hurried back to the trauma bay, a hospital worker in green scrubs approached Deaver. “Do you know the name of the patient in the emergency room?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Would you give me his name, please?”
“It’s Reagan. R-E-A-G-A-N.”
“First name?”
“Ron.”
The hospital employee kept scribbling.
“Address?”
“Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania.”
The man’s pencil stopped moving.
“You mean…?”
“Yes, you have the president of the United States in there.”
* * *
THE VOLUME OF noise in the trauma bay was now so high that Wendy Koenig gave up on using a stethoscope and instead placed a finger over the brachial artery in the president’s left arm, just below the blood pressure cuff. She inflated the device a third time, desperate to get a reading. Koenig released the air and waited; she sensed more than actually felt the bump as she watched the needle descend on the cuff’s pressure gauge. Reagan’s systolic blood pressure was about 60; his normal reading would be about 140. This was bad news: a reading of 60 indicated that he was in shock, and, as Koenig knew, most seventy-year-olds who came to the ER in a condition similar to Reagan’s did not survive.
Only five or six minutes had elapsed since the assassination attempt. Nurses and technicians were pumping crystalloid fluid, a salt solution, into Reagan’s body to boost his sagging blood pressure and reduce his chances of slipping further into shock. He had three IV lines running into his arms, and doctors had already ordered universal donor blood from the hospital blood bank.
Joyce Mitchell, the ER doctor, noticed the pile of clothes under the gurney and realized that Reagan’s shirt was spotted with blood. She told an orderly to rush the shirt to the laboratory so they could determine the president’s blood type. Another nurse drew blood from Reagan so it could be taken to the same lab. A moment later, another doctor turned to Jerry Parr: did he know the president’s blood type?
“O positive,” Parr replied.
By now, trauma surgeons were on their way to the emergency room. One of the first to arrive was William O’Neill, a thirty-year-old surgical intern who had been consulting with the family of a patient in a fourth-floor hallway when his pager started beeping. He politely excused himself and ran for the ER.
As he neared the nurses’ station, two men in suits grabbed the five-foot, six-inch O’Neill and lifted him into the air. “Who are you?” they demanded.
“I’m Dr. O’Neill. I’m on the trauma team.”
The agents flung O’Neill toward the trauma bay, where he found several doctors and nurses working frantically on a patient lying face-up on a gurney. His skin was gray and his lips were caked with blood. O’Neill, already experienced enough to make quick and fairly accurate assessments of new patients, thought the man might not survive.
All at once, O’Neill understood the scene around him. There was a reason the ER was so alive with activity: the well-dressed men he’d just encountered on his way here were Secret Service agents, and the man on the gurney was the president of the United States. He took a close look at the gray face of his patient and confirmed his identity.
O’Neill turned to the Secret Service agent who seemed to be in charge. “What happened?”
“There was a shooting and I shoved him into the car,” the agent said. “I think he may have broken a rib.”
O’Neill heard someone say that Reagan’s blood pressure was now 80, already 20 points better than when it was first measured. The fluids were working.
The doctor leaned over the gurney. “Hello, Mr. President, how are you doing?” he asked. “Where are you hurting?”
“I’m having a hard time breathing,” Reagan replied.
“Mr. President, do you know what happened?”
“Not really.”
Other doctors joined O’Neill at the president’s side, including Drew Scheele, another intern, who had been observing a surgery but wanted to see what was causing all the commotion in the ER. As he entered the trauma bay, he spotted the remnants of a nice blue suit on the floor. What a waste of an expensive suit, Scheele thought. He walked up to the gurney, made a quick assessment of the patient’s condition, and placed an oxygen mask on the man’s face.
The patient stared up at Scheele. “Am I dying?” the man asked through the mask.
“No, you’re going to be fine,” answered Scheele. In fact, he could see that the man was in serious condition; he had no idea whether the patient would live or die. He still hadn’t focused on the man’s face and s
o had no idea who he was.
G. Wesley Price, a surgical resident, arrived soon after Scheele. Price had already had a long night and day. A twenty-five-year-old man, shot several times in the abdomen, had died in surgery early that morning; afterward, Price had continued with his usual duties, checking on patients and working in the pathology lab. Just minutes earlier, he’d been in the lab when he heard sirens on Pennsylvania Avenue. Looking out an open window, he saw a motorcade speeding toward the hospital. He sprinted downstairs to the emergency room, where a crowd was gathering in the far corner by the trauma bay.
“Who’s the patient?” Price asked a nurse.
“It’s the president!” the nurse replied.
“You’re kidding,” Price said. He walked the final ten feet into Bay 5A and there was Reagan, now naked, lying on a gurney. Bags of fluids were suspended above him, and a urologist had already inserted a Foley catheter to remove his urine.
As he entered the room, Price spoke to Judith Whinerey, the assistant head nurse. “Who is in charge?” he asked.
“You are,” replied Whinerey. Turning, she shouted to everyone in the bay, “Everybody, Dr. Price is here.”
Price, a thirty-one-year-old fourth-year resident, was now the most senior surgeon in the room. The nurses and O’Neill told him what they knew: Reagan had walked into the ER and collapsed. His blood pressure was low, and they were giving him fluids and waiting on blood from the hospital blood bank.
“I can’t breathe,” the president said again. “My chest hurts.”
Price leaned over his patient. “Hello, Mr. President, I’m Dr. Price.” He pulled out his stethoscope and pressed it to the right side of the president’s chest. It was difficult to hear anything in the din, but Price detected a light rush of air and decided the right lung sounded normal. But when he moved the stethoscope to the left side of Reagan’s chest, he heard nothing, which meant the left lung wasn’t functioning and had probably collapsed.
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