Rawhide Down

by Del Quentin Wilber

  He began by slicing into the skin about eight inches below Reagan’s left armpit and pulling apart the tissue with his gloved fingers. He gently pushed a Crile clamp, a skinny scissorlike device, into a two-inch gap between two ribs. With his fingers and the clamp, he pried away fat and muscle, mining a hole into the president’s chest cavity. The space was slightly too small, so he had to force the clear plastic tube through. He slid it eight inches into Reagan’s chest and sutured it into place before attaching it to a Pleur-evac device, which suctions out and collects blood. Blood started pouring into the Pleur-evac’s plastic container.

  As the tube began to relieve some of the intense pressure in the president’s chest, Reagan became calmer. An anesthesiologist gently patted his right shoulder and leaned down to his ear. “Everything is going to be okay,” he said.

  Looking up from the gurney, Reagan spotted Jerry Parr, one of the few familiar faces within view. “I hope they are all Republicans,” he said through his mask. Parr smiled, but he was too anxious to laugh. Reagan would repeat the line later, to better effect.

  One nurse monitoring the president’s vital signs was startled by his attempt at humor; given his condition, she didn’t think it was a good time to be joking around. Another nurse was amazed at how calm Reagan seemed. And everyone working around the gurney was impressed by his courtesy.

  “I don’t mean to trouble you,” the president said to one of his doctors, “but I am still having a hard time breathing.”

  * * *

  WHEN NANCY REAGAN rushed through the hospital’s emergency entrance, trailed by her Secret Service agents, Mike Deaver was waiting for her.

  He broke the bad news right away. “He’s been hit,” Deaver said.

  “But they told me he wasn’t hit,” Mrs. Reagan said.

  “Well, he was. But they say it’s not serious.”

  “Where? Where was he hit?”

  “They don’t know,” Deaver said.

  “I’ve got to see him,” she said. “Mike, they don’t know how it is with us. He has to know I’m here!”

  As she approached the ER, Mrs. Reagan spotted Dan Ruge in the hallway.

  “Oh, Dan,” she said, nearly in tears as they embraced.

  The scene around the first lady was chaotic. Secret Service agents and police officers ran past her in the hallway; police radios squawked as officers and hospital security teams chased away medical students, onlookers, and even reporters. (At least one journalist had already been discovered hiding by a bank of telephones.) Mrs. Reagan and her agents were ushered into a small office near the ER. There she was joined by several friends and associates who had rushed to the hospital, including Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, a longtime Reagan supporter and advisor.

  One of Mrs. Reagan’s friends gripped her hand; then he began to sob. The first lady did not break down, but her mind flashed back to November 22, 1963, when she’d been driving down San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles and heard a radio report that President Kennedy had been slain. She prayed that history would not repeat itself, and she kept telling herself that the hospital’s doctors knew what they were doing and that she had to stay out of their way. But she desperately wanted to comfort her husband. She was not accustomed to being kept away from him, especially under such dire circumstances. To anyone who would listen, she pleaded, “I want to see my husband.”

  * * *

  WHEN JEFF JACOBSON, a neurosurgical resident, heard the trauma team being paged, he rushed to the ER. There was a slight chance that the bullet had hit Reagan’s spinal cord; Jacobson’s task was to determine whether he had suffered any nerve damage. Jacobson worked his way through the throng of doctors and nurses and began to assess the president. He asked him to move his left hand, left arm, right hand, and right arm, and then his legs. The surgeon tapped the president’s knees and ankles with a rubber mallet, then ran a pinwheel over his extremities. Reagan reacted perfectly to all the tests.

  As Jacobson stepped away from the president’s gurney, he noticed a second patient in the trauma bay: this was Jim Brady, the president’s press secretary. As nurses and technicians cut off Brady’s clothes, inserted IV lines, and put an oxygen mask on his face, Jacobson performed a cursory inspection of Brady’s head, which was swaddled in bloody bandages. The press secretary’s left eye was swollen to the size of an egg, and blood and brain matter oozed from the wound just above the eye. Clearly, the injury was devastating, but Brady was breathing on his own and moaning, two good signs.

  Also attending Brady was Paul Colombani, who had rushed down the stairs with David Gens. Colombani quickly checked the press secretary’s chest, lungs, abdomen, and extremities but found no other wounds. He stepped back to allow Judith Johnson, an anesthesiologist, to go to work. To ensure that his brain was getting enough oxygen, Brady needed to be put on a respirator as soon as possible. Johnson asked Brady whether he was getting enough air.

  Yes, he said, trying to remove the mask.

  “No, you’ve got to leave it there,” Johnson said.

  Brady’s blood pressure was high and his pulse was racing. Johnson ordered a nurse to administer the drugs that would put the press secretary to sleep and paralyze his body. It would then be easier for Johnson to get a tube down Brady’s throat and take over his breathing with a machine or a respiration bag.

  Brady was large and had a short neck, both factors that made it more difficult to “tube” him. Johnson had to get it right the first time: failure would waste precious seconds or minutes, allowing carbon dioxide to build up in Brady’s blood and brain. Repeated attempts to insert the breathing tube might also make Brady vomit, sending debris into his lungs that could obstruct his air supply and later lead to infections.

  With Jeff Jacobson and Paul Colombani standing by, Johnson stood over the front of the gurney; then she gripped Brady’s jaw, swiveled his head, and aimed the breathing tube at the back of his tongue. The tube went in on the first try. Doctors immediately increased his air supply to 100 percent oxygen and raised the head of Brady’s gurney to a 45-degree angle, hoping to reduce pressure on the press secretary’s brain.

  * * *

  ARTHUR KOBRINE, ONE of GW’s top neurosurgeons, was reviewing X-rays in a room near the ER when his beeper went off. Walking down the hall, Kobrine spotted Dan Ruge, an old friend who had been his teacher years ago at Northwestern University’s prestigious medical school.

  “Art, I’m glad you’re here,” the president’s doctor said. “There’s someone in the back you have to see.”

  “Is it the president?”

  “It’s not the president, but it is somebody who I think is going to need your services.”

  Kobrine moved toward the trauma bay and spotted Reagan lying on a gurney in Bay 5A. Turning right and stepping into Bay 5B, Kobrine immediately saw that Brady was in very bad shape. His first cursory examination confirmed his sense that the press secretary’s chances of survival were slim.

  A fellow surgeon who’d been observing the initial treatment of Brady pulled Kobrine aside. “I hope you are not going to operate on this guy,” the doctor said. “It wouldn’t be good for your career.”

  Kobrine shrugged off his colleague; of course he would operate. If he didn’t, Brady would die.

  * * *

  SHORTLY AFTER BRADY arrived in the ER, paramedics wheeled in a third gurney, this one carrying Agent Tim McCarthy. But the trauma bay was bedlam, and there was no room for a third patient in any case. McCarthy’s gurney was parked against a wall in the ER.

  Stephen Pett, a thoracic surgeon, saw McCarthy curled on the cart and took charge of his care. Pett grabbed an orderly and wheeled McCarthy into ER Room 3, a small space with an exam table. Nurses cut off McCarthy’s clothes and started running IV lines into his veins. Pett, who specialized in chest injuries as well as heart and lung problems, carefully examined McCarthy’s body and found a small bullet wound in his right chest.

  After cleaning the area with antibacterial solution and injecting
anesthetic, Pett made an incision and inserted a chest tube. Only a trickle of blood emerged. Pett and another doctor then inserted a catheter into McCarthy’s abdomen. This time, blood poured out. The bullet had entered McCarthy’s chest, but had somehow passed into his abdomen and was now probably lodged somewhere in his flank. A doctor called for an operating room to be prepared for surgery.

  Through it all, McCarthy was stoic. He seemed more concerned about the president than about himself.

  Standing at McCarthy’s gurney was Paul Colombani, who had left the trauma bay and come to Room 3 to help treat the agent. In a few minutes, he would join the surgical team operating on McCarthy.

  “What happened?” Colombani asked.

  “I got in front of the shooter,” the agent said simply.

  * * *

  AS MCCARTHY WAS being prepared for surgery, doctors at the Washington Hospital Center, GW’s crosstown rival, were examining Thomas Delahanty, the wounded police officer. He’d been brought to WHC because the paramedics at the scene feared that GW would be too crowded with the other victims. In agony from the bullet wound in his back, he had left deep bite marks in the leather slapjack shoved into his mouth to help him fight the pain. While lying on the sidewalk, he had asked for a priest.

  The bullet was nestled near Delahanty’s spine. The trauma team called in a neurosurgeon, who concluded that, with the bullet so close to the spinal cord, an attempt to remove it might do more damage than the actual wound. Doctors gave Delahanty pain medication, cleaned the wound, and pumped him full of antibiotics. Then they sent him to another part of the hospital to rest. For now, there was nothing more they could do.

  * * *

  WITHIN FIFTEEN MINUTES of the assassination attempt, the man who had caused all this havoc arrived at D.C. police headquarters. Hands cuffed, he sat between Agents Dennis McCarthy and Danny Spriggs as the police cruiser they had commandeered at the Hilton pulled into the basement parking garage and came to a quick stop outside one of the underground entrances.

  Their suspect between them, McCarthy and Spriggs tumbled from the cruiser and then rushed toward the door and into the station’s cell block. McCarthy had his gun out: even in a police station, he was not going to let someone get close enough to kill the would-be assassin.

  Once in the cell block, McCarthy shoved the gunman against a wall. Spriggs patted him down for weapons and pulled a number of items from his pockets. A police officer put him in a cell and slammed the door shut.

  McCarthy took a seat outside the cell and trained his eyes on the assailant. No one was going to get near the blond man, nor would he have an opportunity to kill himself—not while McCarthy was guarding him.

  Spriggs retreated to a small room and spread the contents of the man’s pockets and his black leather wallet across a table. He studied the array of items with intense interest. A Texas driver’s license informed Spriggs that his suspect’s name was John W. Hinckley Jr.; his age was twenty-five and his address was in Lubbock. From a Colorado ID card, Spriggs learned that Hinckley was five ten and weighed 175 pounds, had blue eyes, and lived in Evergreen. Spriggs also inspected three business cards, two belonging to doctors in Lubbock and another to a psychologist in Denver. He flipped through several photographs of a young woman, all of which appeared to have been clipped from magazines; two receipts for three handguns and some ammunition; and a card proclaiming the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. From Hinckley’s pockets came $129.08 in cash and coins, and a four-inch-wide John Lennon pin. It was about the strangest assortment Spriggs had ever pulled from a suspect’s pockets.

  * * *

  THREE FLOORS ABOVE the station’s cell block, the D.C. homicide office was eerily empty. As soon as they’d received word of the shooting, supervisors had dispatched every available detective to the Hilton, to GW Hospital, and to Washington Hospital Center. Only one detective had remained behind: Eddie Myers, a thirteen-year department veteran. It was Myers’s job to formally take the suspect into custody and bring him upstairs for questioning.

  Myers, his silver badge clipped to the lapel of his beige suit, went down to the cell block and found the gunman sitting on a bench. From a distance, the suspect was good-looking. A thatch of sandy hair covered most of his ears, and thick bangs dipped down to his eyebrows. He was obviously careful about his clothing and appearance: his blue-striped shirt was open at the collar, and he was as calm and nonchalant as a man waiting for an appointment with his doctor. With his bright blue eyes, he looked a bit like a musician in a boy band. But seen up close, his face was flat and empty of emotion.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Myers told Hinckley. “I don’t want to discuss anything about what happened down here. I’m going to take you upstairs to my office, where we can talk.”

  “Watch out for my wrist,” Hinckley said. “I think they broke it.”

  “We’ll be careful with your wrists,” Myers said, handcuffing Hinckley behind his back and then taking him up a rear elevator to the third floor. With Dennis McCarthy trailing, Myers led Hinckley through the empty homicide office and into a small, white, windowless room used by detectives to interrogate murder suspects. Myers sat Hinckley down on one of the room’s three chairs and cuffed his left hand to the small metal table, freeing his right hand to fill out forms. Sitting across from Hinckley, Myers pulled out a form that advised the suspect of his right to remain silent and to consult an attorney. Hinckley said he understood his rights.

  “Do you wish to answer any questions?” Myers asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think I ought to talk to Joe Bates.”

  “Who is Joe Bates?”

  “He’s an attorney, in Dallas, Texas.”

  Myers left the room to find someone who could track down the lawyer. He soon returned; with any luck, he could get Hinckley to decide an attorney was not necessary.

  “I simply want to hear your side of the story,” Myers said. Then, trying to get his suspect to loosen up, he said, “You must be a Democrat.”

  Hinckley chuckled.

  “Whatever you tell me I am going to tell the court,” Myers said, adding, “We don’t have to talk about the shooting.”

  “I don’t know anything about any shooting,” Hinckley replied.

  Despite this denial, Hinckley expressed concern about his own safety. Myers assured him that the police would protect him.

  At the moment, the urgent need was not to prove Hinckley’s guilt but to find out if coconspirators were about to strike other targets. The best way to discover whether Hinckley was part of a larger plot was to get him to tell them, so Myers was eager to keep Hinckley talking. With Dennis McCarthy looking on, the detective rolled an arrest report into the room’s typewriter. Saying he needed to take care of some paperwork, Myers began asking Hinckley questions about his background.

  As Myers slowly pecked away at the typewriter, using his two index fingers, Hinckley provided his correct name, date of birth, and social security number. Among other things, he told Myers that he had recently arrived in D.C. on a bus from California and had been staying at the Park Central Hotel. Myers’s low-key approach seemed to be working: Hinckley even mentioned his arrest in Nashville.

  Myers left the room again for a minute or two and inspected the contents of Hinckley’s pockets, which had been brought upstairs. He thought the magazine photos of the woman, who looked as if she could be a model, might get Hinckley to open up.

  “Who’s the girl in your wallet?” Myers asked when he returned to the interrogation room.

  “She’s a friend of mine,” Hinckley said.

  “Why did you do this?”

  “When you find my room, you’ll know why.”

  Hinckley seemed to have no interest in saying more. Myers continued filling out the arrest report, noting that Hinckley was being charged with assault with intent to kill a police officer. The detective was about to add the charge of attempting to kill the president when he paused and turned to McCarthy.


  “How do you spell ‘assassinate’?” Myers asked.

  “I’ll spell it for you,” Hinckley interjected. “A-S-S-A-S-S-I-N-A-T-E.”

  Myers was floored. The detective thought he had seen it all: drug deals gone wrong, violent domestic disputes, gambling-fueled rages, abductions, rapes, murders. A few years earlier, he had questioned a cop killer; in the end, the man coldly admitted, “Yeah, I killed that motherfucker. He was trying to be a hero.” Myers had studied the eyes of sobbing husbands who had killed their wives, of mothers who had identified the bodies of their own children, of thugs who had committed terrible crimes without apology or remorse. But nothing had prepared him for John Hinckley, an emotionless enigma, a man who was both worried about his safety and eerily calm. At first, Hinckley had seemed to want to talk, to tell the story that would apparently be instantly obvious to anyone who “found his room.” But then he went no further. He simply wouldn’t open up—except to spell a word, and correctly at that.

  CHAPTER 10

  “MY GOD. THE PRESIDENT WAS HIT?”

  Hospital personnel continued to pour into GW’s emergency room; doctors and nurses now stood guard with Secret Service agents at the entrances to keep the area from becoming even more crowded with people who didn’t belong there. The noise level was higher than ever; at times, agents and nurses and doctors had to shout to be heard. Even so, the necessary work of trauma care was getting done.

  The president seemed to be doing better. He was receiving universal donor blood, and doctors were speeding it into his system by kneading the blood bags dangling from hooks above his gurney. His blood pressure had risen to about 160, high enough that doctors decided to reduce his fluids. But blood kept flowing from his chest. Within a few minutes, the Pleur-evac had collected more than half a liter, then nearly a liter. The crimson stream was steady, and it was not slowing down.