Rawhide Down

by Del Quentin Wilber

  “I said up there, Cap. I’m not a liar. I said there had been no increased alert.”

  “Well, I didn’t know you were going up, Al,” Weinberger said. “I think if—”

  “I had to,” Haig snapped, “because we had the question already started and we were going to be in a big flap.”

  “Well, I think we could have done a little better if we had concentrated on a specific statement to be handed out,” said Weinberger, rebuking Haig for ignoring his own requirement that no official was to address the press without first getting his statements approved by the others in the Situation Room. “When you’re up there with questions, why then it’s not anything you can control.”

  Weinberger, a keen lawyer and tough administrator who had served as California’s budget director when Reagan was governor, was not the sort to back away from a fight. Now he and Haig continued their verbal battle about the issue of alerts and DEFCON levels. After several minutes of intense exchanges, Haig again lost patience.

  “Let me ask you a question, Cap,” Haig said. “Is this submarine approach, is that what’s doing this, or is it the fact that the president’s under surgery?”

  “Well, I’m discussing it from the point of view that at the moment, until the vice president actually arrives here, the command authority is what I have,” Weinberger said, reiterating what he had been told by Ed Meese earlier on the phone. “And I have to make sure that it is essential that we do everything that seems proper.”

  “You’d better read the Constitution,” Haig said.

  “What?” Weinberger said incredulously.

  “You’d better read the Constitution,” Haig said. “We can get the vice president any time we want.”

  * * *

  VICE PRESIDENT BUSH was still a couple of hours away from Washington in Air Force Two. At 3:25, the plane had landed at Austin’s Robert Mueller Municipal Airport and pulled to a stop at the far end of the tarmac. Bush and the other dignitaries stayed on the plane, and at one point the vice president slipped unobtrusively into his small cabin for a few minutes of solitude. As he sat in the cabin, he prayed, both for the president and for the country. He also jotted some notes on an in-flight information card, scribbling that it had taken about twenty minutes for the “enormity” of the situation to finally hit him.

  The plane’s passengers followed reports of the shooting on the fuzzy television set in the conference room. When he returned from his cabin, Bush chatted with his guests, who included Representative Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat who was the powerful House majority leader.

  Bush felt awful about what had happened to Reagan, whom he considered a friend. “How could anybody work up a feeling of sufficient personal malice toward Ronald Reagan to want him dead?” he wondered aloud. The vice president also said he felt no special burden, no impending sense of destiny. “He seems so calm,” Wright wrote in his diary aboard the plane, “no signs whatever of nervous distress.”

  The pilots and Secret Service agents hoped to refuel and take off as quickly as possible, but the plane’s fuel truck never materialized. Growing uneasy, Bush’s military aide and a Secret Service agent ran onto the tarmac in search of fuel. They quickly spotted an Esso truck filling up a Braniff Airways jet and requisitioned it for Air Force Two. By 4:10 the plane was airborne again.

  As Air Force Two streaked toward Washington, Ed Pollard and the military aide entered Bush’s cabin to lobby the vice president to take a helicopter from Andrews Air Force Base directly to the South Lawn of the White House. Security was paramount, Pollard and the military aide argued, and therefore flying to the White House was the safest thing to do. Besides, there was no time to waste, and it was far more efficient to land on the South Lawn than to fly to the Naval Observatory and then fight rush-hour traffic to the White House.

  But Bush wasn’t sure. Yes, it would make great television, but he worried that landing on the South Lawn would send the wrong signal to the country and seem disrespectful to the first lady, especially since the helicopter would touch down right outside her bedroom window. Landing at the White House might heighten alarm; it might also suggest that he was usurping power. Bush decided to follow his usual routine and fly to the observatory. “Only the president lands on the South Lawn,” he told Pollard and the military aide.

  Bush then dictated a secure message for the officials in the Situation Room: “We will touchdown at 1835 local at Andrews. I plan to helicopter to the observatory and motorcade to the White House. Approximate arrival there at 1900. Feel strongly about proper mode of arrival unless situation dictates more immediate route to White House.”

  * * *

  THE CROWD OF doctors, nurses, and agents made the normally chilly operating room warm and humid. Aaron’s headlamp threw off a good deal of heat as well; a nurse occasionally dabbed his forehead with a towel to prevent sweat from dripping into the president’s open chest. From time to time, Aaron eyed a clock on the wall. He hadn’t given himself a deadline, but he didn’t want to keep Reagan under anesthesia for any longer than necessary.

  As Aaron worked, others on the surgical team continued to transfuse Reagan with red blood cells, as well as with plasma and platelets, blood products that promote clotting and slow bleeding. They pumped several other fluids through the IV lines, including lactated Ringer’s, a water solution of calcium, potassium, lactate, and salt that helps rehydrate patients and keep their blood pressure up. They also gave the president an antibiotic to prevent infection, and a diuretic to help him flush all the fluids they had given him. Using blood samples drawn from the arterial line in his left hand, they carefully monitored his oxygen levels. At the start of the operation, the doctors had adjusted the flow of air into Reagan’s lungs so that it was 100 percent oxygen; by now, with his readings improved though still far from optimal, they had reduced the flow to a steady 50 percent.

  To accommodate Aaron’s work, an anesthesiologist carefully worked the respiration bag to inflate and deflate Reagan’s lungs. To give Aaron more room to manipulate the left lung as he began searching for the bullet, Cheyney and Adelberg took turns reaching into the six-inch hole in Reagan’s chest and cupping the heart and gently nudging it aside. For Adelberg, holding the president’s beating heart in his gloved hand was a galvanizing experience; he had never felt so focused in his life.

  Massaging the lung with his fingertips, Aaron felt for the piece of metal he knew must be nestled in the spongy tissue. The hemorrhaging was tapering off, likely stanched by the pressure of his fingers and the air flowing from the respirator. But ten minutes of squeezing and probing the lung yielded nothing, and Aaron began to imagine the next day’s New York Post headline: “Doc Leaves Bullet in President!”

  After a few more minutes of fruitless searching, Aaron voiced his doubts. “I think I might call it quits,” he said. But speaking the thought aloud only seemed to spur him on—instead, he redoubled his efforts.

  At one point, frustrated, Aaron turned to Cheyney and offered her a chance to hunt for the projectile. She pressed the president’s lung between her fingers, blindly looking for the metal fragment. She respected Aaron for giving her a chance to find the bullet, and she decided that if she succeeded she would grab Aaron’s hand, pull it inside Reagan’s chest, and pass him the slug so he would get the credit. But Cheyney had no luck either, and after a minute or two Aaron took over once more.

  When Aaron again wondered aloud whether he should halt the surgery without retrieving the bullet, Dutch Lichtman, one of the anesthesiologists, figured it was time to lighten the mood.

  “Having a good time, Ben?” he asked.

  Some of the doctors and nurses chuckled. Aaron smiled. “I’m having a marvelous time, couldn’t be better.”

  But with each passing minute, his anxiety grew. He had left plenty of bullets in patients when he thought they would do no harm. But this was a special case, and he continued to worry about the medical and political implications of leaving a would-be assassin’s bullet in the pr
esident’s chest. Then, as he kept coming up empty, Aaron was suddenly seized by dread—what if the bullet wasn’t in the lung anymore? What if it had slipped into a vein, entered the heart, and then been propelled from the heart into the president’s circulatory system? That could be disastrous—if the bullet ended up in the carotid artery, for instance, it could be pumped straight up to the brain.

  Aaron asked for another X-ray.

  * * *

  AS THE AFTERNOON wore on, the ashtrays scattered around the Situation Room’s conference table filled up; plumes of cigarette smoke created a haze under the ceiling’s fluorescent lights. Officials sipped Coke, coffee, and Sanka as they worked. Eager for news, they kept an eye on the television and occasionally left the conference room to speak to subordinates by telephone. Aides quietly entered to whisper updates to their bosses. Cabinet secretaries from a number of different departments, including Transportation and Commerce, filtered in and out.

  “What’s the situation with the Polish strike?” Richard Allen asked an aide. The staff member reported that the labor strike had been put off indefinitely: Solidarity and the Polish government had reached a compromise. Allen was relieved. That was one less international crisis to worry about.

  By now, Fred Fielding had obtained the presidential succession documents he and his staff had prepared, and he began reviewing them with Al Haig and Dan Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff. One was a letter, to be signed by Reagan, informing congressional leaders of his decision to temporarily transfer power. Fielding also showed Haig and Murphy a second letter, to be signed by the vice president and a majority of cabinet secretaries in the event that the president was unable to sign the first. It declared that Reagan’s “present inability to discharge” his duties required the transfer of presidential authority to Bush.

  Among the many officials in the conference room at the time was Richard Darman, one of Jim Baker’s top advisors. The sight of Fielding, Haig, and Murphy reviewing the succession documents made him uneasy. In Darman’s view, many of the president’s aides had responded to the crisis far too emotionally. Darman did not think this was the best time or place to discuss a historic transfer of presidential authority.

  Darman asked Fielding for the documents, saying that he would hold them until they were needed. Then Darman left the room to call Baker at the hospital. Upon hearing his aide’s account of the conversation initiated by Fielding, Baker was annoyed; in his view, Fielding should not have raised the matter without consulting him first. Baker told Darman that he and Meese had already conferred and rejected the notion of transferring power to Bush, at least until they learned more from the doctors. After the phone call, Darman walked to his office and put the papers in his safe.

  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.

  * * *

  DR. ARTHUR KOBRINE 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?”

  * * *

  AT 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.