Rawhide Down

by Del Quentin Wilber

  Pulling a chair close to the small desk and taking a seat, Chmiel brought his face to within six inches of Hinckley’s. “John,” he said, speaking softly, “I really need to know something. Were you acting alone or were others involved?”

  Hinckley remained quiet for a few seconds. “No,” he said finally. “No one else was involved.”

  Chmiel believed him.

  After Chmiel left the room to brief his supervisors about his conversation with Hinckley, it was Agent Henry Ragle’s turn. Ragle, a dogged investigator who liked to wear tailored suits and starched shirts, recalled that, earlier, Hinckley had seemed curious about the Secret Service; as he was being taken into custody at police headquarters, Hinckley asked Ragle why the FBI and not the Secret Service was arresting him. Ragle explained that the Secret Service was charged with protection, but the FBI handled investigations into actual incidents. Now, thinking about how he might get his suspect to talk, Ragle decided that having a Secret Service agent in the interview room might encourage Hinckley to loosen up. Ragle asked Stephen Colo, the agent who was serving as liaison between the two federal agencies, to participate in the session. Colo was happy to oblige.

  Ragle and Colo entered the interview room. The FBI agent began by telling Hinckley that the bureau still hadn’t been able to reach his parents; for now, Ragle said, he merely wanted to ask some background questions. When Hinckley didn’t object, Ragle launched a string of terse queries, most of them calling only for a yes or no.

  Within minutes, Colo could see that the interview was going nowhere. Hinckley was defensive, perhaps because Ragle—who was more accustomed to questioning bank robbers—seemed to be grilling him. Colo took Ragle aside in a corner of the room and suggested that since he, Colo, had plenty of experience with disturbed people outside the White House, he might be able to get somewhere with Hinckley. Ragle agreed to let him try.

  Colo took a seat directly across from Hinckley, who’d been brought a fast-food hamburger and a Coca-Cola. With Ragle sitting next to him, Colo used a personal history form as a guide and began asking a series of questions that delved into Hinckley’s background. Hinckley seemed to like the new approach and began to provide more complete answers. He wasn’t married, he said, but he had a brother and a sister, and his sister had two small children. He had studied at Texas Tech but dropped out because of medical problems; he had also attended writing school at Yale University. (The two agents heard this as “riding school.”) His parents had recently given him an ultimatum to “clean up his act” or move out and be cut off financially. He described his last year of travels to the District of Columbia, Denver, New York, New Haven, and Los Angeles, and he mentioned that he’d sold stock in his father’s company to finance his trips. He even provided the exact price of his cross-country bus ticket.

  Colo asked whether he had ever seen a doctor. Hinckley told him that his parents had urged him to seek psychiatric help the previous year and that since then he’d been seeing a psychiatrist regularly.

  “What was wrong?” Colo asked.

  “I have no direction in life,” Hinckley said simply.

  After about twenty-five minutes of questioning, Hinckley went quiet for a moment and then told Colo that he didn’t want to say any more until he consulted a lawyer.

  Ragle left the interview room to tell others in the office what they had learned; as he did, George Chmiel returned.

  “Is this on television?” Hinckley asked him.

  “No, this isn’t being taped,” replied Chmiel.

  “I didn’t mean that. Is this on television?”

  Now Chmiel understood that Hinckley meant the assassination attempt. “Yes,” he said, “it is on national television.”

  “Will this affect other people?” Hinckley asked. “Will they be pulled into it?”

  Something about Hinckley’s question caught Colo’s attention. Earlier, watching as FBI agents inventoried the contents of Hinckley’s wallet, Colo spotted a note with a phone number scribbled on it—the kind of note a man jots down after meeting a woman in a bar. The number had a Connecticut area code, and Colo recalled that Hinckley had said that he’d visited New Haven several times and attended Yale’s “riding school.” Colo also remembered that the wallet’s plastic sleeve contained several photographs of a pretty girl. Investigators had initially assumed these were just filler photos of the kind that often come with a new wallet, but now Colo wondered whether they were pictures of a real woman in Hinckley’s life, perhaps a girlfriend.

  “Yes, others will be pulled into it,” Colo replied. “Are you talking about your parents and your friends?”

  “And others,” Hinckley said.

  “I know about the telephone number in your wallet, the one that goes to Connecticut,” Colo said, bluffing.

  “Well,” Hinckley shot back, his face tightening, “if you know about that, you know everything.” Then he slumped his shoulders and took a deep breath.

  It was the first time Colo had seen his suspect show any emotion. Hinckley seemed relieved, as if he could finally let go of a long-held secret.

  Silence filled the room.

  “Yes,” Colo said, “but I have to hear about it in your own words.”

  “That goes to a dorm at Yale University,” he said. “The girl is Jodie Foster, the actress.”

  “Is she your girlfriend?” Colo asked.

  “It’s really a one-sided relationship.”

  “Does she know you?”

  “She probably knows my name,” Hinckley said, adding that he had spoken to her two or three times on the phone. Then he told Colo that he had tape-recorded the conversations, and that the tapes were stashed in a suitcase in his hotel room.

  “She was very courteous,” Hinckley added.

  At last Colo understood. The assassination attempt wasn’t about politics or the presidency or even Ronald Reagan. It was about impressing a movie star.

  Colo was flabbergasted. What kind of crazy motive was that? But now he was sure that Hinckley had been acting alone—no conspiracy would ever revolve around a fantasy of attracting the attention of an actress. He ran to find Ragle and an FBI supervisor. As they pieced together Hinckley’s story, Jodie Foster could prove to be a critical witness, but they had to get to her before the media did.

  CHAPTER 15

  “WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?”

  In a corner of the recovery room, behind portable screens, Ronald Reagan drifted in and out of consciousness. Nurses worked constantly at his bedside, checking his blood pressure, monitoring his respirator, offering words of reassurance. When the president seemed uncomfortable, doctors increased his pain medication; when the level of oxygen in his blood was still too low, they raised his air intake to 80 percent oxygen. Doctors who had examined him could hear blood clots and mucus rattling in both lungs, but they detected no breath sounds at the base of either one. The left lung, of course, had been badly damaged by the bullet and the surgery, but blood and other debris had now worked their way into the right lung, so it too was not performing well. Reagan’s most recent X-ray was also somewhat troubling: in addition to showing the effects of the secretions in both lungs, it confirmed that the lower lobe of the left one remained collapsed.

  Ben Aaron, who was keeping a close eye on Reagan, considered how he might clear out the lungs and help improve his patient’s breathing. The best approach, he thought, would be to perform a fiber-optic bronchoscopy—a procedure that would involve inserting a probe with a camera lens down the president’s breathing tube—to examine the lungs and the material collecting in them. Through the probe, Aaron could also inject saline into the lungs to loosen mucus and clots, then use the same device to remove the debris.

  As one of Aaron’s assistants sterilized the bronchoscope, doctors increased Reagan’s air intake to 100 percent oxygen. Another physician, Jack Zimmerman, a specialist in treating critically ill patients after surgery, took his place at the head of the president’s bed, where he would operate the two-lite
r respiration bag to ensure that his patient got enough air during the procedure. Like many others that day, Zimmerman was struck by Reagan’s naturally dark hair.

  Aaron lubricated the probe and inserted it into the president’s breathing tube. The probe got stuck about eight inches down; despite the pain medications, Reagan stirred and became agitated. Zimmerman assured him that everything would be okay.

  The surgeon tried again but still couldn’t maneuver the probe past a kink in the tube. They now had two options. They could swap out the breathing tube for a new one—a laborious and somewhat risky maneuver—or try a more conservative procedure, recommended by Zimmerman, that involved hyperinflating the lungs with a respirator bag, infusing them with a small amount of sterile saline, and then using a separate catheter to vacuum out the clots and secretions. Aaron told Zimmerman to give it a try, but then he was called out of the recovery room to operate for a second time on his patient from the night before; the man was once again bleeding badly.

  Under Zimmerman’s direction, the two nurses attending the president in the recovery room—Denise Sullivan and Cathy Edmondson—inflated Reagan’s lungs, injected the solution, and sucked out debris. As Sullivan and Edmondson worked, Zimmerman explained the procedure to the president and told him to relax. But Reagan continued to tug at the uncomfortable tube. Edmondson had to admonish him several times. “Don’t pull at it now,” she said. “You are going to have to let me breathe for you.”

  As time went on, the president’s blood tests steadily improved. Zimmerman adjusted the respirator to deliver 60 percent oxygen, then 50 percent. Soon Reagan felt well enough to ask for a pencil and a piece of paper. Lying on his back, he began jotting notes on white and pink hospital records attached to a clipboard. His handwriting was shaky—he was still groggy from the anesthesia and the painkillers—but it impressed the nurses that he could write at all.

  “All in all, I’d rather be in Phil.,” he scratched, a near quotation of a famous crack by the comedian W. C. Fields.

  Everyone around the bed chuckled. Okay, thought Denise Sullivan. He’s going to make it.

  In another note, this one somewhat garbled, Reagan wrote, “I am aren’t alive aren’t I?” The nurses assured him that he was.

  He also asked about the shooting. “What happened to the guy with the gun? Was anyone else hurt?”

  Sullivan thought hard about how to respond. She had been told to say nothing to the president about the other victims, particularly Jim Brady. “Two other people were shot,” Sullivan replied, “but they are okay, don’t worry about them. And yes, they got the guy with the gun.”

  A flurry of notes followed. Some were serious; more than once, the president asked why he couldn’t breathe. But many were lighthearted and alluded to Hollywood and acting. At one point, on the same piece of paper he’d used to ask about the gunman, he scribbled: “Could we rewrite this scene beginning about the time I left the hotel?”

  * * *

  AFTER LYN NOFZIGER’S second appearance in front of the media, he went looking for a doctor at the hospital who could speak to the press after the president came out of surgery. Nofziger ruled out Dan Ruge, the White House physician, because reporters might suspect him of downplaying the seriousness of the president’s condition. He also didn’t want to turn to the surgeons who had operated on Reagan: they might be too tired and too emotional to handle the harsh media spotlight. Several doctors at GW told Nofziger that Dr. Dennis O’Leary, a hospital administrator, had some experience with the press.

  Nofziger found O’Leary in his office and introduced himself. “So,” Nofziger said, “who is going to do this, going to brief the press? There is a lot of media over there and somebody has got to talk to them.” Nofziger let his words hang for a moment as he stared at O’Leary.

  “Who, me?” O’Leary asked. “You mean there is nobody else?”

  “There’s nobody else.”

  After persuading O’Leary that he was up to the job, Nofziger told him, “You have to be prepared to answer every stupid question these guys can dream up. And, by the way, be yourself.”

  O’Leary, in fact, knew quite a bit about reporters. His father had been a correspondent for Sports Illustrated, and in his current job as dean of clinical affairs at GW Medical Center—an assignment that put him in charge of all patient-related issues at the center’s hospital and medical school—O’Leary dealt with journalists fairly frequently. Confident and poised, he didn’t back down from arguments and often deployed his dry wit as a weapon.

  Before the press conference, O’Leary was briefed by the surgeons who had operated on the president. Then he asked Nofziger if there was anything he should be careful about mentioning.

  “Just tell the truth,” Nofziger said.

  During the five-minute walk from the hospital to the medical school, O’Leary sketched out his opening statement in his mind. It would be short and to the point, a straightforward description of Reagan’s current condition.

  At 7:30 p.m., after a brief introduction by Nofziger, O’Leary stepped to the podium in Room 101 of Ross Hall, where he usually taught a class on hematology. But instead of respectful medical students, he faced scores of reporters, photographers, and television cameramen. The television lights nearly blinded him, but he could see that the noisy crowd was so big it barely squeezed into the spacious classroom. He felt as though he’d landed on Mars.

  “The president is in the recovery room,” O’Leary began. “He is in stable condition and he is awake.”

  The rest of the brief statement was accurate except in one instance. O’Leary said that the president “was at no time in any serious danger,” which was clearly incorrect. If Jerry Parr hadn’t decided to redirect the limousine from the White House to the hospital, Reagan would likely have died; if Reagan had arrived in GW’s emergency room even five or ten minutes later, his chances of survival would have been slim. But in O’Leary’s defense, he had not been told what had transpired during Reagan’s most perilous moments in the ER.

  When responding to questions from reporters, however, O’Leary’s answers were sometimes wrong. To a shouted query about transfusions given to the president, O’Leary understated the amount of blood Reagan received by three units, an important difference. Then he understated the amount of blood loss by about 1.5 liters. If medical experts had heard the truth about how much blood Reagan had lost and how much had been replaced, they might have raised serious questions about the severity of the president’s injuries.

  In response to another question, O’Leary said the bullet “was really not very close to any vital structure,” and added that it was “several inches” from the president’s heart. In fact, the bullet had mangled Reagan’s lung and come to rest just an inch from his heart.

  O’Leary was also asked about the president’s arrival at the hospital, but he failed to mention that Reagan had collapsed upon entering the emergency room. “He got out of the car and stood up and walked in on his own,” O’Leary said. “As I say, he was alert and awake all the time.”

  When asked whether he found it “extraordinary that a 70-year-old man could be shot in the lung and then brought to the hospital and walk in under his own power,” O’Leary paused and replied: “I think it speaks well for the physiologic health of the president. We do have elderly people—much more elderly than the president is—who do undergo chest surgery, but he certainly sailed through it.”

  “Do you find that medically extraordinary?” someone asked.

  “Maybe not medically extraordinary,” O’Leary responded, “but just short of that, okay?”

  * * *

  SITTING AROUND THE conference table in the Situation Room, George Bush and the administration’s top officials watched O’Leary’s performance and felt enormous relief. “This guy is good,” said the vice president.

  When the press conference was over, Bush led a discussion about whether he should give a statement. “I think I could,” Bush said. “And just say we are very
pleased. I don’t think we need questions, either.”

  The meeting adjourned at eight p.m., at which point the vice president and several officials moved upstairs to Bush’s small office, down the hall from Reagan’s. Baker, Meese, and the others clustered around Bush’s desk and talked through a range of issues, from national security to the vice president’s schedule. Just outside the office, one of Bush’s aides attempted to draft a statement for the media. Frazzled, he couldn’t find the words. Ken Khachigian, the president’s chief speechwriter, put a piece of paper in a secretary’s typewriter and quickly produced a brief and confident statement that papered over the day’s trials and problems.

  A few minutes later, Bush entered the White House press room and stepped up to the podium.

  “I am deeply heartened by Dr. O’Leary’s report on the president’s condition, that he has emerged from this experience with flying colors and with the most optimistic prospects for a complete recovery,” the vice president said. “I can reassure this nation and the watching world that the American government is functioning fully and effectively. We’ve had full and complete communication throughout the day and the officers of the federal government have been fulfilling their obligations with skill and with care.”

  Then, having taken no questions, Bush was gone.

  * * *

  BEFORE HEADING HOME that evening, Joe Giordano, the head of the trauma team, stopped by Reagan’s bedside to check on his patient. He was pleased to see that the president was improving and didn’t seem to have suffered any adverse effects from the surgery or the anesthesia. During the operation, Giordano had thought about how much the outcome mattered—for every doctor in the room, for the hospital, and for the nation. As he stood at the president’s bedside and looked through his chart, Giordano was relieved to reach an unambiguous conclusion: the surgery had gone perfectly.

  A little after nine, David Gens—who had spent the past hour and a half removing a patient’s ruptured appendix—sat down next to Reagan. As he had once before, Gens wondered whether anyone had told the president what had happened that day.