“Mr. President, do you remember me from the ER?” Gens asked.
The president nodded.
“Do you know what happened?”
Reagan shook his head.
“Your lung had been torn by the bullet,” Gens said. “And we repaired that. We took out the bullet. But everything is going to be all right.”
Reagan nodded again.
“Mrs. Reagan did fine throughout all the excitement,” Gens said with a grin.
Reagan smiled. Gens could see that the president was doing much better. Even as doctors continued to reduce the proportion of oxygen in his air supply, his color and his blood oxygen levels were improving. Gens left the recovery room and tried to catch a nap in a comfortable chair in the dialysis unit. But the day’s adrenaline hadn’t worn off and he couldn’t sleep.
* * *
DENISE SULLIVAN AND Cathy Edmondson were impressed by how compliant the president was—he was so unlike most VIP and celebrity patients. Despite his pain and his weakened condition, he followed instructions and showed remarkably good cheer. He even seemed apologetic about causing them undue stress.
But Reagan had long felt a great respect for nurses, especially since a near-death experience more than three decades earlier. After a movie premiere in 1947, he had suddenly become very ill. He was taken to a hospital where he was diagnosed with a dangerous strain of viral pneumonia. He burned with fever, then froze with chills. Medications seemed to have no effect. One night, Humphrey Bogart appeared in his dreams, and together they acted out a scene under a streetlamp on a dark and lonely patch of sidewalk.
The attending nurses wrapped Reagan in blankets and fed him hot tea through a glass tube. Each breath hurt so much that he reached a point where he wanted to die. But one nurse in particular wouldn’t let him. She gripped his hand and urged him to inhale and exhale. “Come on now, breathe in once more,” she said, leaning over him. “Now, let it out.” Reagan followed the nurse’s gentle instruction. He breathed and he survived.
Now here he was again, this time putting his trust in two nurses who refused to leave his side. They, too, held his hand and coaxed him to relax. They told him that they would stay right there with him and that everything would be fine. He just needed to let the machine breathe for him.
“Don’t fight it,” they said over and over again.
“I keep on breathing?” he wrote.
Yes, they said. And so he did.
* * *
AFTER JERRY PARR left the hospital that evening, he grabbed a bite to eat at the White House mess, where he also sipped a glass of vodka, straight up. He felt at once excited and devastated. He could feel the adrenaline still coursing through his system, and he kept trying to sort out what had gone both right and wrong. He knew he had saved the president’s life, but he also understood that the Secret Service had failed by allowing the gunman to get so close to the president. He was head of the presidential detail; this was his error to bear.
As he replayed the shooting in his head, Parr realized that he and his agents had been lulled into complacency by the routine nature of trips to the Hilton and other sites like it in Washington. If the president had given a speech in Baltimore or Philadelphia or New York, everyone would have been more alert—the agents, the police, even the spectators—because of the less familiar settings. Nursing his drink, Parr wondered whether he and the other agents would be portrayed as goats or heroes. When he finally got home, Parr hugged his wife and crawled into bed. He was exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come.
Back at the White House, George Opfer sat in the command post below the Oval Office; folded uncomfortably in a chair, he tried to catch some sleep. Though agency supervisors had told him to go home, he’d refused. If something went wrong in the recovery room, he wanted to be the agent who brought the first lady to the hospital.
Upstairs, in the residence, Nancy Reagan was curled up in a ball on her husband’s side of their bed, fast asleep. She clutched one of the president’s white T-shirts in her hands.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, GW’S doctors gave Jim Brady only a 50 percent chance of survival. Arthur Kobrine had done everything possible to save the press secretary’s life. He and the other surgeons plucked out all the shrapnel they could reach and removed the dead and damaged brain tissue. They irrigated and cleaned the wound with particular care.
As he finished up the surgery, Kobrine faced a dilemma: should he reattach the bone flap, the section of Brady’s skull he had removed to gain access to the brain? Leaving the flap off was the safer course. Although it had been soaking in a pool of antiseptic, it had inevitably collected germs and replacing it could lead to a serious infection. Besides, Brady could live without it, though his head would be misshapen until the gap could be covered with a ceramic plate. Then, not uncharacteristically, Kobrine had a macabre thought: if he didn’t replace the bone flap and Brady later died, the press secretary’s head would be so disfigured that his casket would have to be closed at his funeral.
Kobrine weighed his options and then made his decision. He replaced the bone flap and stitched up Brady’s head. After a brief stop in the recovery room, the press secretary was sent to the intensive care unit on the hospital’s fourth floor.
Sarah Brady stayed at her husband’s side all through the night. Several visitors came by, including Richard Allen, Brady’s friend and fellow commuter. Allen, whose wife, Pat, joined him at the hospital, was devastated by the press secretary’s condition. Blood seeped through the bandages on Brady’s head, which had swollen to the size of a basketball. The left side of his friend’s body twitched uncontrollably. Allen and his wife both hugged Sarah Brady, who then leaned over her husband and, calling him by his nickname, whispered in his ear, “Bear! Bear! It’s Dick and Pat—they’re here, Bear!”
Allen took Brady’s right hand in his own. He was stunned when the wounded press secretary squeezed back so hard it hurt. Emotion swept over him; for the first time that day, tears streamed down Allen’s face.
* * *
HOUR BY HOUR, the president’s condition improved. As if to keep his small audience entertained, he continued writing notes. In a barely legible chicken scratch, he quoted Winston Churchill’s famous line about how there was “nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” And in his innocent, movie-star way, he flirted with the nurses. A little after 11:30, he wrote to Denise Sullivan, “Does Nancy know about us?” Sullivan, a hazel-eyed thirty-four-year-old, laughed. She tried to put the note in her pocket, but a gruff Secret Service agent snatched it from her hands.
When the night shift began, two new nurses, Marisa Mize and Joanne Bell, took over the president’s care. While Bell monitored Reagan’s vital signs and updated his chart, Mize sat at the right side of his bed and held his hand. A few minutes after taking her seat, she saw that phlegm had become stuck in the president’s throat. Anxious and uncomfortable, he clutched at his breathing tube. After Mize patted his head and told him it was okay to be scared, she persuaded him to let go of the tube. Just as the other nurses did, she told him to let the machine breathe for him. And she, too, promised to stay with him.
“I’m going to hold your hand and not leave you,” she said.
Reagan gripped her right hand and didn’t let go. He wouldn’t take his eyes off her. His lids would droop and then shut, only to snap open again a moment later.
“Go to sleep,” Mize told him again and again. “I’m right here. I haven’t left.”
After finishing his latest surgery, Ben Aaron returned, still wearing his blood-tinged scrubs. He reviewed Reagan’s chart, talked for a moment with a nurse and another doctor, and then said something the president couldn’t quite make out.
Suddenly Reagan seemed frantic. “What did he mean ‘this is it’?” he wrote to Mize. “Will I like it?”
Mize could see that the president was frightened by whatever he thought Aaron had said. She guessed that Reagan believed that “this is it” meant that somethin
g terrible was about to happen.
“No, no, you are fine,” Mize said. “They are going to remove your breathing tube soon.”
Aaron told Zimmerman he was going to take a nap; he lay down on a nearby cot and fell instantly asleep. Zimmerman, too anxious to sleep, guzzled his sixth cup of coffee.
A few minutes later, Reagan struggled with the tube again. Calmly, Mize took his hand. “You have to let this machine breathe for you,” she reminded him.
Hoping to distract the president, Mize began talking a bit about herself. She told Reagan that she was from southern California and had gone to college in San Francisco, where she’d studied music before getting into nursing.
The mention of his home state seemed to perk up the president. Once again he reached for the clipboard and wrote, “Send me to L.A. where I can see the air I’m breathing.”
A seemingly endless series of doctors and nurses came by the president’s bed. Soon Reagan wrote another note to Mize: “If I had this much attention in Hollywood I’d have stayed there.”
A bit later, he wrote that he felt “like I’ve done a remake of Lost Weekend,” referring to the Oscar-winning film about an alcoholic who goes on a bender and loses all sense of time.
Mize chuckled. She was surprised that Reagan was able to joke with her so soon after his surgery; still, he sometimes seemed confused.
“Do you know where you are?” she asked him.
He shook his head.
“You are in the GW recovery room,” she said, adding that it was early in the morning of March 31.
“I thought it was still afternoon,” he wrote back.
A little after two a.m., Mize noticed a perturbed look on Reagan’s face. Suspecting that he was feeling anxious about something, she tried to lighten the mood. “What, do you think your wife is holding dinner or something?”
“No,” he wrote, “I’m not really hungry for some reason.”
Then, on the same sheet of paper, he wrote: “What does the future hold?”
Mize wasn’t quite sure what he meant, nor did she know how to answer. As she thought about how to respond, Reagan scribbled, “Will I be able to do ranch work, ride, etc.?”
“Sure,” Mize told him. “Give yourself three months and you’ll be able to do those things again.”
“How long in the hospital?” he wrote a minute or two later.
“Three weeks,” Mize said.
By this point, Reagan’s oxygen levels were acceptable and his lungs were working more efficiently. Mize and the other nurses thought he could breathe on his own; so did the doctors who were monitoring his care. At three a.m., they removed the breathing tube. Then, as Reagan caught his breath, they waited by his bedside—they all wanted to hear the president’s first words.
When Reagan finally cleared his throat and spoke in a hoarse voice, he was characteristically jaunty. “What was that guy’s beef?” he quipped.
For the next forty minutes, the president held court, telling stories and jokes. Everyone was amused by his performance and amazed at his stamina.
After his audience filtered away, it was just Reagan, Mize, and Joanne Bell, who continued to monitor Reagan’s vital signs and make notes on his chart. The president and Mize chatted back and forth for a while, talking about everything from his work schedule to his advisors. As they spoke, Mize realized that Reagan didn’t seem to hear everything she was saying; he also seemed to be trying to read her lips. When she asked whether he was hard of hearing, Reagan said he was, in his right ear. “But I’m too vain to wear a hearing aid,” he told her.
At one point, referring to the White House, the president asked who was “running the show.”
Mize intuitively understood that she should avoid mentioning the controversy about Alexander Haig’s news conference, which was already getting a lot of attention. Instead, she answered, “The vice president caught a plane back to Washington.” She felt foolish for making it sound as if Bush had hopped on an American Airlines flight; then, feeling even sillier, she said, “In situations like this the vice president is in charge.”
But the question led Mize to wonder whether Reagan’s many duties as president were on his mind. Gently, she said, “I bet you are pretty anxious with everything you have to do.”
No, not really, Reagan said. He told her he had a great routine: he walked to the office before nine and was home in the residence by five or five-thirty. He ate dinner and often watched a movie with his wife, then went to bed. “I have three guys who mostly run things for me,” he said modestly.
As the hour passed four a.m., Joanne Bell became increasingly frustrated. She knew the president needed to rest, and she wanted him to stop talking to Marisa Mize and everyone else. Finally, deciding it was time for decisive action, she placed a moist washcloth over Reagan’s eyes.
“Now, Mr. President,” Bell said, “you need to get some sleep. In the most polite way I know how, I’m putting this cover over your eyes, and I want you to shut up and go to sleep.”
For the first time in almost twenty-four hours, the world around the president came to a stop. Someone turned off the overhead lights. Nurses read charts by flashlight; doctors quietly finished their reports. Around the recovery room, Secret Service agents stood sentry. Only one sound could be heard—the beep-beep-beep of the machine monitoring the president’s steadily beating heart.
EPILOGUE
After a fitful hour of sleep and a sponge bath, Ronald Reagan was wheeled from the recovery room into an elevator for the ride to the hospital’s intensive care unit on the fourth floor. There, as Secret Service agents and police officers stood at attention, he was rolled down a hallway until he reached room 4025-N, one of the largest in the ward. The plain white room had been scrubbed clean for the president, and his bed was placed headfirst against a wall. To his right, sunlight from a bright new day seeped around the edges of the stuffy room’s thick window shade.
The door closed, and now the president was alone with two nurses and a Secret Service agent who stood guard behind a drawn green curtain. For the rest of Reagan’s stay in the hospital, an agent was always stationed in his room.
Nurse Maureen McCann, wearing a yellow scrub dress, introduced herself. Though he was still weak and in pain, Reagan smiled and said, “I have a daughter named Maureen.”
McCann and the second nurse, Carolyn Ramos, then conducted a basic medical assessment, checking the president’s blood pressure, his pulse, his temperature, the position of his chest tubes and dressings, and his IV lines. Everything was fine. Ramos asked Reagan a series of questions to test his mental acuity. After querying him about the year and whether he knew his whereabouts, she paused and said, “I was going to ask you who is president, but I don’t think that is necessary.”
Reagan laughed, and Ramos went on to say that when she had asked the same question of a patient a few weeks earlier, the patient replied, “It’s that actor fellow—Jimmy Stewart.” Again Reagan was amused, and he responded with one of his favorite yarns about being mistaken on a New York City street for his fellow movie actor Ray Milland. Not wanting to disappoint the fan, Reagan had signed an autograph in Milland’s name.
The nurses were impressed that Reagan could joke after his ordeal, but the laughter stopped when they began performing respiratory therapy, which involved pounding on the president’s back with cupped hands and then forcing him to cough up debris from his lungs. The therapy was so vigorous that it could be heard by anyone in the vicinity; later, when Nancy Reagan spent time in a nearby room while the therapy was administered, she described it as sounding like someone was “slapping a side of beef” next door.
The therapy session exhausted the president and made him sweat; to help him cool down and to quench his thirst, McCann gave him some ice chips to chew on. Then, knowing that he would soon have visitors, she asked whether she could brush his tangled hair to make him look a bit more presentable. “I meant to have it cut,” Reagan said, adding that he hadn’t washed it in a co
uple of days. She gently combed and parted the president’s hair.
Ramos offered to brush Reagan’s teeth for him. Looking puzzled, the president said, “But they’re mine.” Ramos was embarrassed—most ICU patients around Reagan’s age had dentures. She gave him what he needed to brush his own teeth.
At 7:15, the president’s official day began. Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver filed into the room. “I should have known I wasn’t going to avoid a staff meeting,” Reagan quipped, drawing laughter from his top advisors. Someone handed the president the dairy bill to sign. Borrowing a pen, Reagan scrawled his signature in the proper place and the bill became law. The men discussed the shooting briefly, and one of the members of the Troika told the president that the gunman was “a kid from a good family in Colorado who just happened to be crazy.”
This was the first Reagan had been told anything about his assailant, and he reflected on the news for a moment. “I had hoped it was a KGB agent,” the president said, referring to the Soviet spy agency. “On second thought,” he added, “he wouldn’t have missed then.”
For most of the rest of the day, the president napped, read the newspapers, and visited with Mrs. Reagan and the children, all four of whom were now in Washington. At one point, joking with his son Michael, Reagan said, “If you ever get shot, make sure you’re not wearing a new suit.” But that afternoon, the one-liners and the stories came to an abrupt halt when Dan Ruge, the White House physician, stopped by and broke the sad news about the shooting of Jim Brady, who was still fighting for his life just around the corner.
“Oh, damn,” Reagan said, his eyes welling up with tears.
* * *
THE FIRST SEVERAL days of Reagan’s recovery went better than the doctors could have hoped. The president regained his color and grew steadily stronger. He successfully spat up dark blood, a sign that his body was working to clear his lungs. To ensure that he got plenty of rest, his White House staff strictly limited the number of visitors. Not until April 6 was anyone outside the president’s closest circle permitted to see him; that afternoon, Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, came by to pay his regards. O’Neill—Reagan’s political nemesis—entered the room and walked straight to the bed, where he grabbed the president’s hand and kissed his head. Then the Speaker knelt and together they recited the Twenty-third Psalm—“The lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Speaking through tears, O’Neill said, “God bless you, Mr. President. We’re all praying for you.”
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