by Sheila Tate
Then Nancy faced the biggest challenge of her married life on March 30, 1981.
The First Lady was at a luncheon at the National Trust for Historic Preservation in nearby Georgetown. Over dessert Nancy caught my eye and indicated she was ready to leave. It was shortly after 2:00 p.m. She said her goodbyes to Michael Ainslie, the president of the National Trust. After a short drive back to the White House, I headed toward my office while she took the elevator to the private residence. My phone was ringing as I walked into my office. It was Jennefer Hirshberg, a reporter for the Washington Star, telling me that they heard on the police radio that shots had been fired outside the Capital Hilton and wanted to know if I knew anything. I said no and immediately dropped the phone. I ran back down the hall toward the residence elevator. I wasn’t thinking; I was operating out of pure instinct. Nancy Reagan came down the hall toward me, moving swiftly. That’s when I knew she had heard the same news.
She had just learned that there had been a shooting from George Opfer, her lead Secret Service agent. At that point no one knew that the president himself had been shot. George recommended she stay in the safety of the residence until we had more information. Nancy was having none of that.
She simply said, “No, he needs me.”
We raced to George Washington Hospital in about five minutes. Mike Deaver stood outside waiting for her. There we first learned that President Reagan had been shot by a deranged young man—a schizophrenic—who thought actress Jodie Foster would be attracted to him if he killed the president.
I think the First Lady went into shock. She became very quiet once they took the president into surgery. I was standing in the hallway leading into the operating room. They wheeled him past me (and what seemed like every doctor within a five-mile radius) and he saw Chief of Staff Jim Baker, White House Counselor Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver standing directly across from me, all three of them looking morose. President Reagan raised his head—I vividly remember seeing the muscles and tendons in his neck strain—and he said to them, “Who’s minding the store?” All three broke out in big smiles of relief.
As I rode with Nancy on the elevator up to the hospital chapel we held hands. I kept saying, “It’s going to be all right.” She did not say a word. When we talked about it later, she did not remember me, the elevator, holding hands, or anything I said. She went into the chapel where Sarah Brady was praying for Jim. Jim Baker joined Nancy and they prayed together. He told me she was really shaken.
I recall feeling useless and searching for something to do. I started asking nurses to help me find out who else was injured and what hospital they were in. That’s when one nurse told me that Jim Brady had died. That’s what the media was reporting. I quickly found out that was not true and ran back to her to tell her not to repeat that because it really was not true. But living with the belief that Jim had died for just those few minutes before I learned the truth—that he was in fact alive and down the hall at GW hospital—was incredibly painful. And the next day, as I was leaving the hospital, Sarah Brady was standing in the hall outside Jim’s room. She insisted I come in; I tried to say no, that I didn’t want to disturb him. What I really didn’t want was to see him. Sarah pushed me into the room, ahead of her, and said “Jim, look, Sheila Tate is here.” He made some effort to say something—not intelligible, just a groan of recognition—and all I could do was look with horror at his bandaged head. It was more than double its normal size. I left that room and, for the first time since the shooting, I walked outside where I began to cry; I fully expected Jim to die before the night was over.
* * *
Nancy focused entirely on her husband’s recovery. She spent every day at his bedside. She brought him something different every day, like Jelly Belly jelly beans, his favorite candy. She taped Get Well cards from across the nation and funny notes from children all over his walls. She invited him to dance as they walked down the halls to get him exercise. AP reporter Maureen Santini reported a particularly moving account of a telegram the president received from his old pal Jimmy Stewart saying, “I would have taken that bullet.”
I talked to Nancy frequently in the immediate aftermath, usually at my instigation, to get any information that I could provide to the press. The day after his surgery, I was in the adjoining room at the hospital, helping Patti and Ron, two of their children, with statements they wanted to release to the media. Nancy said to me, “Can you hear that?” It was a slapping, pounding sound. She said the nurses were beating on the president’s back to keep him from getting congested. I can still hear that sound if I stop and think about it. And I vividly remember how Nancy winced with every pounding.
Mr. Hinckley was unsuccessful in his bizarre plan to kill Ronald Reagan, but he wreaked havoc on the life of our wonderful, ebullient presidential press secretary, Jim Brady, who died in 2016. Jim took a bullet in the middle of his forehead. He was never truly Jim again; he was a shadow of his former self, confined to a wheelchair and fighting complications for the rest of his life until he succumbed to those injuries thirty-five years later. Hinckley murdered him; it just took thirty-five painful years for Jim to die. Jim will always be my hero.
There were many heroes on March 30, 1981.
President Reagan very likely would have died if his Secret Service agent, Jerry Parr, had not thrown him into the limo. Jerry ordered the driver to head straight for the White House, but within a few minutes he spotted foamy red blood on the president’s lips and realized the president had been injured and ordered the driver to proceed to nearby GW Hospital. At the time, even Jerry did not know the president had been shot; at first he assumed he’d broken the president’s rib when he shoved him into the car and threw himself on top of President Reagan.
DC police officer Thomas K. Delahanty was shot in the neck; that bullet ricocheted off his spinal cord and created permanent nerve damage to his left arm. Officer Delahanty’s injuries forced his retirement from a career he loved. The docs who operated to remove the Devastator bullet from his body had to wear bulletproof vests in case it exploded during the surgery.
Secret Service Agent Tim McCarthy put himself in the line of fire as he was trained to do. When he spread his body in front of President Reagan, he took a bullet to the abdomen. He recovered and subsequently became one of Nancy’s agents before retiring. He eventually moved back to Illinois where he is still serving the public, now as police chief of a town in his home state. He was like every agent I knew in the Presidential Protective Detail, a mixture of courage, modesty, and decency.
* * *
Oddly, I think Ronald Reagan recovered more quickly than Nancy. After that day, March 30, 1981, she was a wreck whenever he left the safe confines of the White House, worrying about his safety.
Nancy had always been attentive to her husband’s schedule because, as she told me, his staff tended to cram his day with one event after another from morning until evening with little or no time between meetings. She insisted that he did not function well with an overloaded schedule so she kept the pressure on to space out his meetings and give him breaks.
This was especially true when she was away from the White House. Once on a trip we were sitting in her hotel room at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas (which was actually Frank Sinatra’s private apartment), where she was scheduled to speak to the National PTA on the subject of youth drug abuse and prevention. The president’s schedule for the next day came across a fax machine; she looked at it and handed it to me saying, “This is what I mean.” His day was set to start at 8 a.m. and end at 11 p.m. She made a call and the schedule was moderated a bit. Quite a bit, as I recall.
Just as she always did when out of town, she also called her husband. As he came on the line, she settled back against the bed pillows, put her feet up on the bed, looked up, and burst out laughing. The ceiling above the bed was mirrored. She could hardly get the words out to tell the president because she was laughing so h
ard.
Nancy was frequently criticized by the press for always being on the phone. She called her mother every single evening just to tell her she loved her. If she and the president were not together, they called each other daily. Nancy kept in close touch with her lifelong friends by calling them. She’d quickly learned that they were reluctant to call her because they assumed she was busy. After I left her staff, I became one of the privileged who received frequent calls. But for some reason the press thought her affinity for keeping in telephonic touch was some kind of a personal defect.
I think her anxiety about Reagan’s schedule gave rise to her secret dependence on astrology. She began conferring with a West Coast astrologer about “safe” days for the president to travel. I never knew about this practice until it became public, though I do know that Nancy never used astrology to determine her own schedule. Jim Baker told me he did not know about it for several years. Mike Deaver was the only one who knew and he kept it to himself. Nancy’s “protective” astrological scheduling became public thanks to a book by former chief of staff Donald Regan and the media went wild. I had only recently left the White House when the book came out and “Katie bar the door” as my mother used to say. I went out to lunch that day, and when I walked back into my office, I had at least fifty phone messages from various reporters and media outlets awaiting me. It wasn’t hard to figure something big had happened. So first I called the White House and asked Elaine Crispin, the new press secretary, what was going on. She told me about the astrology and said they thought it would be a one-day story. I could not have disagreed more. I told Elaine that unless they did something to diffuse it, this astrology business would be like an albatross around her neck. I really felt heartsick.
Looking back, Nancy’s reliance on astrology just seems silly to me but at the time the revelation that the president’s schedule was determined by an astrologer in California was very troubling and very damaging. However, understanding her anxiety about his safety, I can excuse her reliance on the astrologer. Sort of.
Their son, Ron, also inspired Nancy’s protective insights. For his own reasons he decided to sign away his right to Secret Service protection. It’s not unusual these days and generally goes unreported when adult children eschew armed guards, but at the time it was too juicy a story for someone not to leak it to the press.
When I told Nancy about the press inquiry from one of the New York tabloids about Ron’s lack of security, she burst into tears. Her husband came immediately from the Oval Office after hearing about it. The president had just escaped a potentially lethal bullet wound even with Secret Service protection; now their son was without any protection whatsoever and it was about to become public knowledge. The parents were understandably beside themselves. Nancy was as upset as I ever saw her, inconsolable about the idea that Ron had left himself so vulnerable. After what they had been through, she had every right to be fearful. And I suspect the hardest part was that she was helpless to do anything to ensure his protection.
Much later I learned that Patti had also shed her Secret Service protection but luckily that never surfaced publicly during Reagan’s presidency.
* * *
President Reagan actually forgave Hinckley. He was quoted as telling the Pope that he realized that as a Christian he had a duty to forgive him. I don’t believe Nancy ever did. I took some comfort in the fact that Nancy had died before Hinckley was set free to live in Williamsburg, Virginia, under the supervision of his mother, who is over ninety years old.
I read that Officer Delahanty was not “enthused” to learn that Hinckley was being released from the mental hospital, St. Elizabeths, in DC, in 2016.
Many Americans did not know that for the remainder of President Reagan’s terms, Jim Brady retained the title of press secretary to the president; he also retained his salary and benefits, at the president’s insistence. While Jim was never able to actually resume his duties, he was included in everything as much as possible.
I still smile when I remember one encounter between the Reagans several months after the shooting. The president had just been given medical clearance to go back to work part-time in the Oval Office. She and I were going somewhere. We were in the downstairs “cross hall” about to walk out the door to get into her limo. The president came running down the hall toward her; he wanted to say goodbye to her before she left. She saw him running and her protective instincts kicked in; she instantly put up her hands, telling him to slow down. He said with a big smile on his face, “I can’t help it. It’s my boyish exuberance!”
7
The Perfectionist
I have often wondered why the term “perfectionist” is an implied criticism. People often asked me if it wasn’t hard working for a perfectionist like Nancy. I readily describe Nancy Reagan as a perfectionist. I consider it a compliment. And I enjoyed working for someone who knew what she wanted.
Nancy was a perfectionist when it came to her home, and since her home was going to be the White House, she was eager to get that house in order, so to speak. She was naturally a “nester” and she wanted to get settled before she went to the next item on her comprehensive checklist. She also wanted, I think, to weave a cocoon of comfort and stability around her family’s lives.
Quite logically, Nancy’s attention to detail also extended to entertaining. She worked with the same thoroughness on everything. My records indicate there were fifty-six official state dinners during the Reagan administration and several reciprocal dinners overseas. When I left in February 1985, I had handled press for thirty-two of them. I was sad to read how seldom the Clintons or President Bush 43 hosted state dinners. Truly, missed opportunities. They were such elegant events and often helped improve understanding and cement relations between the United States and the guest countries. Nancy felt they were very important and she really worked to make sure every detail of every dinner was considered. I doubt any administration since has held as many state dinners as the Reagans or, for that matter, made as many diplomatic friends.
Muffie Brandon was Nancy’s first social secretary and is a great friend to me. She worked closely with Nancy to establish an incredibly detailed checklist for state dinners that was used to organize each of them during the eight years of the Reagan administration. Muffie says Nancy was deeply interested and involved in the planning of every dinner. If you have ever orchestrated a daughter’s wedding, you know how complicated it becomes. Now imagine organizing a far more complicated state dinner every month for eight years. The only significant gap in that schedule was due to the March 30, 1981, assassination attempt.
Here’s how they typically came together.
The National Security Council or the State Department would notify Chief of Staff Jim Baker or Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver of a pending state visit that would include a formal state dinner. From that point, Nancy and Muffie took over.
The State Department would send Muffie a suggested guest list, often including distinguished Americans whose family originated in the country of the visiting head of state.
Nancy got deeply involved in the guest list and would go over suggested names with Muffie. She would add names and delete others. As Muffie said, “We developed an unofficial quota system with set numbers of guests from the Senate, the House of Representatives, the American ambassador to the guest country as well as the current ambassador from the visiting country to the United States. Vice President and Mrs. Bush were always included.”
We also had a set number of senior White House staff and several reporters or publishers with their spouses. Jim Brady and I selected the media guests. After Jim was shot two months after the inauguration, Larry Speakes and I made the recommendations.
Nancy and Muffie reviewed lists of distinguished Americans, often with ties to the visiting country; they came from the arts, education, science, and medicine. Personal friends of the Reagans were also often included, usual
ly members of Governor Reagan’s famous kitchen cabinet.
Muffie and Nancy would discuss the menu with the head chef and make certain that there were no dietary restrictions or special religious observances to honor. Menus reflected the best in American cuisine. And California wines, of course, were favored.
These dinners were an important extension of the diplomatic outreach by the Reagan administration. Nancy was intent on making certain their guests felt honored by the evening’s events. Nancy would personally choose the decor, the color of the table coverings, the china, and the flowers. She frequently had advance tastings of the menu and a preview of the proposed floral arrangements.
As you can imagine, an invitation to a Reagan state dinner was highly coveted; Muffie regularly received desperate requests for help getting invited. Nancy decided from the beginning that the guest lists were to be limited to 120 people for every State Dining Room dinner. No exceptions. The 120-person limit was established principally to allow room for our waiters to move easily between tables, but it also added an aura of exclusivity that a state dinner deserves.
To accommodate the larger visiting party, typically thirty people, not invited to the dinner, Nancy and Muffie established an alternative dinner held in the downstairs garden room and hosted by senior White House staffers. That “alternative” group always joined the state dinner guests for the evening entertainment in the East Room.
Seating, as you can imagine, was incredibly sensitive. Nancy was very attentive to it. Explained Muffie: “She and I would sit down, often in the calligrapher’s office with the names of each guest on pink or blue slips of paper, laying out a seating plan for each table of eight. Nancy was very detail oriented and especially attentive to the president’s table. She was more concerned with personal dynamics than protocol. Sometimes it took a call with Chief of Protocol Leonore Annenberg to settle protocol issues. When we finished this exercise, I would type up the agreed-upon seating arrangements and send it up to her. Corrections, reassignments, revisions were often made until we got final approval from Nancy. Then, and only then, would the calligraphers go to work creating the seating cards and menus.”