Nancy asked her stepbrother to spend that first night with her at the White House, but Dick opted to stay with the Ruges instead. The next morning, he joined his sister for a prayer service. “I was amazed at her self-control. She didn’t cry. She didn’t say how awful this was,” Dick recalled. “I cried during the service. She showed no emotion at all.”
The other three Reagan children arrived from California, via an uncomfortable overnight ride aboard a military cargo plane. Patti had gotten news of the shooting when a Secret Service agent interrupted a session with her therapist. Michael also heard it from an agent, who assured him his father was unhurt; through news reports on the radio, he soon realized otherwise. Maureen received a call from her fiancé, Dennis Revell, who couldn’t summon words to tell her what had happened, and so he asked her to turn on the television. As they all boarded a plane that night, it occurred to Patti that none of them had spoken to Nancy or reached out to one another. “What kind of family is this?” she thought. “Even a bullet can’t bring us together.”
For most of the flight, the three Reagan children sat in different parts of the C-140, on canvas seats. Patti realized that their only connection was a man who might be bleeding to death in a hospital bed thousands of miles away. “There was something else uniting us. Each of us knew, in some part of our hearts that, although our presence was expected there, it wasn’t really important,” she recalled. “Ronald and Nancy Reagan are two halves of a circle; together, they are complete, and their children float outside.” At Nancy’s funeral thirty-five years later, her daughter would use almost exactly those words to describe the bond between her parents.
Patti, Ron, and Doria made a midmorning visit to Ronnie in the hospital. Nancy told Maureen and Michael they would have to come later, which hit them as a hurtful, infuriating reminder of their secondary status as the children from Ronnie’s first marriage. They decided to use the time checking in on Delahanty and McCarthy, and to thank them for their valor in the line of duty. They also saw Sarah Brady, who was hovering over her bandaged husband and begging him to live. Eventually Maureen and Michael got into their father’s room for a short visit, but only after pleading with a doctor to let them see him. Within a day, all four of Ronnie’s children had left Washington, though Maureen and Patti would return while he recuperated. The family would not all be together again until the following Thanksgiving.
Nancy did summon others to lend support. Frank Sinatra and his fourth wife, Barbara, were asleep in Las Vegas when the phone rang. “Ronnie’s been shot,” Nancy blurted on the other end of the line. “Can you come?” Sinatra canceled the final three shows of his weeklong engagement at Caesars Palace and arranged for a flight. When he and Barbara arrived at the White House, they were met by Nancy and evangelist Billy Graham. The Reagans’ pastor, Donn Moomaw, flew in from Los Angeles. Old friends like the Wicks also were on hand. From around the country, get-well letters and gifts—flowers, Ronnie’s favorite jelly beans, chocolates—were flooding in. But Nancy still felt that without Ronnie in the bed beside her, she was by herself. After one grueling day at the hospital, she wrote in her diary: “It’s a big house when you’re here alone.”
Outside, it seemed the world had been put on pause. The Academy Awards, which had been scheduled to be broadcast by ABC on March 30, were put off for a day. Master of ceremonies Johnny Carson opened the next night by saying: “I’m sure that all of you here and most of you watching tonight understand why we have delayed this program for twenty-four hours. Because of the incredible events of yesterday, that old adage ‘the show must go on’ seemed relatively unimportant.” The star-filled audience at LA’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion erupted in cheers when Carson announced the president was in “excellent condition at last reports. He has been conducting business, and he happens to be in very good spirits.” There was more applause when Carson noted Ronnie had given his blessing to playing a video greeting taped two weeks before. “Film is forever,” the prerecorded president quipped from the jumbo screen. “I have been trapped in some film forever myself.” Carson said that Ronnie “asked for a television set in his room so he could view this program tonight.” Watching the Academy Awards had actually been Nancy’s idea, as what she hoped would be a morale booster in the gloomy hospital suite. The curtains had been nailed closed for security reasons, shutting out the glorious spring that was being announced by the blooming of the cherry blossoms. Ronnie enjoyed some of the ceremony as he drifted in and out of sleep.
The timing of the awards broadcast was not the only dilemma faced by the television networks. They were sensitive to the fact that a movie had set this tragedy in motion. NBC shelved an upcoming episode of Walking Tall, a series about a crime-fighting sheriff based on a popular 1973 film with the same name. The reason: the episode had been titled “Hit Man.” ABC temporarily changed the name of one of the lead characters in its new hit sitcom The Greatest American Hero from Ralph Hinkley, which sounded too much like the gunman’s, to Ralph Hanley. But things started to get back to normal after a few days.
Or so it seemed. In fact, the White House and the doctors were giving the public a misleadingly rosy picture of the president’s condition and hiding how close to death he had been. During the hours after the shooting, Lyn Nofziger coolly and masterfully took over handling the media that descended upon the hospital, offering upbeat fodder to the journalists on deadline.
Nofziger said the president was conscious and had walked into the hospital on his own. Which was accurate but hardly the whole story. He also kept the press informed with a steady stream of anecdotes about how Ronnie was cracking jokes and passing clever notes to his doctors and nurses. “All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” Ronnie wrote in one, reprising the line that comedian W. C. Fields once said he wanted to have inscribed on his tombstone. Those reassuring bits of information became the instant lore of that horrible day. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be holding the nation together, or even that such a thing was needed,” Nofziger would later recall. “Neither did I feel that the president was dying.”
Still, reporters were clamoring for more medical details. Nofziger recruited the hospital’s smooth and personable spokesman, Dennis O’Leary, to give a briefing. O’Leary stuck pretty much to the facts—that the president was in the recovery room, stable, and awake. But he made one glaringly false statement, which was that Ronnie “was at no time in any serious danger.” He also downplayed the amount of blood the president had lost. As Nofziger did, O’Leary noted that the president had walked into the hospital, without adding that he had collapsed as soon as he got inside. Weeks later, when more information was available and reporters began challenging him on what he had said, O’Leary replied that “people believe what they believe,” but he continued to insist: “The president was not in serious danger of dying.”
Within an hour after Ronnie left the recovery room, his top aides brought him a piece of legislation to sign, a dairy bill, to convey the impression that he was still able to function as the nation’s chief executive. His faint, wobbly handwriting said otherwise. Nor was he out of the woods. On the fifth day after he was shot, Ronnie began coughing up fresh blood and spiked a fever of 105. Doctors feared pneumonia. He also lost his appetite, so Nancy had their former Los Angeles housekeeper make and ship two of his favorite soups: hamburger and split pea. What bothered her as much as anything was the sound of nurses in the next room slapping him on his back to keep his lungs clear, an exercise they had to repeat every four hours. It was as though he were a side of meat. “That’s your father they’re doing that to,” she lamented to Maureen when she came to visit.
Ronnie made steady progress after the infection crisis passed. On April 11, twelve days after he was shot, he was released from the hospital under tight security, wearing a bulletproof vest under his red cardigan sweater and sport shirt. “I walked in here, and I am going to walk out,” he declared, and did so, though stiffly. When he, Nancy, and Patti arrived back at the White H
ouse, he was greeted by two hundred members of his staff, Cabinet secretaries, and their families, many huddling under umbrellas against a light but relentless rain. A big cloth sign announced: Welcome Home Mr. President. “This looks like a nice place,” he said.
Once Ronnie was home, Nancy insisted that he drastically cut back his work schedule. She showed him a letter she had gotten from Lady Bird Johnson, in which the former first lady had written that Lyndon had needed a full month to recover from his 1965 gall bladder operation. In the early weeks of his recuperation, Ronnie wore his navy-blue bathrobe and pajamas to meetings with top advisers and the National Security Council, then retreated to the residence for a nap. He was in bed for the night a half hour after dinner.
Nancy had accelerated the solarium renovations, so that he could convalesce in a setting far different from his dark hospital room. She also set up a gym in Tricia Nixon’s old bedroom, across the hall from theirs. As the doctors slowly took him off antibiotics, food began to taste good again. Between more regular eating and his weight-lifting workouts, Ronnie would eventually fill out—and indeed, become more muscular than he had been before, adding an inch and a half to his chest. Nancy, however, remained wracked by tension and anxiety. At night, she took a banana to bed as a snack to eat during her inevitable bouts with insomnia. She feared the crunching of an apple might wake her husband.
Ronnie’s first day back in the Oval Office was April 24. Late that morning, he held a meeting with his Cabinet and was greeted with applause. But he wasn’t well enough yet to make it to California the following day for Maureen’s wedding to Dennis Revell. He urged the couple not to reschedule. In her father’s stead, his brother, Neil, walked Ronnie’s eldest down the aisle at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. As a gift, Nancy sent a set of pewter drink stirrers topped with decorative elephants. Though they were clearly not from Tiffany & Co., they came in one of the store’s distinctive boxes, and each was in a tarnish-preventing storage sleeve that bore the Tiffany name. The couple knew they must have come from Nancy’s “gift closet,” where she kept unwanted things that people had given her and Ronnie. Her recycling practices were a running joke among the Reagans.
As weeks went by, the White House began to turn its attention back to the ambitious agenda the president had set out for the country. Ronnie’s poll numbers, which were sagging before the assassination attempt, shot up 11 percentage points in the days afterward. “While it is common for a president’s popularity rating to increase at a time of national crisis, the rise for Reagan appears as sharp as any yet recorded,” the Washington Post noted, and pronounced it a “second honeymoon” for the president.
That was confirmed when Ronnie entered the House chamber on April 28 to sell his economic program in a nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress. Lawmakers leapt to their feet to give him a three-minute burst of applause. Ronnie noted in his diary that the speech had been interrupted by ovations fourteen times. He was especially touched that dozens of Democrats had joined Republicans in clapping at some points. “Maybe we are going to make it,” he wrote. “It took a lot of courage for them to do that, and it sent a shiver down my spine.”
The horrific event that Nancy would refer to only as “March 30” or “the thing that happened to Ronnie” had changed them both. He saw a divine hand in the fact that he had been spared, which made him more convinced than ever that there was a purpose at work in his presidency. On April 12, in his first diary entry after the shooting, Ronnie wrote, “Whatever happens now, I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.” He had understood from the moment he awakened in the emergency room that his healing would have to begin with forgiveness: “I realized I couldn’t ask for Gods [sic] help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed-up young man who had shot me. Isn’t that the meaning of the lost sheep? We are all Gods children & therefore equally beloved by him. I began to pray for his soul and that he would find his way back to the fold.”
But while Ronnie was turning toward the light, Nancy could not escape her darkness. Night after night, while he slept soundly on the left side of the bed, she lay awake on the right, her thoughts locked on gruesome possibilities. She obsessed over the fact that presidents elected in a year that ended in zero tended to die while in office, either from natural causes or by assassination. William Henry Harrison had been elected in 1840; Abraham Lincoln, in 1860; James A. Garfield, in 1880; William McKinley, in 1900; Warren G. Harding, in 1920; and John F. Kennedy, in 1960. That pattern suddenly seemed more an omen than a statistical oddity. Ronnie was also the only sitting president in history to survive being wounded in an assassination attempt. Did that present some kind of sick challenge to other would-be killers? Everywhere there were reminders of the danger. In May, when the couple celebrated Ronnie’s recovery by going out to dinner for the first time, black-suited Secret Service sharpshooters were posted on a rooftop overlooking the Georgetown club where they were dining.
Her weight slipped from an already slender 112 pounds to less than 100. Nancy could see in pictures of herself how gaunt and drawn she looked. Patti visited her parents during their trip to the ranch over Memorial Day weekend. For Ronnie, getting back to his beloved mountaintop spread was a tonic, though the doctors had told him to go easy on the horseback riding. “The weather was beautiful, and so was the ranch,” he recalled later. “Its wild scenery and solitude only reminded us how much we loved about it and how much we missed our life in California.” But as Patti hugged her mother good-bye, she was struck by how tiny Nancy had become: “This woman whose presence has been so enormous in my life, who has seemed to tower over me, was almost lost between my arms.”
Ronnie could also see the toll it was taking on Nancy. He thought she needed a break, so when the invitation to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer arrived, he urged her to attend without him. “Saw ‘Mommie’ off for London & the Royal Wedding. I worry when she’s out of sight 6 minutes. How am I going to hold out for 6 days,” he wrote in his diary July 23. “The lights don’t seem as warm & bright without her.”
As the months and later the years went by, the memories of that horrible day in March stayed fresh in Nancy’s mind. In an interview with Parade magazine in late 1981, she struggled for words to describe how it haunted her: “I think, before it happened, it was something I knew was always out there, and it was constantly in the back of my mind. I had to keep it in the back of my mind, you see, or I couldn’t function. I knew measures were taken to protect us, and we had to depend on those. And now…
“I thought for a while it was something that in time would fade away,” she added. “It hasn’t. It’s a particular kind of trauma that never leaves you once you’ve known it.”
* * *
The news from around the world offered no reassurance. Weeks after Ronnie was shot, there was an attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. Anwar Sadat was assassinated at a parade in Cairo on October 6, just two months after Ronnie had toasted the Egyptian president as a peacemaker at a White House state dinner. Nancy said: “It’s not just America. No. No. It is all over the world. Violence everywhere. Yes, yes, it does something to you. Yes, it changes you.”
On Nancy’s insistence, Ronnie never made a trip to the Middle East while he was president, not even to Israel. “She thought he was going to get smoked if he went over there. She just said, ‘They can come here all they want. You’re not going over there,’ ” recalled Jim Kuhn, who was Ronnie’s executive assistant. “The thing that really got to her was when Anwar Sadat was blown away in that military parade. The Hinckley thing was just a stupid Secret Service mistake, but that thing with Sadat really hit her hard.” Nancy also vetoed the idea of Ronnie attending Sadat’s funeral. She was too afraid for her husband’s safety. The White House dispatched three of his predecessors—Nixon, Ford, and Carter—to represent the United States.
In early December of that first year of Ronnie’s presidency, there were rep
orts that Libyan leader Mu‘ammar Gadhafi had dispatched a hit squad to the United States to assassinate him. The potential threat was taken seriously enough that Ronnie had to light the national Christmas tree from the White House, instead of doing it in the open on the Ellipse, a park just outside the White House fence, as presidents typically did. Concerns about security also scotched Nancy’s plans to go out and do her Christmas shopping, so she had to ask friends to buy her gifts for her. Ronnie ordered Secret Service protection for the troika of Deaver, Baker, and Meese, and, for a while, mock presidential motorcades wended through Washington as decoys to draw out would-be assassins.
Ronnie’s handwritten Christmas letter to Nancy at the end of that first difficult year was a particularly tender one; two pages of reassurance and love on White House stationery. It also offers a glimpse of how differently Nancy looked in his eyes from the image of her that was being forged in brutal Washington. Their lives had changed in ways they could never have foreseen, but their devotion to each other had not. Ronnie began by lamenting that a president constrained within the fortified White House had not been able to select a Christmas present for the person he loved most:
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 31