by Jerry Parr
We had plenty of agents: the day shift who’d been at the hotel and Mrs. Reagan’s agents, and soon the four-to-midnight shift, who heard about the shooting on TV like everyone else, drove right to the hospital. In addition we had support from the Washington field office.
Pat Miller did a wonderful survey, a protective plan, right on the spot. These guys knew what to do, and it relieved me of a lot of worry. The inner perimeter was holding, but we needed middle and outer perimeters. There were all kinds of problems. People were trying to get into the hospital just to be there. The press was trying to stake out territory; senators were arriving, expecting to be handled with deference.
At 2:57 p.m.—thirty minutes after he was shot—the president was on his way to the operating room.
I went into the operating room with the president. Though I’d dressed in scrubs with President Carter in the burn unit, I’d forgotten how they went on. To the nurses’ amusement I put them on backward, but nobody mentioned it. I covered everything—clothes, face, hair, shoes—so as not to violate the sterile environment. I introduced myself to Ben Aaron, the senior thoracic surgeon, and Kathleen Cheyney, a thoracic surgical fellow. While junior to Aaron, she herself had eight years’ experience with chest surgery. I took my place about four feet behind the president’s head.
I watched the surgeons open his chest, then use a rib spreader that looked like a torture instrument from the Inquisition. Dr. Aaron started hunting for the bullet revealed by X-rays taken in the trauma room—a flattened-out bullet, like a curved dime. Aaron couldn’t find it. He put his hand in the president’s chest to feel for it. Still no luck. Finally, he turned to me in frustration and asked, “Do you really want it?”
As a criminal investigator I knew we needed it to establish the “chain of custody” evidence for trial. I’d heard we had the lone gunman, but we needed the bullet to be sure it came from his gun. Our plan was for the bullet to go from the president’s body, to Dr. Ben Aaron, to me, in a cup. Then to Agent Joe Trainor, and from Trainor to an FBI agent. And then they would trace it back to John Hinckley.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to increase the president’s danger by keeping him open and sedated longer than necessary. I gulped and took a giant leap of faith. “Well, we’d really like to have it.”
They re-X-rayed him in the operating room. I kept looking at the monitor up there, and his blood pressure stayed in a good range. Mine was probably higher at that point!
At the very same time, in the next operating room, Agent Tim McCarthy was undergoing surgery for a gunshot wound to the upper chest. The bullet had migrated to his abdomen, nicking several organs on the way. He was young and strong and got out of surgery first.
In another operating room, Dr. Art Kobrine was working on Jim Brady. That was a much longer, much more serious operation. Brady would survive with his mind intact, but he would be in a wheelchair the rest of his life and unable to work again.
Peering through the large observation window overlooking Reagan’s operation, I saw a figure dressed in surgical green, mask and all. I recognized his eyes and motioned him to come in. It was John Simpson, then assistant director of Protective Operations (he later became director). He had guarded Reagan in earlier campaigns and had a deep respect and affection for him and Mrs. Reagan. I knew he wanted to be there, whether the president lived or died.
Dr. Aaron finally found the bullet and removed it from the president’s lung. Then he still had to stop all the internal bleeding in Reagan’s chest. He discovered the problem—a damaged artery—and stitched it shut. They had to clean the wound, sew up the tissue and muscles inside, then close the rib cage and sew up the skin. They left drainage tubes in that would be removed in a few days.
The surgery lasted about three hours. The doctors had done their best. I was praying it was good enough to save Ronald Reagan.
In the recovery room, about 7:15 that night, the president regained consciousness. He had tubes running in and out, draining out fluids that weren’t supposed to be accumulating, like clots and secretions, and putting in fluids he needed, like saline. He was on a ventilator and couldn’t speak. He tried to pull out his breathing tube. Agitated, gesturing for a pen and paper, he scribbled, “I can’t breathe.” Under it, he made ditto marks. The second line read “ “ “ “ at all.” He handed me the paper, his eyes full of fear. He was the color of ash. Two nurses, Denise Sullivan and Cathy Edmondson, were monitoring his blood pressure, drainage tubes, and breathing, but they were not in the room. I longed to comfort him, to protect him, but I was helpless—and on the verge of panic myself.
Like Abraham in the Bible, I started to argue with God.[80] Surely you didn’t bring him through all this to suffocate before my eyes! I motioned desperately to nurse Cathy Edmondson, telling her, “He feels like he can’t breathe!” I showed her Reagan’s note. She touched his arm and said gently, “Mr. President, the ventilator is breathing for you. Try to trust us. You’re getting all the oxygen you need.” Once he relaxed and let it work, he (and I) felt better. That’s when I finally started to believe the president would live.
The hospital staff was very kind, but I realized the president needed to know he had a protector, a familiar agent he could trust. I couldn’t stay in the hospital all night.
I gave an order: “While he’s in this hospital, I want a White House agent in the room at all times. I don’t care what else is going on. I don’t care if the FBI is getting a deposition. I don’t care if they’re giving him a bath and he’s buck naked. I want an agent in here, all the time.” My order was kept for the whole length of the president’s hospital stay.
At that point I understood that I—we—could control only a little chunk of Ronald Reagan’s life, but a very important chunk: at that moment we had to be with him until he either survived or passed.
In a very real sense, my own destiny hinged on the president’s survival. The drive to protect him came from nearly nineteen years of training, yes. But I operated from an even deeper protective instinct, one I’d always known, a drive so essential to my being that it defined who I was. To fail at protecting the president would have called into question my life’s purpose.
But Ronald Reagan proved to be very robust. Years at the ranch chopping wood, building his own fences, and riding the range had been good for him.
All the doctors agreed that we’d have surely lost him if I’d taken him back to the White House. Though I had hints of it, only later did I learn how very close he had come to dying. I learned that during those tense moments in Trauma Room 5, while they were reassuring him he’d be okay, most of the doctors and nurses feared he would die. He was seventy years old. His blood pressure had plunged dangerously low. His grievous loss of blood had put him in shock; not until the surgery was nearly complete were the doctors able to stem the flow. Surgery revealed that the bullet had torn up a lung and lodged only an inch from his heart. For foreign policy reasons as well as domestic stability, the president’s real condition had been downplayed.
I thanked God for helping me make the right decision.
Shortly before the president regained consciousness, around six o’clock, I had finally been able to call Carolyn. That’s when I learned she’d been an eyewitness. Her boss, Tom Morrison, and one of her colleagues, Larry Garr, had heard the sirens and looked out their office windows. They saw Carolyn staring into an Uzi, shaking and crying. Separately, each ran downstairs to try to help. Tom was stopped by an agent with dogs. Larry got to her and led her back up to her office. As they entered the lobby of the Universal North Building, they noticed a bullet hole in the ceiling—one of Hinckley’s last bullets had apparently hit there, but it was never recovered.
Carolyn called W-16, White House Operations. They said they thought I was okay. She called the kids—Kimberly in college, Jennifer en route home from high school cheerleading practice—but they’d already heard the incorrect report that three agents had been shot. Both girls sobbed with relief when Carolyn to
ld them I was fine. Trish was still in elementary school. Her principal had not yet learned of the attempt. “Please,” Carolyn begged, “find Trish. Tell her that Mom’s on the way home and Dad’s okay.”
Larry Garr brought Carolyn home. The first thing they saw as they walked into the house through the laundry room was my bulletproof vest. Carolyn burst into tears all over again.
That night, after the president regained consciousness in the recovery room and the doctors thought he was going to make it, I still had an important job to do. Back at the White House in W-16, I wrote a narrative affidavit of what had gone down as best I could recall. Then, suddenly realizing I had not eaten since breakfast, I went to the White House mess.
Ed Hickey, director of the White House Military Office, was there. Before I could get a bite, he asked, “Did you get the authentication card?” My heart sank. I had no idea what he was talking about.
The authentication card was carried by every president at all times. It contained the codes, in conjunction with the “football,” to initiate nuclear war.
Frankly, I’d never heard of it. Through my time with President Carter and now with Reagan, nobody had ever told me there was such a thing. I had handed all the president’s clothes, shoes, wallet, and cuff links to an FBI agent. I felt really dumb. “I guess the FBI has it,” I said. (It took a lot of wrangling between agencies, but we eventually got it back.)
Ed said, “Well, why don’t we have a drink?” So we did. Confession: I drank two glasses of vodka, and it had absolutely no effect on me! Then I drove home to Potomac in the midnight darkness and collapsed.
Unable to sleep much, I kept calling the hospital every hour to talk to the agents. That night the agents wouldn’t leave when their shift was supposed to end. The same was true of the nurses. They didn’t want to be relieved of duty. I learned that during the night the president started writing jokes to the nurses. “Does Nancy know about us?” he wrote Denise Sullivan. To Marisa Mize, who replaced her, “Send me to LA where I can see the air I’m breathing.”
Some of the notes were serious. He wrote Mize, “What does the future hold?” Then, “Will I be able to do ranch work, ride, etc.?” She assured him he’d be able to do all that in three months.
At three in the morning, to the president’s immense relief, doctors removed the breathing tube. Reagan asked whether others were hurt and was told two were injured but recovering well. Nobody mentioned Jim Brady yet. Though hoarse, he was happy to be able to speak and entertained his audience, telling stories until four o’clock, when nurse Joanne Bell covered his eyes with a damp cloth, turned off the overhead lights, and ordered the president of the United States to go to sleep.
An hour and a half later, Reagan was moved from the recovery room to the ICU, where head nurse Lita Amigo and her boss Barbara Holfelner had been waiting since two thirty the prior afternoon.[81] They would not go home for two days. The ICU had only fourteen beds and all but one were full. To make room for McCarthy and Brady, who preceded the president, the healthiest ICU patients were sent to the floor. Reagan had stayed in the recovery room while the nurses and Secret Service worked out traffic patterns and ID procedures and chose rooms in the ICU. The unit was crowded with security people and unbearably hot.
Dan Ruge, the president’s White House physician, broke the news to Reagan about Brady’s severe injury. The president wept.
ICU nurse Debbie Augsbach, who had waited sixteen hours, gave the president a newspaper around seven in the morning, the first he had seen. Although news of the attack covered the front page, she recalls, “He didn’t discuss the shooting. Instead, he turned to me and asked, ‘Do you know there was another child found in Atlanta?’” (A mass murderer was being sought in the deaths of several children in Atlanta.)
Later that day (Tuesday, March 31) Reagan met with the “Troika”—Meese, Baker, and Deaver—and proved he was still in charge by signing a dairy bill.
Reagan’s recovery was phenomenal. As he prepared to leave the ICU that night, nurse Lita Amigo (who had been on duty two days) took his hand and said, “I’m praying for you, Mr. President.”
He joked, “I’m not going to another world—just downstairs.”
Two nights later I had two dreams. In one I went out to get in my car, and it ran away from me with nobody in it. The other involved a tractor that started without me, and I couldn’t catch it. It didn’t take a psych degree to interpret the symbolism.
I visited the president daily, often more than once at the beginning, and carefully quizzed the shift leaders and medical team about anything unusual. The nurses were touched by the president’s consideration and humility. Barbara Benedict was on the floor with him after he left the ICU. She recounts the first time the president insisted he was well enough to wash himself in the bathroom without help.
He went in, closed the door, and stayed and stayed and stayed. She called, “Mr. Reagan, are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” came the answer.
More minutes passed. No sounds came from behind the door. Now worried, but loath to violate his privacy, she tried again. “Mr. President, can I help you with anything?”
“No, I’m fine.”
After more minutes passed, she announced, “Mr. Reagan, I’m coming in.”
She discovered the president of the United States on the floor with a towel, wiping up a spill on his hands and knees. Embarrassed, he explained, “I made a mess and didn’t want you to have to clean it up.”
That consideration for others ran deep in Reagan’s fiber and remained unaffected by his status. He wore contact lenses, and one day I had casually mentioned that my daughter Kimberly was having trouble removing hers. A few days later he called me into the Oval Office. He had a gift for me. It looked like a tiny suction cup. “I use one of these to take out my lenses,” he said. “See if this would help Kimberly.”
On April 11, the thirteenth day, the president went home. The nurses who had cared for him were there to see him off. Though they had worked twelve-hour shifts with no days off, many were weeping when he left. He had been an ideal patient—cheerful, undemanding, agreeable to any procedure no matter how uncomfortable. They had worked so hard and cared so much, and they knew as he left they would probably never have such an experience again.
Refusing a wheelchair, he said, “I walked in. I’m walking out.”
A few days after the assassination attempt, I did something very unusual for the Service in those days: I got all the agents who had been on duty that day (except Tim McCarthy, who was still recovering) and let them talk.
I knew how much pain—and guilt—had been associated with the Kennedy assassination. In their book, The Kennedy Detail, Jerry Blaine and Clint Hill and others have spelled out how their lives were devastated. Jimmy Taylor, who was with Governor George Wallace when he was shot and paralyzed, never got over his guilt feelings. Dick Keiser, head of President Ford’s detail, had hiccups for months after Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore each shot at Ford within a span of eighteen days. Larry Dominguez was in two assassination attempts, the attempts on Wallace and Reagan. The hypervigilance required to be responsible for someone’s life, especially a president’s, is exhausting. And when something goes wrong, the trauma runs deep.
So we got together in my office at PPD and talked about it for six or seven hours. Bill Green, the advance agent, especially wondered if he had done anything wrong. He later had to endure inspection, and then a Treasury Department investigation. I felt that because the Hilton was so familiar—we had brought presidents and vice presidents there more than a hundred times over the years—we may have become complacent. But given the protocols of the time—and the fact that the president lived—we escaped the type of criticism that might have otherwise followed.
Still, important lessons emerged. We had a problem with arrivals and departures. While we already knew that protecting the president in an open motorcade is impossible, that he must be in an armored, closed car, the atta
cks on Ford and Reagan showed us how very, very vulnerable we were on arrivals and departures.
We addressed the problem in two ways. First, we placed an armored cover where VIPs enter the Hilton Hotel. When a car drives in now, they shut the doors before the protectee emerges. Outsiders can’t see the person.
Second, we acquired magnetometers, which we’d been trying to have at the White House for years. As soon as they were up and running, we discovered a lot of people going in there with guns—hundreds of them! Most meant no harm. Many were little old ladies, tourists afraid to walk on the streets of Washington, DC. (It’s really quite safe in the tourist areas.)
Strangely, the president’s would-be assassin and I had something in common: John Hinckley Jr., too, had been brought to that moment at the Hilton by a movie. He was obsessed with the film Taxi Driver, starring Jody Foster as Iris, a twelve-year-old prostitute. In the movie, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) plans to kill a presidential candidate to win the love of a woman and gain the redemption of Iris.
Hinckley set out to kill a president to win the love of Jody Foster.
Hinckley later told investigators that he had stalked Carter. He said of the day in Dayton, “I didn’t make a move because I was ‘looked off.’” I think he meant some agent—maybe me—locked eyes with him, and he lost his nerve.
About a week after following Carter from Dayton to Nashville, Hinckley was arrested at the Nashville airport when a security officer discovered three guns in his luggage: a .38 and two .22-caliber pistols, plus a pair of handcuffs and a box of hollow-nose bullets.[82] Hinckley intended to board a flight to New York, which was the president’s next destination. The police seized his guns and took him to jail. A judge let him go on $62.50 bail. They kept the guns, but no one in Tennessee connected him to the president’s visit. Not until the assassination attempt did the FBI put the two events together.
We went back to look at the ABC camera crew’s pooling pictures of that day in Dayton, and sure enough, there he is, about six or seven feet away from the president. Stopping the camera, one can see Bill Cotter, Mike Maddiloni, and me looking in his direction.