Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

I remember one punchy Congressional News Service headline I particularly enjoyed. It read, COYNE CAN’T COUNT! The member in this case was James K. Coyne III—a freshman Republican from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who may not even have remembered the legislation involved until the Congressional News Service reminded him. The best I can recall, it derided the Republican doctrine that cutting taxes and raising defense spending would somehow avoid higher deficits. But any sins the opposition committed, however obscure, were rightly fair game, as far as I was concerned, and so I’d write up the stories I liked and send them out. Later, after a newspaper in Congressman Coyne’s district had used our item, I received a clipping of it attached to an appreciative note from the Democrat whom Coyne had beaten the year before. Keep up the good work was the message.

  What I was doing was partisan politics at its most basic, nothing on a very high level but definitely a lot of fun. The goal was to hit back effectively at the same dozens of House Republicans, for the purposes of 1982, who’d managed to KO House Democrats in 1980. We were targeting not only the usual swing districts but also some historically Democratic ones that had been carried by Reagan.

  Yet our fear remained that Ronald Reagan would do such a bang-up job as president that he’d sweep those same Republicans right back in a second time. Not only would he protect them, he’d entrench them.

  In early March, Tip O’Neill made a fateful decision. Believing as he did that the American people make only one national decision politically, whom to elect president of the United States, it was an inevitable one. He decided, in his words, to “give Reagan his schedule.” He was going to allow the White House’s fiscal agenda—all the spending and tax cuts—to be debated and voted upon in the House by August 1. There would be no procedural games, no foot-dragging. The voters wanted Ronald Reagan, so now they would get him, and in sufficient time to judge the results by the 1982 congressional elections.

  This decision, which won for Tip a personal thank-you call from the president, was actually a strategic withdrawal. “I was convinced that if the Democrats were perceived as stalling in the midst of a national economic crisis, there would be hell to pay in the midterm elections,” he said. If Reagan got his program and it failed to produce positive results, the Democrats would be rewarded at the polls.

  Tip knew that he had little leeway. The situation facing him in the House was far worse even than it appeared on paper. Over the past decades, with only the brief exceptions of the early New Deal and the Great Society, the Congress had been ruled by a conservative alliance of Republicans and southern Democrats, two factions sharing common ground when it came to increased national defense spending or opposition to social legislation. Meeting with the Democratic Conservative Forum, a group composed of southern Democrats, Reagan now found himself surprised but delighted to hear that their own list of proposed spending cuts topped his by $10 billion. “You’ve made my day,” he told them, thrilled.

  As they were assembling their forces and their ammunition, it was critical that Reagan and his shotgun guard, Jim Baker, avoid any missteps. When Senate Republicans surprised the White House with their plan to “freeze” Social Security benefits, denying retirees their expected cost-of-living adjustments, the Reagan team quickly stomped it to death. They knew better than to touch what Kirk O’Donnell had christened the “third rail” of American politics.

  The Reagan team, in fact, was smart enough to steer clear of anything at all that might stall its momentum. It knew that the spring and summer of its inaugural year was the once-in-a-presidency moment to launch the administration’s program on its way. The Senate Budget Committee, where I’d worked under Edmund Muskie, was now in Republican control and moving fast, to the chagrin of liberal Democrats, on Reagan’s cuts. As the last days of March drew on, the committee was swinging into action on the White House plan. “We have undone thirty years of social legislation in three days,” New York’s senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarked blackly.

  The Democrats, looking around, believed that the country’s affections for Ronald Reagan could not possibly grow deeper. The sole consolation they could offer themselves was that all honeymoons, especially the political sort, come to an end.

  President Reagan in range of John Hinckley. Fortunately for us all, the Secret Service’s Jerry Paar was closest when the bullets flew. He had Reagan crouched and covered in a speeding car within seconds, and at George Washington University Hospital in just under three minutes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD

  “I do not know that in our time we have seen such a display. It makes us proud of our president.”

  —SENATOR DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN

  As a White House speechwriter, I’d known Jerry Parr up close: he’d been the head Secret Service agent responsible for protecting the president. Parr had come to the White House during Carter’s presidency, having earlier served both at home and abroad. On that sad November morning when Carter had flown south to cast his vote in Plains, Jerry was there with us on Marine One. On the inaugural platform he’d been the fellow positioned, first, in back of Carter, and, once the torch was passed, behind Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, sworn in as the fortieth president of the United States.

  The young Jerry Parr had set his heart on becoming a Secret Service agent from an early age. When he was nine he’d talked his dad into taking him to the movie Code of the Secret Service, whose hero, Lieutenant Brass Bancroft, a dashing agent and ace pilot, was played by a busy young actor, Ronald Reagan. This was Reagan’s fourteenth movie after only two years in Hollywood, and he would appear as Brass Bancroft four times altogether. According to the buildup, Brass and his fellow agents were required to be “dauntless in the face of danger” and “fearless in the face of death.” Hoping to keep audiences hooked on the series, publicists at Warner Bros. came up with the idea of starting a Brass Bancroft fan club, which they called the “Junior Secret Service Club.” Anyone joining it would receive a membership card signed by Ronald Reagan. The nine-year-old Jerry Parr had been so enthusiastic about Code of the Secret Service he went back to see it again and again.

  In 1962, at the age of thirty-two, after stints with the air force and a public utility company in Florida and then earning a previously deferred college degree, Parr fulfilled his boyhood dream of becoming a Secret Service agent. After being accepted into the program, he found himself to be the oldest trainee in his class. Over the following years, Parr served diligently, rose through the ranks, and finally was put in charge of presidential protection—as head of the Secret Service White House detail—in 1979.

  Inspired so many years before by Ronald Reagan, in ways that wound up giving shape to his life, Jerry Parr, a little over four decades later, now was about to return the favor.

  History often produces strange parallels. In March 1981, another moviegoer, twenty-five-year-old John Hinckley, would also reveal himself to have been greatly influenced by a film, and to be equally motivated to act out what he’d seen on the big screen. A depressed college dropout, whose wealthy family was in the oil business, Hinckley seemed to fail at everything he tried. Repeatedly viewing Martin Scorsese’s grimly violent Taxi Driver—released originally in 1976—he became obsessed with one of its stars, Jodie Foster. She’d memorably played a preteen prostitute in the movie, but by the time of Ronald Reagan’s election she’d entered college and was a freshman at Yale. Determined to make Foster notice him, Hinckley first moved to New Haven, writing and phoning her repeatedly. But when his attentions proved entirely unwanted, he began to envision impressing her by the magnitude of an extreme act he would plan and commit.

  Since a central plotline of Taxi Driver had been the determination of a loner—Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro—to assassinate a politician, this was the course Hinckley decided upon in his quest to prove to Foster his devotion. After leaving New Haven, Hinckley first fixed on the idea of shooting Jimmy Carter and, following him to Nashville, back in early October, wo
und up arrested instead on a concealed weapons charge. After paying a fine of $62.50, he was released.

  • • •

  On March 30, 1981, at two thirty in the afternoon, a lunch being given by the National Conference of the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO in the International Ballroom of the Washington Hilton was just ending. The event’s speaker had been Ronald Reagan, who’d launched into his speech at 2:03 p.m. Among the topics were the deficit, his tax-cutting agenda, his determination to reduce federal regulations, and the intensive military buildup he planned. He also told the audience, “I hope you’ll forgive me if I point with some pride to the fact that I’m the first President of the United States to hold a lifetime membership in an AFL-CIO union”—which in his case was the Screen Actors Guild.

  As soon as he’d finished speaking, Reagan left the building by the side exit on T Street to approach the waiting presidential motorcade—where, nearby, John Hinckley was lying in wait. Raising a .22-caliber revolver, he fired six shots. One hit James Brady, the president’s press secretary. Another wounded D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty. A third struck Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy. Although Hinckley missed hitting President Reagan directly, one of the bullets ricocheted off the presidential limousine and entered President Reagan’s lung, lodging approximately an inch from his heart.

  Following the Secret Service rule of “cover and evacuate,” Jerry Parr, who’d been standing right behind Reagan, grabbed him and shoved him onto the backseat of the waiting limo, then jumped on top of him. “Let’s get out of here,” he yelled to the driver. “Haul ass!”

  Here’s Reagan’s account from his journal of those harrowing moments:

  My day to address the Bldg. & Const. Trades Nat. Conf. A.F.L.-C.I.O. at the Hilton Ballroom—2 P.M. Speech not riotously received—still it was successful. Left the hotel at the usual side entrance and headed for the car—suddenly there was a burst of gun fire from the left. SS Agent pushed me onto the floor of the car & jumped on top. I felt a blow in my upper back that was unbelievably painful. I was sure he’d broken my rib. The car took off. I sat up on the edge of the seat almost paralyzed by pain. Then I began coughing up blood which made both of us think—yes I had broken a rib & it had punctured a lung. He switched orders from W.H. to Geo. Wash. U. Hosp.

  Here’s White House detail chief Parr’s statement to the FBI:

  We were, I suppose, three or four feet from the limousine when I heard what sounded like firecrackers or a small caliber weapon. I heard one shot. There was a short interval then three or four other shots. My reaction was instantly to shove the President forward into the limousine.

  . . . at Dupont Circle he started spitting up this blood—profuse amounts of red, bright red, frothy blood. And I thought, “Well, what would cause that? Maybe landing on top of him cracked a rib. Maybe I punctured a rib.”

  We really were moving quite rapidly at that time. The president said, “I’m having trouble breathing and I think I cut the inside of my mouth.”

  Suddenly Agent Parr noticed an alarming change in the injured man’s condition: Reagan’s lips were turning blue. From his training, Parr knew this indicated bleeding in the lung. Recognizing the perilous situation, he knew it would waste precious time continuing on to the White House. “I think we should go to the hospital,” Parr told the president.

  “Okay,” Reagan agreed. Though he’d recoiled at hearing the gunshots at the Hilton, he hadn’t even realized at first he’d been hit, and was obviously in shock, though alert. And so Parr directed the driver now to change course and turn west, making for George Washington University Hospital.

  Barely three minutes after leaving the Hilton, the speeding motorcade screeched to a halt in front of the emergency room doors. “This is the president!” yelled Parr. It was a magnificent execution of duty. There’s almost no question that Jerry Parr’s quick thinking was what saved his wounded companion’s life.

  The rest of the performance upon their arrival was pure Reagan. Despite the high stakes and the very clear danger, it took a veteran showman to understand so beautifully the role he now needed to play, knowing that the front-row audience would be his country. He was determined to walk through the doors of the hospital under his own strength. More remarkably, even now he stopped to chat with people standing outside the building. But Reagan’s determination could carry him only through the hospital doors. Twenty feet inside, Paar saw his eyes suddenly roll back in his head and he collapsed. He and another agent caught him before he reached the floor. Despite the brio he exhibited, the president had lost 50 percent of his blood supply through internal bleeding and now would require a surgeon’s skills to extract the unexploded slug resting precariously near his heart.

  “Honey, I forgot to duck,” he confessed sheepishly upon spying his distraught wife, Nancy, who’d been rushed to his side. No one minded that he’d taken this one from Jack Dempsey, who’d said the same thing after losing the 1926 heavyweight title to Gene Tunney. He then topped it with his quip to the medical team about to operate on him. “I hope you’re all Republicans,” he said before succumbing to the anesthesia.

  • • •

  Within a week of the attempt on his life, President Ronald Reagan seemed to be going about the business of running the country, issuing new proposals on such issues as air quality and auto safety regulations. That at least is the story the public was getting. The truth was far scarier. The country’s leader was in far worse condition—a reality Jim Baker and the others around him decided should be kept from the American people and the world.

  This alone became a challenge. Baker learned that Senator Strom Thurmond, the aging Dixiecrat-turned-Republican, had talked his way past hospital officials into Reagan’s presence. This had infuriated Nancy Reagan, which prompted Baker to assign Max Friedersdorf to take charge 24/7 of keeping the president from being disturbed.

  “Jim called me with the story,” Friedersdorf reported. “Told me to get over to the hospital and stay in the president’s room and make sure no one, despite any credentials or rank, got into the sickroom.”

  Jim Baker, ever strategic, had ruled that the first representative of official Washington to visit the convalescing president would be the leader of the opposition. Eventually, after several days, once Reagan was able to start receiving approved company, the first person to be admitted to his bedside was Tip O’Neill.

  “I was in the room on my chair where Baker had posted me,” is how Friedersdorf remembers it. When the Speaker came in, “he nodded my way and walked over to the bed and grasped both the president’s hands, and said ‘God bless you, Mr. President.’

  “The president still seemed groggy . . . with lots of tubes and needles running in and out of his body. But when he saw Tip, he lit up and gave the Speaker a big smile, and said ‘Thanks for coming, Tip.’ Then, still holding one of the president’s hands, the Speaker got down on his knees and said he would like to offer a prayer for the president, choosing the Twenty-third Psalm. ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . . ’ ” It seemed clear to Friedersdorf, witnessing the encounter, that Reagan, though weak, was paying attention. “He recited part of the prayer with the Speaker in almost a whisper.”

  Once they’d finished, the Speaker let go of the president’s hand, stood up, and bent to kiss him on the forehead. “ ‘I’d better be going,’ he told the patient. ‘I don’t want to tire you out.’ ” During this privileged visit to GW Hospital, Tip saw firsthand the reality of Reagan’s condition. Like the rest of the country, he’d been led to believe the president was experiencing a robust recovery. Instead he found himself kneeling within inches of a seventy-year-old man lying there in great pain.

  The Speaker had been asked by the White House not to comment on the president’s condition. “I suspect that in the first day or two after the shooting he was probably closer to death than most of us realized,” he later said. “If he hadn’t been
so strong and hardy, it could have been all over.”

  The week before the shooting Reagan and Nancy had spent the evening at Ford’s Theatre. The benefit was for a cause important to Millie O’Neill, its chairwoman. The two couples sat together in the first row. Captured on videotape taken that night, the president and the Speaker can be seen laughing and enjoying themselves while a juggler-comedian performs with antic precision on the stage, his long knives whirling barely an arm’s length away in front of them. I can remember Tip talking in the office about his uneasiness at those knives flying so close.

  Yet Reagan had glimpsed a shadow there in Ford’s Theatre. “I looked up at the presidential box above the stage where Abe Lincoln had been sitting the night he was shot and felt a curious sensation. . . . I thought that even with all the Secret Service protection we now had, it was probably still possible for someone who had enough determination to get close enough to a president to shoot him.” Tip O’Neill, who’d greeted Reagan at the street door that night, would say later that he, too, actually had had the same thought, undoubtedly inspired by the historic surroundings and suddenly realizing how vulnerable Reagan—as president—was.

  Ronald Reagan had dodged death, but only narrowly. He would return to the White House the same but different, changed by this close brush with his own mortality. The causes that had mattered so deeply to him in the past now became his life’s abiding purpose.

  “A lot of the people you have under contract don’t know a football from a cantaloupe,” actor Pat O’Brien told producer Jack Warner. “This guy does.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  RONALD REAGAN’S JOURNEY

  “Go West, young man.”

  —HORACE GREELEY

  Tip O’Neill viewed Ronald Reagan as a man who’d gotten ahead in life by virtue of the enviable gifts—good looks, athleticism, a voice made for the broadcast booth or the cowboy movie—bestowed on him at birth. What bugged the Speaker so much about the former California governor and movie star was the belief that handsome guys like his new rival had to have had it easy, and being handsome and having it easy was an affront to those who weren’t and didn’t.