The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Karen Tumulty (motivational novels .TXT) 📖

He pulled the oxygen mask from his face and tried to make a joke. His mind conjured a famous old line that boxer Jack Dempsey supposedly told his wife after he lost his heavyweight title to Gene Tunney in 1926. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” Ronnie said. Nancy pushed the mask back on and urged him not to talk. As she left the room, she whispered to Deaver, “Mike, he looks so bad.”

Ronnie continued to lose blood—at one point, more than half of what he had in his body—and was in danger of going into shock. Just under an hour after he had been shot, the president of the United States was wheeled toward operating room 2. Doctors were going to try to repair his damaged artery and extract the bullet that an X-ray had shown was lodged in his left lung. Ronnie caught sight of Baker, Nofziger, Laxalt, and Meese in the hallway. He winked and said, “Who’s minding the store?” Nancy walked beside him, her hand in his. When she finally had to let go and leave her husband’s fate to the skill and training of the surgeons, Nancy kissed Ronnie on the forehead and told him one last time that she loved him. Right before they put him under, the president joked with his medical team: “I hope you are all Republicans.” Everyone laughed, and Dr. Joseph Giordano replied, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.”

Nancy spotted another patient being wheeled right behind him. It was Press Secretary James Brady, who had been hit above the left eye. A nurse told Nancy he was not expected to survive. So dire was Brady’s condition that, at one point, all three television networks announced erroneously that he was dead. Nancy would never forget the sight of Brady’s head “open and bleeding and grotesquely swollen. I had never seen anybody with a head wound, and it was monstrous.” Brady would survive, though he was severely disabled. He retained the title of press secretary, a symbolic one given his inability to work on more than a limited schedule. When Brady died in 2014 at the age of seventy-three, the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide resulting from the wound he had suffered more than three decades earlier. The White House briefing room is named in his honor.

With Ronnie in surgery that would last for more than three hours, Nancy sat in a waiting room, watching the television footage that was being broadcast over and over. The president emerging from the hotel, smiling and waving to the small crowd that had gathered there. The brief pause he made to take a shouted question from Associated Press reporter Mike Putzel, who was standing about twenty feet away. Ronnie’s sudden look of surprise as the first shot was fired. Brady falling, and a pool of blood forming around his head as he twitched on the sidewalk. Two other bodies on the ground. Agents and police diving on the shooter just a few feet away, one of them screaming “Get him out! Get him out!” An ambulance arriving with its siren on. On ABC, anchorman Frank Reynolds said: “God, you tremble to think he could get such a clear shot at the president.”

She learned that the blond assailant she saw being dragged away was a twenty-five-year-old drifter named John W. Hinckley Jr. More details would come out later: he came from an affluent family in Colorado and wanted to impress the young actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had become obsessed after seeing the 1976 movie Taxi Driver. (The movie’s protagonist, Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, plots to assassinate a presidential candidate.) In addition to Ronnie and Brady, the six bullets that Hinckley fired in less than two seconds wounded two others: Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, who was shot in the chest, and District of Columbia policeman Thomas Delahanty, hit in his upper spine. Both were being treated.

Nancy went to the window to look at the crowds that had gathered below. Opfer pulled her back and drew the blinds. He told Nancy they still didn’t know whether this was a larger plot, which meant there might be more killers out there. She looked startled, and once again thoughts of Dallas raced through her head.

A nurse asked Nancy if she wanted to visit the hospital chapel. She and Opfer went there, knelt together on a pew, and were soon joined by Brady’s wife, Sarah, who hadn’t yet seen her husband. That day was the first time the two women had met. They hugged, joined hands, and prayed together—for their husbands, for the men who had been wounded protecting them, for the country. Deaver, Baker, Meese, and Nancy’s press secretary, Sheila Tate, had also made their way to the chapel. They formed a tiny, traumatized congregation.

Meanwhile, in the operating room, Dr. Benjamin Aaron was still searching for the elusive bullet. He ordered another X-ray. Just as he was preparing to abandon the search and sew Ronnie up, he found it. The slug was slightly lower in the president’s lung than they had initially thought, just an inch from his heart and aorta. Tests would show it was a type known as a “devastator,” an expensive and customized .22-caliber cartridge designed to explode on impact into fragments, with the force of a shot fired from a much more powerful handgun. This bullet hadn’t done that, possibly because it was flattened to the size and shape of a dime when it ricocheted off the door of the presidential limousine.

Back at the White House, there was bedlam. In the first hours after the shooting, details of the situation were scarce. Ronnie’s top aides were later criticized for not temporarily transferring presidential authority to Vice President Bush while the commander in chief was unconscious on the operating table. That should have been the call