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

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 House, 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