Reconstructing the Day Reagan Fell: Chaos After a President’s Shooting

The patient was 70, fit and very polite. He made it a point of pride to walk into the emergency room under his own steam. The medical staff went to work on him immediately, cutting off clothes, inserting IV lines, starting fluids and hooking up monitors. The process moved so fast that one worker never bothered to look at his face. Another asked for an address and was surprised by the answer: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It has been nearly 30 years since President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981. The attack is well remembered, but the details are not. One reason for the memory lapse, according to Del Quentin Wilber, the author of “Rawhide Down,” a newly revealing account of this potentially deadly attack, is that Reagan survived it so smoothly. Twelve days after being fired upon, he was back at the White House looking sensational. He ultimately enhanced his popularity by rebounding with such courage, resilience and even good cheer.

Mr. Wilber, a Washington Post reporter covering law-enforcement and security issues, had no great interest in dredging up the details of this crisis. But in 2008 he covered a hearing for John W. Hinckley Jr., the blank-faced shooter who had been found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982. (Mr. Hinckley remains largely confined to a psychiatric hospital.) A few days after the article ran, Mr. Wilber was in the office of an F.B.I. agent reporting on a different matter. The agent casually opened a desk drawer and showed him Mr. Hinckley’s gun.

How had this assassination attempt come to be treated so lightly? Mr. Wilber decided to find out. And so much time had elapsed that doctors, nurses, former Secret Service officers and other first-hand witnesses to the event were willing to discuss it. One of Mr. Wilber’s main sources for “Rawhide Down” (which takes its title from President Reagan’s Secret Service code name, a tribute to his love of ranching) was Jerry Parr, an ex-member of the Secret Service who was 18 inches from the president when six shots were fired. Mr. Parr talked about what happened in hopes of keeping it from happening again.

“Rawhide Down” newly emphasizes the gravity of the damage inflicted on the president. While there was no concealing the devastating injury to James Brady, the White House press secretary, or that two law-enforcement officers (Timothy McCarthy of the Secret Service, and the District of Columbia police officer Thomas Delahanty) were also shot, the condition of the president was much more grave than the public knew. For one thing, the day was chaotic, with real lapses in communication between White House spokesmen and medical personnel. As the book points out, while doctors were operating on Mr. Brady’s damaged brain, they were angered to hear radio reports that their patient was dead.

Photo

Del Quentin WilberCredit
Sam Horine

For another, it all happened so quickly. The shooting occurred at 2:27 p.m., directly after the president addressed a branch of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Four minutes later he was at George Washington University Medical Center, where few staff members had been told he was headed. Mr. Parr had to make the life-or-death decision of whether to return Mr. Reagan to the White House or rush him to emergency medical care.

What had happened to him? No one knew that either. He was in obvious pain, but he had been shoved roughly into his limousine after Mr. Hinckley’s .22 went off; maybe that accounted for some of the damage. There was blood on his lips, but no indication of its source. And once doctors were able to examine him, they found a thin slit of a wound on his side but no site resembling a bullet entry hole. Yet the president bled so heavily from internal injuries that during the ensuing 24 hours he lost about half of his total blood supply.

“Rawhide Down” is a fast-paced book that captures many points of view. Nurses and medical technicians have especially candid memories of the pressure they faced, the uncertainty about how to deal with such an important patient and the ad-hoc solutions they devised. They decided to call him Mr. Reagan rather than Mr. President; the situation would be less frightening that way. They were amazed by his joking, his courtesy and his general lack of V.I.P. attitude.

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They were also impressed by his bravery. Throughout the incident the president had no clear idea of what had happened to him or what to expect. He struggled to breathe, brightened at any mention of the first lady and was canny enough to take his cues from technicians, who would be candid with him about what the doctors really meant. As he got ready to undergo chest surgery, one worker assured him that being taken from the E.R. to the operating room was a good thing. If he were really in peril, she said, doctors would never allow him to be moved.

As for the doctors, their recollections are filled with both professionalism and awe. One of them could not believe he was inserting a chest tap into the leader of the free world. Another marveled at holding the president’s beating heart in his hands. And Dr. Benjamin Aaron describes the process of deducing that the small slit was a bullet hole after all. The bullet came to rest within an inch of Reagan’s heart and slipped around frighteningly during surgery. But it had ricocheted off his limousine and been flattened and weakened by that blow.

Mr. Wilber also has much to say about the two other essential contingents in this drama: White House insiders and the Secret Service. The White House account, relying in part by tape recordings made by Richard Allen, the national security adviser, provides a behind-the-scenes look at crisis management — and at the loose-cannon problems presented by Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., who forever damaged his reputation by trying to seize the reins of power. The book records the utter amazement of, for instance, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger at Mr. Haig’s “Dr. Strangelove”-style meltdown.

And the Secret Service agents finally have the chance to explain how Mr. Hinckley was able to get within 20 feet of the president in a crowd held back only by a rope line near the Hilton’s side entrance. The simple answer: sheer complacency. Trips to the Hilton were routine events, and the interior of the hotel had been thoroughly vetted. Reagan’s walk to his car was short. It hardly seemed important. And the agents who ignored that rope line remain haunted by it to this day.

RAWHIDE DOWN

The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan

By Del Quentin Wilber

Illustrated. 305 pages. Henry Holt & Company. $27.

A version of this review appears in print on March 10, 2011, on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: Reconstructing the Day Reagan Fell: Chaos After a President’s Shooting. Today's Paper|Subscribe