My Turn Read online

  “Leave it in?”

  “Yes, sometimes we do that.”

  Finally, some good news: Just as they were going to close Ronnie up, they found the bullet and removed it. It had penetrated to the seventh rib, where it deflected to the left lower lobe of his lung.

  It missed his heart by one inch. It doesn’t come much closer than that.

  Ronnie had lost so much blood that they had to replace almost all of it. He received five units before the surgery. It was the blood loss, combined with the chance that Ronnie could go into shock, that had everyone so frightened.

  Our son Ron was the first of our children to reach the hospital. He’d heard the news in a coffee shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, and when he couldn’t find a flight to Washington, he had chartered a plane so he and his wife, Doria, could get to us as fast as possible. The other children—Patti, Mike, and Maureen—were all in California, and their military plane didn’t get in until early the next morning.

  When Ron came in, I was in a stupor, staring at the television. By then I was moving by rote: Somebody tells you to do something and you do it. Ron hugged me; I said, “I’m so frightened”; he said, “I know, Mom, but hold on.”

  Ronnie began to wake up around seven-thirty that evening. They took us through a back door into the recovery room and led us to his bed, which was fenced off with screens. When I saw him, his face drained of color, a tube in his throat to help him breathe, and all that equipment attached to his body, I just started to cry. “I love you,” I said, holding his arm. For what seemed like a long time we just looked at each other. Then Ronnie reached for a pencil and paper. “I can’t breathe!” he wrote.

  “He can’t breathe,” I repeated. I understood the fear in his eyes. When I was pregnant with Patti, years ago, I would wake up in the middle of the night, unable to take in any air. Once I even saw myself in the mirror, turning green. It was frightening. All I could think about was where my next breath would come from.

  Ronnie started to sit up.

  “He can’t breathe!” I shouted.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Reagan,” one of the doctors said. “The respirator is doing it for him. He just has to get used to it.”

  Ron leaned over his father and said, “It’s okay, Dad. What you’re feeling is the tube down your throat. It’s like the first time I went scuba diving. When I put the mask on, I thought I was choking. But it’s okay, just relax. They’re getting air to you, and you’ll be fine.”

  Ronnie was so groggy from the operation that when I saw him the next morning, he had no recollection of any of this.

  He drifted in and out of sleep. Then he wrote another note: “I’m still alive, aren’t I?” He cracked a number of jokes in the hospital, but this wasn’t one of them. The writing on that note was so faint and wobbly I could barely read it.

  Later, he told me, “When I started to wake up and open my eyes, all I could see was white. The sheets, the walls, the coats on the doctors and nurses—everything was white. For a minute I wondered if I was in heaven and these were all angels.”

  I didn’t want to leave the hospital, but the doctors and nurses had plenty of work to do on Ronnie, and there was nothing I could do to be helpful. I also knew that if I spent the night at the hospital, I’d be sending out a message to the world that Ronnie’s condition was critical. It was, of course, but at that moment I didn’t want people to know. It was Ron who talked me into leaving.

  As Ron, Doria, and I left the hospital, George Opfer pointed out the parents of Agent Tim McCarthy, who were coming in. From the calm expressions on their faces, I could see they hadn’t really grasped what had happened to their son, who had been shot in the stomach as he crouched in front of Ronnie to protect him. I went over to tell them how much I appreciated what Tim had done, that if he hadn’t made himself a target in place of Ronnie, I would have lost my husband. But I could see that my words didn’t register.

  A few days later, Tim was well enough to visit Ronnie, who praised him for his courage. Ronnie said, “Someday I hope your children will know what a brave father they have.” When he returned to the White House, Ronnie wrote a letter to Tim’s children, saying just that.

  Tim told me later that he’d been scheduled to do something else that day and wasn’t even supposed to be at the hotel with the president. He and another agent had flipped a coin, and Tim lost.

  As I left the hospital that night, everything was illuminated by bright television lights. People had hung sheets on the surrounding buildings with messages on them: GET WELL SOON and WE LOVE YOU and my favorite, TONIGHT WE ARE ALL REPUBLICANS.

  Chris Wallace of NBC told me later that I had looked so drawn as I left the hospital that he decided not to ask me any questions. I can only imagine how I must have seemed if it was enough to silence a network reporter.

  Back at the White House, Ted Graber and Rex Scouten were waiting for me on the second floor of the residence. Rex disappeared when I arrived, and Ted stayed with me. Phone calls were pouring in, but I didn’t feel like talking, so Ted and the wonderful White House operators handled them for me. The staff offered us something to eat, and I ended up pushing some scrambled eggs around on a plate.

  I felt cold, so the four of us—Ron, Doria, Ted, and I—went into the bedroom and lit a fire. Later, I tried to sleep, but it was hopeless. I spent the night glued to the television.

  “Nothing can happen to my Ronnie,” I wrote in my diary that night. “My life would be over.”

  The next morning I went back to the hospital. They had taken the tube out of Ronnie’s throat, and his condition was slightly better. But after a night in intensive care, he still hadn’t slept. Every four hours, they turned him over on his stomach so the nurses could pound on his back to shake out the fluids and keep them from building up in his lungs. The noise was so loud you could hear it in the next room; it sounded like somebody slapping a side of beef. I remember telling Mermie (Maureen), who had just arrived along with the other children, “That’s your father they’re doing that to.”

  Ronnie had been writing notes and asking questions about who else had been hurt. Dan Ruge, the White House physician, had told the doctors and nurses to put Ronnie off, to avoid upsetting him, but now Dan decided that we had to tell him. I knew Ronnie would take it badly, and I wanted to be there.

  When Ronnie heard about Jim Brady and the others, his eyes filled with tears.

  “Damn,” he kept saying, hitting the bed with his fist.

  “Was Jim hit in the head?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Damn,” he said again.

  Later, I collected some of the notes Ronnie wrote to the doctors and nurses, and I was struck, although not altogether surprised, at the humor in many of them. Some of the best comments ended up in the newspapers. After waking up in the recovery room, Ronnie wrote, echoing W. C. Fields, “All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” Another note quoted Winston Churchill, who had once said, “There is no more exhilarating feeling than being shot at without result.”

  The notes showed me that despite the harm done to his body, Ronnie’s outlook was strong. “Can we rewrite this scene beginning at the time I left the hotel?” he asked. And later, in the recovery room, “Send me to L.A., where I can see the air I’m breathing!” When a nurse was combing his hair, and taking the opportunity to examine his roots, Ronnie wrote, “Now you can tell the world that I don’t dye my hair.” And when everybody was fussing over him in the recovery room, the note read, “If I’d had this much attention in Hollywood, I’d have stayed there.”

  Looking back on this whole period, I can see how these one-liners provided a great deal of reassurance to the nation. People reasoned, understandably, that if the president could be so good-natured in the hospital, his injuries must not be too serious.

  But not all of the notes were amusing:

  “What happened to the guy with the gun?”

  “What was his beef? Was anyone hurt?”

  “Can I keep breathing?”

>   “How long in the hospital?”

  “Will I still be able to work on the ranch?”

  While Ronnie slept, I talked with Sarah Brady and with the doctors. They were feeling a great deal of pressure, and I’m sure my questions didn’t make it any easier. But I wanted to know everything.

  I’m the type of person who needs as much information as possible, even if the news isn’t good. And that was my real fear: that with the best of intentions, the doctors were withholding bad news. At the White House, the first thing I’d been told was that Ronnie wasn’t hit. It was an honest mistake, but now, at the back of my mind, I wondered what else they weren’t telling me.

  The Academy Awards had been scheduled for March 30, but were postponed for two days because of the shooting. Ronnie had taped a greeting for the show, and on the night of April 1 we moved him out of intensive care and into a room with a television. He was still pretty groggy, but I thought the awards show would boost his morale.

  Johnny Carson was the host, and when he mentioned Ronnie’s name, the audience erupted with applause. I had hoped something like this would happen to cheer Ronnie up—and it did. The whole world was praying for him and sending messages of support, but Ronnie was cut off from all of it as he lay in his hospital room, drifting in and out of sleep.

  From where he lay, Ronnie couldn’t even see the sky. The curtains in his room were actually nailed shut, because there was still the possibility that John Hinckley hadn’t acted alone. There was also a sudden rise in the number of threats against Ronnie, which is apparently a common pattern following an attack on the president.

  I couldn’t argue with the need for tight security, but my chief concern was Ronnie’s recovery, and it saddened me that this man who so passionately loves the outdoors couldn’t even see out his window. The cherry blossoms were in bloom and spring was bursting out all over Washington, but that little hospital room was dark and depressing—you couldn’t tell day from night. I did my best to liven it up. We were receiving an enormous amount of mail, and I brought in some pictures from schoolchildren and tacked them up on the bare white walls.

  Within days, the White House was bursting with gifts of jelly beans, chocolates, and enough flowers to fill a meadow. Soon we were delivering candy and flowers to every hospital in the Washington area. When a ten-pound box of chocolates arrived from King Hassan of Morocco, I gave it to the nurses and doctors.

  A great many people wanted to visit Ronnie in the hospital. Some wanted to wish him a quick recovery. Others had pressing business. And still others, I suspected, just wanted to look important. But Dr. Ruge clamped down on visitors so Ronnie would have enough time to rest and heal. We had to keep reminding people that aside from being the president, Ronnie was also a patient who was trying to recover from a terrible physical and emotional trauma.

  Many, many friends called to comfort me. My brother, Dick, a neurosurgeon, came down from Philadelphia and helped explain some of the medical procedures. Billy Graham came, as did Donn Moomaw, our minister in Los Angeles, and our old friends the Wicks, and their son, C.Z., who flew in from California. Frank Sinatra canceled a performance and flew to Washington. Elizabeth Taylor was in town with Little Foxes, and she canceled her show, too. I felt really grateful for all their help and support.

  But ultimately I had to face these events on my own. One evening, after another long day at the hospital, I came back to the White House and wrote a single line in my diary. As I look back on that brief entry now, it still evokes the immense loneliness I felt during that week: “It’s a big house when you’re here alone.”

  On the fifth day after the shooting, just as Ronnie seemed to be showing real improvement, we suffered a major setback when he began to run a fever of a hundred and three. The doctors couldn’t explain it, and they thought he might need another operation. Fearing he might come down with pneumonia, they put him on antibiotics and Tylenol.

  The Tylenol, incidentally, served to minimize the seriousness of Ronnie’s condition. When the press asked what drugs Ronnie had been given to deal with the pain, Dennis O’Leary, the hospital spokesman, who was marvelous under pressure, told the truth: In the first two days Ronnie was given a small amount of morphine, but the rest of the time he had nothing stronger than Tylenol. In retrospect, I suppose people were fooled by that answer. But Ronnie withstands pain very well.

  My anxiety increased when Ronnie’s fever was accompanied by a sharp loss in appetite. I arranged for meals to be sent over from the White House, hoping he would find them more appealing than the hospital food. When that didn’t work, I called Anne Allman, who had been our housekeeper in Los Angeles for many years, and asked her to send up Ronnie’s two favorite soups: hamburger and split pea.

  By this time, the doctors had Ronnie walking up and down the hallway, holding my hand. Every day we’d try to go a little farther. But even Anne’s soups failed to revive his appetite, so one night I came into his room and announced, “We’re going out to dinner.”

  “Out to dinner?” Ronnie said. “Where?”

  “Just come with me,” I said. “We’re going to a little disco near the hospital.”

  “All right,” he quipped, “but I won’t be able to dance.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We can just hold hands.”

  When he stood up to put on his robe, I took his arm and walked him down the hall to another room, where I had set up two chairs in front of a television set. I thought that if he watched the news, as we often did over dinner at the White House, maybe I could get some food into him. Ronnie didn’t eat much that night either, but at least he tried.

  More than once, the doctors and nurses commented on what a considerate patient Ronnie was. One afternoon, when George Bush came to visit, he found the president on his knees in the bathroom, wiping up some water. Because of the fever, the doctors hadn’t allowed Ronnie to bathe. But when he found his body covered with sweat, he had given himself a sponge bath.

  “You should let the nurse clean that up,” George said.

  “No,” Ronnie replied. “I’m the one who disobeyed orders. If the doctors see her mopping it up, she’ll get in trouble.”

  The doctors mentioned that Ronnie was in excellent physical condition, and that although he was seventy, he had the body of a man in his fifties. His lungs were clean, and the fact that he had never smoked cigarettes made it easier to remove the bullet. Just three days before the shooting, Dr. Ruge, who is seven years younger than Ronnie, had said, “What can I tell a man who is seventy and in better shape than I am? He knows how to take care of himself.”

  Finally they said Ronnie could go home. He left the hospital in a red cardigan sweater, but underneath it was a bulletproof vest. The threats on his life were continuing.

  The nurses and doctors all lined up to say goodbye. They had come to know Ronnie, and they obviously admired him. All I remember about the ride back is that it was raining, and that Ronnie and I were together, finally, going home.

  Mike Deaver and Dan Ruge were in another car. Mike told me later that as they pulled away from the hospital, Dan, who usually kept his emotions firmly in control, turned to him with tears in his eyes. “You know,” he said, “we could easily have been leaving here in a very different way.”

  When we arrived at the White House, Ronnie walked from the car into the Diplomatic Entrance and then to the elevator. There were reports later that as he did this, he was disoriented. He wasn’t. Or that he had to use an oxygen tank. He never did. But he did receive some special home care. Dan Ruge spent the first few nights in the Lincoln Bedroom, and for a brief time Ronnie slept in a hospital bed. At first they gave him penicillin intravenously, coming into our bedroom at two A.M. and again at six, but he was soon switched over to pills.

  Ronnie wasn’t used to being incapacitated, and he thought he could do more than he was really able to. I showed him a letter I had received from Lady Bird Johnson, who wrote that Lyndon had needed a full month of his presidency to recover
from his gallbladder operation. During the next three weeks, I insisted that Ronnie follow the doctors’ orders by doing as little work as possible. His schedule was drastically shortened. In the morning, he would meet with his close advisers, and then with the National Security Council. But that was it. He attended both meetings in his pajamas and bathrobe, and he spent the rest of the day resting.

  While Ronnie was still in the hospital, I had tried to speed up the renovations in the private living quarters of the White House so that the solarium, at least, would be completed by the time he came back. He had been in a small, dark, enclosed space for almost two weeks, but in the solarium there were windows all around, the room got lots of sun, and Ronnie could once again see the sky. And in good weather, we could pull a chair outside and he could sit on the terrace.

  They had removed part of Ronnie’s left lung, so they explained that he would need a regular exercise program to recover his full lung capacity. A few days later, Mike Abrums, a friend of ours who runs a workout facility in California, flew to Washington and helped set up an exercise room in Tricia Nixon’s old bedroom, across the corridor from ours. As soon as he was able, Ronnie started working out every day after work; I used the weight machine and the treadmill each morning.

  That exercise room turned out to be valuable. Unless they make a special effort, presidents and first ladies don’t get much exercise. Every possible chore was done for us, and we were never required to do anything more strenuous than walk from the door of the White House to the car, and from the car to another door.

  Ronnie became so devoted to these workouts that he grew an entire size in the chest, while the biceps in his arms practically doubled. Before long, we had to buy him some new suits. “I’m proud of you,” I said, “but slow down. This is getting expensive!”

  Once we were home and I was able to reflect on what had happened to Ronnie, I began to realize just how close we had come to losing him. Hinckley had fired six shots in less than two seconds, and four people had been injured. In those two seconds Ronnie came within an inch of death, and I came within an inch of losing the man I love. I now understood that each new day was a gift to be treasured, and that I had to be more involved in seeing that my husband was protected in every possible way.