Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [103]
This was the first Reagan had been told anything about his assailant, and he reflected on the news for a moment. “I had hoped it was a KGB agent,” the president said, referring to the Soviet spy agency. “On second thought,” he added, “he wouldn’t have missed then.”
For most of the rest of the day, the president napped, read the newspapers, and visited with Mrs. Reagan and the children, all four of whom were now in Washington. At one point, joking with his son Michael, Reagan said, “If you ever get shot, make sure you’re not wearing a new suit.” But that afternoon, the one-liners and the stories came to an abrupt halt when Dan Ruge, the White House physician, stopped by and broke the sad news about the shooting of Jim Brady, who was still fighting for his life just around the corner.
“Oh, damn,” Reagan said, his eyes welling up with tears.
* * *
THE FIRST SEVERAL days of Reagan’s recovery went better than the doctors could have hoped. The president regained his color and grew steadily stronger. He successfully spat up dark blood, a sign that his body was working to clear his lungs. To ensure that he got plenty of rest, his White House staff strictly limited the number of visitors. Not until April 6 was anyone outside the president’s closest circle permitted to see him; that afternoon, Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, came by to pay his regards. O’Neill—Reagan’s political nemesis—entered the room and walked straight to the bed, where he grabbed the president’s hand and kissed his head. Then the Speaker knelt and together they recited the Twenty-third Psalm—“The lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Speaking through tears, O’Neill said, “God bless you, Mr. President. We’re all praying for you.”
A temporary setback—a high fever of mysterious origin—puzzled and worried Reagan’s medical team, but it eventually dissipated. On April 11, his thirteenth day in the hospital, the president was released from GW. Doctors, citing hospital protocol, tried to insist that Reagan be taken by wheelchair to his waiting limousine. But Reagan refused. “I walked in,” the president said. “I’m walking out.”
As he shuffled stiffly out the hospital’s doors at 10:43 a.m. that day, Reagan smiled, masking his obvious pain as he slipped into the limousine. At the South Lawn of the White House, he was greeted by a cheering crowd of several hundred people. Wearing a bright red sweater over a white shirt, the president waved to the spectators and turned to walk into the White House, resembling, as an aide later put it, a “championship golfer strolling toward the eighteenth green.”
For the next two weeks, Reagan rested and worked a few hours each day from the White House residence; he returned to the Oval Office for the first time on April 24. Though a number of his aides were stunned by how weak he seemed, he continued to gain strength. On April 28, he traveled to Capitol Hill to give his first public address since the shooting, a speech advocating the passage of his economic package. Favoring his left arm and appearing thinner, the president walked into the House chamber to what one reporter described as a three-minute “rafter-shaking ovation.”
When the applause finally died down, Reagan began by thanking everyone for their prayers and messages of support in the wake of the assassination attempt. Then, speaking about “those others who fell beside me,” the president said:
Sick societies don’t produce young men like Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, who placed his body between mine and the man with the gun simply because he felt that’s what his duty called for him to do. Sick societies don’t produce dedicated police officers like Tom Delahanty or able and devoted public servants like James Brady. Sick societies don’t make people like us so proud to be Americans and so very proud of our fellow citizens.
Applause broke