Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [104]
With his behavior immediately after the shooting and his speech that day, Reagan turned a near tragedy into a political triumph, helping to ensure passage of his ambitious economic program several months later. As one top Democrat wrote in his journal the night of the president’s address, “We’ve been outflanked and outgunned.”
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REAGAN WAS NOT one to dwell on the negative and, unless asked, he rarely spoke about the assassination attempt. He slept fine; he ate fine; he didn’t startle when he heard a bang. He wasn’t afraid to travel or to leave the White House grounds, although for the rest of his two terms security tightened significantly, keeping him farther from reporters and the public.
Reagan kept a diary throughout his presidency. On April 11, 1981, his first day back in the White House, he described the shooting. His prose was typically spare:
Left the hotel at the usual side entrance and headed for the car—suddenly there was a burst of gunfire from the left. S.S. Agent pushed me onto the floor & jumped on top. I felt a blow to my upper back that was unbelievably painful. I was sure that he had broken my rib.… Getting shot hurts. Still my fear was growing because no matter how hard I tried to breathe it seemed I was getting less & less air.
By then, almost two weeks after the attempt, he had been told that the bullet that struck him—John Hinckley’s sixth and last shot—had ricocheted off the right rear quarter panel of the armored limousine and flown through the small gap between the car’s door and its frame. Because the bullet hit the car at an angle, it was flattened and its Devastator charge was eliminated; the shape of the bullet as it struck Reagan also explains why the bullet’s track through his body was a dime-sized channel even though the wound in his chest was merely a slit.
In the hours after the shooting, while being worked on by doctors and nurses at the hospital, the president prayed for his life. He also prayed for his assailant, realizing that he couldn’t ask for God’s grace while feeling hatred in his heart for the man who had shot him.
The president concluded his entry about the shooting by writing: “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.” Over the next few years, aides and friends recalled Reagan telling them the same thing. “He felt like he had been spared for a purpose,” James Baker recalled.
Never one to presume that he understood God’s intentions, Reagan later speculated that he’d been granted his wish to live so that he could help mitigate the risk of Armageddon. “Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war,” he wrote. “Perhaps that is the reason I was spared.”
Soon after his discharge from the hospital, Reagan retreated to the White House solarium and handwrote a personal appeal to Leonid Brezhnev. Reagan stated that he hoped to create “the circumstances which will lead to meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace.” Though neither Brezhnev nor his immediate successors proved particularly responsive, Reagan continued to pursue an end to the Cold War. Even as he spoke harshly of the Soviets, increased the nation’s defense budget, and launched the expensive antimissile program popularly known as Star Wars, he hoped to engage with a Soviet leader who would commit himself to serious negotiations. That leader appeared in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Reagan and Gorbachev held four summits and in 1987 achieved a historic accord that substantially reduced nuclear weapons. In 1989, ten months after Reagan left office, German citizens tore down the Berlin Wall. Two years later, a decade after Reagan’s appeal to Brezhnev, the Soviet Union collapsed, ending the Cold War.
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