Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [105]
THE PRESIDENT’S PERFORMANCE on the day of his near assassination reassured the nation; in particular, his ability to entertain his doctors and nurses with stories and jokes caused much astonishment. Not surprised was his son Ron Reagan. “He was a performer, basically, and that was what his background was,” the younger Reagan said three decades later. “It’s hard to turn that off. He also probably wanted to put everyone else in the room at ease.” In fact, the president himself commented on the reflexive impulse that drove him to tell jokes and jot notes late into the night. “There was a crowd standing around,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “Somebody ought to entertain them some way.”
Even under the most harrowing of circumstances, Reagan’s prodigious memory held a ready supply of one-liners; relying on his years of training as an entertainer, he used his quick wit to defuse the tension in both the emergency room and the recovery room. Ironically, Reagan’s two most famous roles as a Hollywood actor involved dramatic hospital or medical scenes. In 1940, he played George Gipp, the famed Notre Dame football player, in Knute Rockne All American. In the movie, Gipp’s coach, Rockne, visits him at his bedside as the star player lies dying. “I haven’t got a complaint in the world, Rock, I’m not afraid,” Gipp says, fighting to keep his eyes open. “What’s tough about this? Rock, some day, when the team is up against it, the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they got, win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then. But I’ll know about it. I’ll be happy.”
In 1942, Reagan gave what is generally regarded as his best performance in Kings Row, a film in which he plays Drake McHugh, a playboy who suffers hard times and is badly injured in a train accident. In the film, a doctor unnecessarily amputates McHugh’s legs. When he awakens from his delirium, McHugh looks down at the bed and screams in terror, “Where’s the rest of me?”
It seems fitting, then, that Reagan delivered his best line of the day—“I hope you are all Republicans”—right before he was put to sleep on the operating table.
That line and others, as well as the president’s extraordinary courage and poise, had a powerful effect on Reagan’s tenure. Immediately after the assassination attempt, Reagan’s popularity improved dramatically: his approval rating went from 59 percent in mid-March to 73 percent within days of the shooting. In late May, it was still standing at 68 percent. David Broder, one of the country’s most respected political journalists, wrote just two days after the assassination attempt that “what happened to Reagan on Monday is the stuff of which legends are made.” Broder went on: “As long as people remember the hospitalized president joshing his doctors and nurses—and they will remember—no critic will be able to portray Reagan as a cruel or callous or heartless man.” Three decades later, Broder stood by that assessment. “He was politically untouchable from that point on,” Broder said in an interview. “He became a mythic figure.”
Lou Cannon, Reagan’s most esteemed biographer, came to a similar conclusion. In a recent interview, Cannon said that Reagan’s actions after the assassination attempt “cemented a bond with the American people that never dissolved. And that’s because they saw a genuine person that day. They began to feel for him the way they would feel for a friend or someone close to them, not just some politician.”
Of course, Reagan’s popularity fluctuated throughout his eight years in office, rising and falling in response to his actions and to events beyond his control. He and his policies were roundly criticized by liberals and moderates, and he often frustrated even his most loyal supporters by compromising on core issues. He preached the importance of balancing the budget but left behind massive deficits. He railed against the evils of taxes but supported substantial tax increases to save Social Security and prevent the budget deficit from spiraling further out of control. He pledged to rid the government