Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [45]
Now Fischer was sure something terrible had happened. Holding back tears, he started to pray, for Reagan and for the men left behind at the Hilton. He couldn’t stop his hands from shaking.
* * *
A FEW BLOCKS away, in the Secret Service command post underneath the Oval Office, Agent Joe Trainor was monitoring traffic on police and Secret Service radios and a stack of scanners. Once Ray Shaddick reported the shooting, the radios went berserk, and he had called a supervisor into the room to help him. Trainor could barely make out what people were saying through the screeching of sirens. As soon as he learned that the president’s limousine was on its way back to the White House, he spoke by phone with the uniformed division of the Secret Service. He had to make sure the limousine could get inside the White House perimeter quickly. “Open all the gates,” he told an officer.
A minute later, when Trainor heard that the motorcade was heading to George Washington University Hospital instead, he picked up the phone again and asked the White House signal operator to patch him through to a special telephone in GW’s emergency room.
“Hold on for a second,” the operator said.
While he waited, Trainor heard Shaddick’s voice speak from the radio in front of him asking if he had heard the transmissions about going to GW.
Trainor replied that he had and that he was calling GW now.
Just then a woman answered the phone Trainor was holding to his ear. He presumed it was a nurse in the emergency room.
“This is Agent Trainor at the White House,” he said. “The president is en route to the emergency room.”
“Has he been shot?”
“I’m not sure,” Trainor said. “I don’t think so. Three other people may have been wounded and are also en route. Tell every doctor to get to the emergency room. And please make sure a stretcher is ready at the entrance.”
* * *
AS THE MOTORCADE neared GW, Drew Unrue asked Jerry Parr if they should head the wrong way around the traffic circle in front of the hospital to save time. “No, go around the circle,” Parr said. He didn’t want to risk crashing into oncoming traffic.
Tires squealing, the Lincoln sped around the circle and jerked to a stop in front of the emergency room doors, its right side facing the hospital entrance.
Parr looked out the window. No one was waiting for them.
The two agents with Uzis jumped from the running boards of the follow-up car, and Ray Shaddick leaped from its passenger seat. Shaddick opened the back right door of the presidential limousine; Parr slipped past the president and got out first, then put his hand out for the president. Reagan shook his head, as if to say “I can do it myself.”
I guess he wants to be a cowboy, Parr thought, momentarily reassured that the president seemed to be strong enough to get out of the limousine under his own power.
Mary Ann Gordon and Dan Ruge emerged from the spare limousine, and a moment later Mike Deaver, David Fischer, and the military aide got out of the control car. They all moved quickly toward the president’s limousine.
Reagan climbed out of the Lincoln and stood up. He steadied himself and hitched up his pants, a reflex that Deaver and Fischer had seen hundreds of times.
So far, so good, thought Deaver.
Fischer felt less sanguine: he thought Reagan looked sick and gray. But Fischer could see that his boss was determined to walk unaided through the ER doors.
Parr took a position to the president’s left, Shaddick to his right. Others stood nearby while an agent went ahead to run interference and scout for trouble in the hospital’s hallway.
Surrounded by his guards, the president shuffled uneasily through the hospital’s sliding glass doors. It was 2:30 p.m.
* * *
BEFORE THE PRESIDENT’S arrival, it had been a typical afternoon in the busy emergency room of George Washington University Hospital, a 512-bed medical center near downtown Washington. Nurses in green scrubs and doctors in white lab coats worked under the yellowish haze of fluorescent lights, checking on a dozen or so patients suffering