Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [49]
He felt sick, helpless. What had happened? What had gone wrong? When he pushed the president into the limousine, had he caused one of Reagan’s ribs to puncture a lung or some other organ? Had he caused a heart attack? He felt nauseous and terrified. If the president died, it would be his fault. He shouldn’t have pushed him so hard.
Watching the nurses struggle to take the president’s blood pressure, Parr felt overwhelmed by an awful thought: Oh, my God, we have lost him. We’ve lost another one. Parr had never been a religious man, but he felt something surging within him. Lord be with him, he prayed.
Then the agent stepped up to the gurney and gently patted Reagan on the head. He didn’t want the president to feel alone, so he leaned over and looked him in the eyes. Let him live, Parr prayed. God, let him live!
CHAPTER 8
THE TRAUMA BAY
Agent George Opfer, the head of Nancy Reagan’s Secret Service detail, was looking forward to a productive afternoon. It had been an easy day so far, and the first lady wasn’t scheduled to leave the White House grounds again, which meant he would have time to catch up on paperwork. But as he eased into a chair at a desk in W-16, the Secret Service command post beneath the Oval Office, he wondered about the first lady’s abrupt departure from a lunch in Georgetown a little while earlier. Something had been bothering Mrs. Reagan—she didn’t seem sick, just anxious and unsettled—and she had told Opfer to take her home. He had promptly escorted her from the luncheon. By the time he drove inside the White House gates at about 2:20 p.m., Mrs. Reagan seemed calmer.
The first lady immediately went upstairs to meet with her decorator and the White House usher about her plans for renovating the residence. Opfer returned to the command post, where he planned to spend the next couple of hours scheduling his team of seven agents. Happily, the week ahead was fairly routine. The first lady’s next major engagement wasn’t for two days, when she would be attending a lunch with the wife of Lloyd Bentsen, a Democratic senator, at Mrs. Bentsen’s home.
Opfer—a lean, blond New Yorker who sometimes received fan mail from young women who’d spotted his photograph in the newspapers when he happened to be standing next to Mrs. Reagan—had been assigned to guard the eventual first lady even before the November election determined who that would be. When Reagan triumphed, one of the service’s top agents, John Simpson, asked Opfer to pay him a visit. In June 1968, Simpson had led a team assigned to protect Reagan when he was an undeclared candidate for the Republican nomination, and he’d become friendly with the Reagans over the years. He knew Opfer would be apprehensive about guarding Mrs. Reagan, who had a reputation for being demanding and sometimes less than understanding when things didn’t go her way, so he offered some advice: “Don’t listen to the stories, because they are wrong. Make your own evaluation when you get out there. And one more thing: the Reagans really are a modern-day love story. So be prepared for that.”
In November 1980, while protecting Nancy Reagan at the couple’s Pacific Palisades home, Opfer had his first encounter with the president-elect. Mrs. Reagan introduced the two men; Reagan looked Opfer in the eye and said, with a bit of an edge in his voice, “Well, George, make sure you take good care of her.”
The hair on the back of Opfer’s neck stood up. Intentionally or not, there was something a little threatening in Reagan’s delivery, as if to let Opfer know that mistakes would not be tolerated. Opfer imagined being shipped off to some remote field office if he screwed up.
Now, as he sat in the command post and jotted notes on his scheduling forms, his earpiece suddenly came alive with radio traffic: there had been a shooting at the Hilton and the president was being rushed back to the White House. Opfer looked up and saw a supervisor