Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [51]
The two cars pulled out of the White House and onto Pennsylvania Avenue for the short ride to the hospital. The radio in Opfer’s ear fed him a steady stream of information, but since the radio’s frequency was unsecured the reports weren’t very specific. He still didn’t know how badly the president had been hurt.
Only a block or two from the White House, the small motorcade encountered heavy traffic and came to a stop. They were stuck for just a few minutes, but to Opfer the wait seemed interminable.
Soon two hands gripped Opfer’s shoulders from behind. “When am I going to get there to see him?” the first lady asked.
“We’re moving,” Opfer replied. “We’ll get there soon.”
A minute later, she seized his shoulders again. “George, I’m going to get out and walk. I need to get out and walk.”
“No, no, we can’t do that, it’s not safe,” Opfer said.
“I need to walk,” she said. “I have to get there.”
At last the traffic eased and they began making good progress. As soon as they reached the ER entrance, Opfer opened the car’s rear door. He watched a blur of red raincoat run for the emergency room doors and then hurried to catch up.
* * *
IN THE CHAOS of the emergency room, Dan Ruge, the gray-haired and decorous White House physician, remained remarkably composed. As soon as he saw an opening, he stepped up to the gurney carrying the president and used one of his delicate fingers to find an artery in one of Reagan’s feet. The president’s pulse was steady, a good sign.
Before coming to Washington, Ruge, a neurosurgeon by training, had been a colleague of Loyal Davis, Nancy Reagan’s stepfather. Ruge hadn’t wanted the job of White House physician, but he accepted it after Davis, a respected neurosurgeon in Chicago, convinced him that the Reagans needed an experienced doctor to prevent anything “foolish” from being done to the president during his time in office. Now Ruge was being put to the test, and though he worried that Reagan had suffered a heart attack, he didn’t have enough information to make a confident diagnosis. But it was not his job to treat the president; his first concern was that the doctors at GW not give Reagan special care. Exotic tests, diagnosis by committee, flying in experts from another city—such measures would take time and could put the president’s life at even greater risk. As he stepped back from the gurney, Ruge was determined to ensure that Reagan wasn’t treated like a VIP. He immediately began telling doctors to handle the president exactly as they would any other patient in his condition.
Only a few feet away, Mike Deaver and David Fischer were watching the unfolding emergency in stunned horror. The leader they both revered seemed to be in terrible trouble.
Seeing Ruge, Deaver signaled him to come over. “Tell me what’s happening,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Ruge replied. “Maybe he had a cardiac.”
Deaver and Fischer were dumbstruck. They’d both watched the president’s speech at the Hilton; he had been so vibrant and alive, and now he was pale and sickly and possibly having a heart attack. It was too much for Fischer; tears streaked down his face.
Watching the frenzied efforts of the trauma bay’s doctors and nurses, Deaver recalled hearing about the chaos at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, where John F. Kennedy had been rushed. Realizing that providing accurate information to the White House would be critical, he ran to find a phone so he could call Jim Baker; Fischer followed. Deaver had trouble getting through to the swamped White House switchboard, but an operator finally answered and transferred him to the office of the chief of staff. An assistant picked up the phone.
“Find Jim,” Deaver said. “Have someone hold this line open.”
A moment later, Baker got on the phone.
Deaver quickly recounted what had happened at the Hilton and then said, “We don’t know what the problem is. It may be a