Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [70]
“You have to save him,” she said, holding back tears. “He has a little boy. Please.”
For a moment, Kobrine turned away. He knew the situation was too dire to make any promises. Instead, he simply said that he would do the best he could.
Returning to the radiology suite, the surgeon marshaled his troops and exhorted them to move quickly. Turning to a Secret Service agent standing nearby, Kobrine told him, “You are going to push through the crowd. We’re going to go down the hall, turn left, and go down to the operating room. We are not stopping. We are just going. Just push people out of the way.”
While Kobrine steered the gurney carrying the press secretary from behind, the agent took a position in front and began to stiff-arm and block people, moving them aside. Just as they began making good progress, the agent abruptly stopped, and Kobrine nearly toppled over Brady.
“God damn it, I told you not to stop for anything,” the surgeon yelled at the agent.
“Sir, that is the president rolling in front of us,” the agent replied. “We have to let him go first.”
* * *
SITTING ON A wooden bench in a locker room after donning his green surgical scrubs and blue Nike running shoes, Ben Aaron adjusted his eyeglasses and mapped out the operation in his mind. It was not a particularly demanding procedure: he would make an incision in the president’s side, cauterize and suture any wounds, and probe the left lung in search of the bullet. But no chest operation is simple. Even healthy patients die from unexpected complications, and Reagan’s surgery presented its own challenges. The patient was seventy years old, and he had been thrown roughly into the limousine, had been in or near shock, and had lost a significant amount of blood. Given all the stresses the president had endured in the past half hour, Aaron worried that he might go into a rapid decline after being put to sleep.
Aaron stood up, took a deep breath, and headed for the operating room. With his years of experience, he knew how to block out any apprehensions and focus entirely on the task at hand. When he entered the OR, he would be all business. His approach to surgery left no room for doubt, earning him comparisons to the advisory on a jar of mayonnaise: he kept cool and didn’t freeze.
Joe Giordano had taken time to gather his thoughts as well. Shortly after inserting the tube into Reagan’s chest and turning the case over to Aaron, Giordano took refuge in the doctors’ lounge and sat down at one of its tables. He tried to absorb what had happened over the past few minutes; at one point he turned to another doctor—an ophthalmologist—and said, “I just put a chest tube in the president of the United States.” He said nothing more before getting up and walking back to the ER.
David Gens didn’t wait to reach the locker room to put on his scrubs—to save time he removed his street clothes and donned his surgical greens inside the closet in which the scrubs were stored. He washed his hands and arms thoroughly and then hurried into the operating room, the first surgeon to arrive. It was always a good idea to have one surgeon scrubbed and ready as soon as a patient had been wheeled into the OR—that way, someone would be on hand in case the patient suddenly began to fail.
Jerry Parr and several other agents were also in the OR. With the help of a surgeon, the agents screened everyone entering the room so that no spectators could slip in. The agents amused the doctors and nurses: Parr had put his scrubs on backward over his suit, and other agents had put their scrubs on incorrectly as well. Hair peeked out from under their surgical caps; pant cuffs jutted from under the scrubs. At least one agent was wearing surgical booties over his bare feet instead of his shoes.
From his position