Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [85]
A few minutes later, when Haig and Allen returned to the Situation Room, Weinberger relayed the new information to them. Allen looked across the table at Haig—he wasn’t sure the secretary was paying attention. “Al, are you listening?” Allen asked. “Ten minutes, forty-seven seconds—the nearest Soviet sub.”
But Haig was listening: when Weinberger went on to say more about the submarines and then informed the room that the bomber crews of the U.S. Strategic Air Command were now “moving from alert in their quarters and on the post to their planes,” Haig seemed barely able to contain his irritation.
“I said up there, Cap. I’m not a liar. I said there had been no increased alert.”
“Well, I didn’t know you were going up, Al,” Weinberger said. “I think if—”
“I had to,” Haig snapped, “because we had the question already started and we were going to be in a big flap.”
“Well, I think we could have done a little better if we had concentrated on a specific statement to be handed out,” said Weinberger, rebuking Haig for ignoring his own requirement that no official was to address the press without first getting his statements approved by the others in the Situation Room. “When you’re up there with questions, why then it’s not anything you can control.”
Weinberger, a keen lawyer and tough administrator who had served as California’s budget director when Reagan was governor, was not the sort to back away from a fight. Now he and Haig continued their verbal battle about the issue of alerts and DEFCON levels. After several minutes of intense exchanges, Haig again lost patience.
“Let me ask you a question, Cap,” Haig said. “Is this submarine approach, is that what’s doing this, or is it the fact that the president’s under surgery?”
“Well, I’m discussing it from the point of view that at the moment, until the vice president actually arrives here, the command authority is what I have,” Weinberger said, reiterating what he had been told by Ed Meese earlier on the phone. “And I have to make sure that it is essential that we do everything that seems proper.”
“You’d better read the Constitution,” Haig said.
“What?” Weinberger said incredulously.
“You’d better read the Constitution,” Haig said. “We can get the vice president any time we want.”
* * *
VICE PRESIDENT BUSH was still a couple of hours away from Washington in Air Force Two. At 3:25, the plane had landed at Austin’s Robert Mueller Municipal Airport and pulled to a stop at the far end of the tarmac. Bush and the other dignitaries stayed on the plane, and at one point the vice president slipped unobtrusively into his small cabin for a few minutes of solitude. As he sat in the cabin, he prayed, both for the president and for the country. He also jotted some notes on an in-flight information card, scribbling that it had taken about twenty minutes for the “enormity” of the situation to finally hit him.
The plane’s passengers followed reports of the shooting on the fuzzy television set in the conference room. When he returned from his cabin, Bush chatted with his guests, who included Representative Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat who was the powerful House majority leader.
Bush felt awful about what had happened to Reagan, whom he considered a friend. “How could anybody work up a feeling of sufficient personal malice toward Ronald Reagan to want him dead?” he wondered aloud. The vice president also said he felt no special burden, no impending sense of destiny. “He seems so calm,” Wright wrote in his diary aboard the plane, “no signs whatever of nervous distress.”
The pilots and Secret Service agents hoped to refuel and take off