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At one point, frustrated, Aaron turned to Cheyney and offered her a chance to hunt for the projectile. She pressed the president’s lung between her fingers, blindly looking for the metal fragment. She respected Aaron for giving her a chance to find the bullet, and she decided that if she succeeded she would grab Aaron’s hand, pull it inside Reagan’s chest, and pass him the slug so he would get the credit. But Cheyney had no luck either, and after a minute or two Aaron took over once more.

When Aaron again wondered aloud whether he should halt the surgery without retrieving the bullet, Dutch Lichtman, one of the anesthesiologists, figured it was time to lighten the mood.

“Having a good time, Ben?” he asked.

Some of the doctors and nurses chuckled. Aaron smiled. “I’m having a marvelous time, couldn’t be better.”

But with each passing minute, his anxiety grew. He had left plenty of bullets in patients when he thought they would do no harm. But this was a special case, and he continued to worry about the medical and political implications of leaving a would-be assassin’s bullet in the president’s chest. Then, as he kept coming up empty, Aaron was suddenly seized by dread—what if the bullet wasn’t in the lung anymore? What if it had slipped into a vein, entered the heart, and then been propelled from the heart into the president’s circulatory system? That could be disastrous—if the bullet ended up in the carotid artery, for instance, it could be pumped straight up to the brain.

Aaron asked for another X-ray.

* * *

AS THE AFTERNOON wore on, the ashtrays scattered around the Situation Room’s conference table filled up; plumes of cigarette smoke created a haze under the ceiling’s fluorescent lights. Officials sipped Coke, coffee, and Sanka as they worked. Eager for news, they kept an eye on the television and occasionally left the conference room to speak to subordinates by telephone. Aides quietly entered to whisper updates to their bosses. Cabinet secretaries from a number of different departments, including Transportation and Commerce, filtered in and out.

“What’s the situation with the Polish strike?” Richard Allen asked an aide. The staff member reported that the labor strike had been put off indefinitely: Solidarity and the Polish government had reached a compromise. Allen was relieved. That was one less international crisis to worry about.

By now, Fred Fielding had obtained the presidential succession documents he and his staff had prepared, and he began reviewing them with Al Haig and Dan Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff. One was a letter, to be signed by Reagan, informing congressional leaders of his decision to temporarily transfer power. Fielding also showed Haig and Murphy a second letter, to be signed by the vice president and a majority of cabinet secretaries in the event that the president was unable to sign the first. It declared that Reagan’s “present inability to discharge” his duties required the transfer of presidential authority to Bush.

Among the many officials in the conference room at the time was Richard Darman, one of Jim Baker’s top advisors. The sight of Fielding, Haig, and Murphy reviewing the succession documents made him uneasy. In Darman’s view, many of the president’s aides had responded to the crisis far too emotionally. Darman did not think this was the best time or place to discuss a historic transfer of presidential authority.

Darman asked Fielding for the documents, saying that he would hold them until they were needed. Then Darman left the room to call Baker at the hospital. Upon hearing his aide’s account of the conversation initiated by Fielding, Baker was annoyed; in his view, Fielding should not have raised the matter without consulting him first. Baker told Darman that he and Meese had already conferred and rejected the notion of transferring power to Bush, at least until they learned more from the doctors. After the phone call, Darman walked to his office and put the papers in his safe.

Just before five p.m.,