Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [88]
Passing the note to Richard Allen, Regan said sadly, “Jim Brady is dead.”
Allen felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. He stared at the note in disbelief and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. He couldn’t believe that the man he’d come to call his friend had passed away, just like that.
“We just learned Jim Brady has died,” Allen told the room.
“We better get a statement ready on that,” Regan said.
“We better just have a moment of prayer and silence,” Allen replied.
The room went quiet while everyone present mourned the press secretary’s death.
The silence lasted for just seven seconds. There was still much work to do.
* * *
DR. ARTHUR KOBRINE was by nature an aggressive and confident surgeon, and at the moment he was even more determined than usual: he had made it his mission to save Jim Brady’s life. Before beginning the surgery on the press secretary’s brain, he gathered his troops in Operating Room 4, one door down from the room where surgeons were trying to find the bullet lodged in Reagan’s lung. Hoping to rally his team before a very difficult operation, Kobrine told them, “We are not going to let this fucking guy die.”
Brady had been hit above his left eye, and fragments of the bullet had scattered all the way across the right side of his brain. Using a disposable razor, Kobrine shaved the press secretary’s head and bathed his scalp in antiseptic. He rested Brady’s head on a circular roll of white gauze and drilled several small holes through the skull. After sawing from hole to hole, Kobrine removed a large section of skull. Before he could pluck out any bullet fragments, however, he and Ed Engle, a neurosurgical resident, would have to suction out blood and damaged brain tissue with vacuum tubes so they could see what they were doing. They needed to be extremely careful not to remove any healthy tissue by mistake; since the brain’s consistency is that of barely jelled tapioca, even the healthy portions could easily disappear up the tubes.
Just as Kobrine and Engle were about to start vacuuming the debris, a clot in Brady’s brain burst, sending a geyser of blood two feet into the air. The eruption proved to be a piece of good luck; not only did it relieve pressure on Brady’s brain, it also opened a hole that allowed Kobrine to explore for damage.
While a third member of the surgical team retracted the scalp and rinsed the wound with saline solution, Kobrine and Engle used the vacuum tubes to clear the brain of blood and injured tissue. When Kobrine spotted two bleeding arteries, he clipped them shut. Then he began gently probing the brain with a gloved finger, feeling for bullet fragments. Using forceps, he removed every fragment he could find.
At one point during the surgery, someone ran into the room and said that the radio was reporting that Brady had died. A nurse turned on the room’s stereo system so they could listen to the broadcast.
“Those fuckers,” Kobrine said. “What do they think we’re operating on, a corpse?”
* * *
AT 5:25 P.M., a radiology technician finished taking a new X-ray of the president’s chest. David Gens trailed the technician to radiology and waited for the cassette to be developed. As soon as it was, he returned to OR 2 and put the film on a backlighted board hanging on one wall.
Ben Aaron studied the image carefully. He was relieved to see that the bullet still appeared to be in the lung; he also noted that it was just a bit lower than where he had been looking. He turned back to the operating table and began hunting again, compressing lung tissue in his fingers, feeling for the small piece of metal. When it didn’t turn up right away, he was surprised—after all, now he knew exactly where to look.
Thinking about why the bullet was so elusive, Aaron realized that it must be sliding away every time he squeezed