Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [89]
After a few minutes, he felt something hard. He wanted to smile but didn’t; instead, he asked for a No. 15 blade and then sliced open the lung directly above the bullet. Reaching into the incision with his right thumb and forefinger, he felt for the bit of metal and plucked it out. Smashed but intact, the bullet was clearly too small to be a .38 caliber. Oddly, it had been flattened into a disk about the size of a dime. Its edges were smooth, and one side was silver, the other black.
Over the years, Aaron had retrieved plenty of bullets from patients, and he knew instantly that this one had struck something hard and then ricocheted into the president.
“I’ve got it,” Aaron said, as he held the bullet aloft for everyone to see. Then he dropped it into a paper cup held by a Secret Service agent.
It was 5:40 p.m., a little more than three hours since the president had been shot.
The flattened .22-caliber Devastator bullet extracted from President Reagan’s chest.
CHAPTER 14
THE WAITING ROOM
While awaiting further word about the president’s surgery, Nancy Reagan and several advisors and friends were led to a large waiting room, where they were buffered from the bustle of the hospital. Throughout the afternoon, Mrs. Reagan had kept an eye on the nonstop television coverage of the shooting and its aftermath. The first lady found some small comfort in the networks’ steady stream of words and pictures; she was desperate for any information, and at least the television offered a semblance of news. Still, most of the reports were not good, and some of them weren’t even accurate. One network incorrectly stated that Reagan was undergoing open-heart surgery. Then all three major networks reported that Jim Brady had died. A few minutes later, the ABC News anchor Frank Reynolds corrected his earlier report and said that the press secretary was in fact alive. Frustrated, he yelled to his producers off camera: “Let’s get it nailed down, somebody!”
At one point, Mrs. Reagan moved to a window in the waiting room and stared down at the crowd gathered in the streets below. Agent George Opfer gently took the first lady’s arm, drew her into the room, and closed the blinds. He warned her that standing in front of a window simply wasn’t safe, especially since a conspiracy hadn’t been ruled out yet.
Waiting with Mrs. Reagan was Mike Deaver, who was unhappy with the way White House officials had responded to the crisis. The performance by Speakes had been dreadful; Haig’s appearance in front of the press corps was an utter disaster. Not long after Haig’s debacle, Deaver went to find Jim Baker, who had spent much of the afternoon in a temporary command post that had been set up in a hospital conference room. “That thing is out of control over there,” Deaver told Baker, urging the chief of staff to return to the White House as soon as possible.
Before leaving the hospital, Baker once again turned to Lyn Nofziger for help. Earlier, Nofziger had proven his ability to set the record straight while providing only a limited amount of information; now, at 5:10 p.m., he stepped to a podium in the main lecture hall at George Washington University School of Medicine, just across the street from the hospital. Speaking in his gruff but authoritative way, Nofziger announced that Reagan was undergoing surgery and confirmed that Jim Brady, though alive, had suffered a serious head wound. He deflected questions about the president’s medical condition but said there was no indication that the bullet had nicked his heart.
As he stepped away from the microphones, Nofziger heard a reporter ask one last question.
“Did he say anything?”
Nofziger turned back to the podium, feeling as if God had just sent him an angel.
“Oh, yes,” Nofziger replied, barely able to suppress