Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [99]
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DENISE SULLIVAN AND Cathy Edmondson were impressed by how compliant the president was—he was so unlike most VIP and celebrity patients. Despite his pain and his weakened condition, he followed instructions and showed remarkably good cheer. He even seemed apologetic about causing them undue stress.
But Reagan had long felt a great respect for nurses, especially since a near-death experience more than three decades earlier. After a movie premiere in 1947, he had suddenly become very ill. He was taken to a hospital where he was diagnosed with a dangerous strain of viral pneumonia. He burned with fever, then froze with chills. Medications seemed to have no effect. One night, Humphrey Bogart appeared in his dreams, and together they acted out a scene under a streetlamp on a dark and lonely patch of sidewalk.
The attending nurses wrapped Reagan in blankets and fed him hot tea through a glass tube. Each breath hurt so much that he reached a point where he wanted to die. But one nurse in particular wouldn’t let him. She gripped his hand and urged him to inhale and exhale. “Come on now, breathe in once more,” she said, leaning over him. “Now, let it out.” Reagan followed the nurse’s gentle instruction. He breathed and he survived.
Now here he was again, this time putting his trust in two nurses who refused to leave his side. They, too, held his hand and coaxed him to relax. They told him that they would stay right there with him and that everything would be fine. He just needed to let the machine breathe for him.
“Don’t fight it,” they said over and over again.
“I keep on breathing?” he wrote.
Yes, they said. And so he did.
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AFTER JERRY PARR left the hospital that evening, he grabbed a bite to eat at the White House mess, where he also sipped a glass of vodka, straight up. He felt at once excited and devastated. He could feel the adrenaline still coursing through his system, and he kept trying to sort out what had gone both right and wrong. He knew he had saved the president’s life, but he also understood that the Secret Service had failed by allowing the gunman to get so close to the president. He was head of the presidential detail; this was his error to bear.
As he replayed the shooting in his head, Parr realized that he and his agents had been lulled into complacency by the routine nature of trips to the Hilton and other sites like it in Washington. If the president had given a speech in Baltimore or Philadelphia or New York, everyone would have been more alert—the agents, the police, even the spectators—because of the less familiar settings. Nursing his drink, Parr wondered whether he and the other agents would be portrayed as goats or heroes. When he finally got home, Parr hugged his wife and crawled into bed. He was exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come.
Back at the White House, George Opfer sat in the command post below the Oval Office; folded uncomfortably in a chair, he tried to catch some sleep. Though agency supervisors had told him to go home, he’d refused. If something went wrong in the recovery room, he wanted to be the agent who brought the first lady to the hospital.
Upstairs, in the residence, Nancy Reagan was curled up in a ball on her husband’s side of their bed, fast asleep. She clutched one of the president’s white T-shirts in her hands.
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THAT NIGHT, GW’S doctors gave Jim Brady only a 50 percent chance of survival. Arthur Kobrine had done everything possible to save the press secretary’s life. He and the other surgeons plucked out all the shrapnel they could reach and removed the dead and damaged brain tissue. They irrigated and cleaned the wound with particular care.
As he finished up the surgery, Kobrine faced a dilemma: should he reattach the bone flap, the section of Brady’s skull he had removed to gain access to the brain? Leaving the flap off was the safer course. Although it had been soaking in a