The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

to the center hall, where they could speak privately. “There’s been a shooting at the hotel,” Opfer told her. “Some people were wounded, but your husband wasn’t hit. Everybody’s at the hospital.”

Nancy started heading for the elevator as soon as she heard the word shooting. Then other details began to register. The hotel. Ronnie was supposed to be giving a short speech at two in the afternoon to the National Conference of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department at the Washington Hilton, a mile and a half up Connecticut Avenue. The hospital. George Washington University was the closest. It was six blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Why, she asked, were they taking Ronnie there if he wasn’t hurt? Opfer told her he didn’t know. Perhaps it was precautionary. Maybe the president wanted to find out about the condition of the wounded.

Opfer pleaded with her to stay put. The hospital was a madhouse. Ronnie was fine. He’d be home soon. “If you don’t get me a car, I’m going to walk,” Nancy said firmly. Six minutes and forty-four seconds after the first report of shots fired, Opfer got in touch with the command center. Using Nancy’s code name, he informed his fellow agents: “We’re gonna leave with Rainbow and go to that location.”

A limousine was dispatched to the Diplomatic Entrance. Nancy climbed into the back seat, and Opfer into the front. The command center alerted agents at the hospital to be ready for her arrival at the Twenty-Second Street entrance. Nancy became frantic as the limousine, traveling without sirens or escort, got stuck in the mayhem of police cars, emergency vehicles, reporters, and onlookers around the hospital. She grabbed Opfer’s shoulder and demanded to be let out, saying she would get there on foot, running if she had to. The agent insisted she stay in the car. He still believed the president was uninjured, but other possibilities were racing through his mind: Was this a conspiracy? Was the First Family under attack? Was the country under attack?

Mike Deaver met them at the emergency entrance and delivered the news that Ronnie had, in fact, been wounded. In the opening of her post–White House memoir, Nancy recounted her shock and mounting panic:

“But they told me he

wasn’t

hit,” I stammered.

“Well,” Mike said, “he was. But they say it’s not serious.”

“

Where? Where

was he hit?”

“They’re looking for the bullet.”

Looking for the bullet! “I’ve got to see him!” I said.

“You can’t. Not yet.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, my voice rising. “If it’s not serious,

then why can’t I see him?”

“Wait. They’re working on him.”

“Mike,” I pleaded, as if it were up to him.

“They don’t know how it is with us. He has to know I’m here!”

Just inside the hospital, in curtained-off trauma bay 5, Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes was taking notes of what he was hearing: “Doctors believe bleeding to death. Can’t find a wound. ‘Think we’re going to lose him.’ Rapid loss of blood pressure. Touch and go.”

Ronnie had arrived at the hospital three minutes after the presidential motorcade peeled out of the Washington Hilton driveway. The initial plan had been to take him back to the White House. But in the car, Ronnie began coughing up bright, frothy blood, prompting Parr to redirect the motorcade to the hospital. It was a decision that no doubt saved Ronnie’s life. “Get an ambulance—I mean get the, um, stretcher out there,” Parr called over the radio at 2:29 p.m. Ronnie kept coughing, filling first his own handkerchief and then Parr’s with blood.

The president walked the fifteen yards from the car to the entrance of the emergency room, but as soon as he got inside and out of public view, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his knees buckled. His blood pressure plummeted so low that nurses could not get a systolic reading. It looked like he was having a heart attack. Not until they cut off his clothes and a surgical resident lifted his left arm did they notice a tiny, jagged slit in Ronnie’s side. An intern who had been in Vietnam recognized it as a bullet hole. There was no exit wound.

As the medical team worked, Nancy was taken to a nearby office, where she began having flashbacks to a day in November 1963, when she was driving down San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles and heard over the car radio that John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. She prayed that history was not repeating itself. The windowless room where they put her was tiny and hot. She heard a lot of noise. People were running back and forth in the hallway, shouting at one another to get out of the way. Nancy kept demanding to see her husband, only to be told the same thing over and over: Soon. “Later, I learned that they were afraid to let me in too early because they thought I’d be traumatized by what I saw,” she recalled. “Considering what I did see, they were probably right.”

At last, she got the summons. Deaver and Opfer accompanied her into the room where the president was. It was a ghastly scene of bandages, tubes, blood. In one corner, Nancy spotted the shredded navy pinstripe suit that Ronnie had put on for the first time that morning. It had been a gift from her, custom-made by his Beverly Hills tailor Frank Mariani.

Ronnie was lying naked on a table under a sheet, surrounded by strangers. His normally ruddy cheeks were ashen. His lips were blue and caked with blood. Opfer held Nancy’s arm, worried she might faint. But he saw her quickly focus and pull herself together.

Nancy stifled her horror when she got to her husband’s side. She smiled at him, held his hand, and whispered over and over: “Oh, Ronnie. Oh, Ronnie.” Twelve days later, the president would write in his diary that “I opened my eyes once to find Nancy there. I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there.