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

under the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, but they worried that it would alarm the country and allies around the world and stir questions about Ronnie’s age and health. Meanwhile, Bush was headed back to Washington aboard Air Force Two, having canceled the rest of his scheduled speaking engagements that day in Texas. He was expected to land at Andrews Air Force Base at six thirty. The military had been put on standby alert status. Initial assessments by the Pentagon showed more Soviet submarines than usual off the East Coast.

What would linger in the public perception was an image of the combustible secretary of state, Al Haig, charging to the podium of the briefing room at 4:14 p.m. and addressing the media. The place was already in chaos. Speakes had fumbled a news conference in which he was unable to provide reporters the answers to such basic questions as whether the president was in surgery or even whether the country had a functioning government. The secretary of state’s attempt to take control of the situation only made things worse. From behind Haig, National Security Adviser Richard Allen could see his knees were wobbling and his arms shaking.

“Who is making the decisions for the government right now?” one reporter asked.

“Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state in that order, and should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm to the vice president, he will do so,” Haig said. “As of now, I am in control here, in the White House.”

Cabinet secretaries and national security officials, who were watching all of this from the Situation Room, were horrified. So were Baker and Meese, who saw it on a television at the hospital. Not only had Haig revealed the depth of his ignorance of the Constitution—there were actually three others ahead of him in the line of succession; he’d omitted the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate—but he came off as breathless, agitated, and possibly unhinged. Haig gave out further erroneous information by denying that the military had been put on increased readiness.

Nancy was too concerned about Ronnie to take note of the secretary of state’s blunder in the moment, but when she learned about it later, she thought it revealed his true character. “From that day on, he was on thin ice with Nancy Reagan,” said Jim Kuhn, who was later Ronnie’s executive assistant. Haig’s performance at the podium was an image the public would never forget—and that Nancy would never forgive.

The first of the Reagan children to reach the hospital was Ron. He arrived as Nancy waited for her husband to come out of the anesthesia. Ron’s unconventional career had taken off, and he was dancing with the Joffrey Ballet’s junior ensemble when he got the word about his father. “Doria and I were having lunch in our hotel coffee shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, before heading to the theater for rehearsal and that night’s performance. A Secret Service agent traveling with us approached the table and quietly informed us that shots had been fired at my father but that he didn’t appear to have been hit,” he recalled. “We quickly left the restaurant and went upstairs to our room, where we watched the scene play out on TV. Some minutes later, the detail leader gave us the news that my father had been wounded, but they didn’t believe it was serious. We immediately began searching for a way to get back to DC, no easy feat from Lincoln.” The Secret Service scrambled to charter a private Learjet for Ron.

Nancy was comforted by the presence of her favorite child. “I’m so frightened,” she told him.

“I know, Mom,” Ron said tenderly, “but hold on.”

When Ronnie woke up around seven thirty, he reached for a pencil and paper and wrote: “I can’t breathe!” Nancy shouted at the doctors: “He can’t breathe!” They assured her that the president was getting enough oxygen, but it didn’t feel that way because it was coming through a respirator. This would not be the last time the medical team would be exasperated by her badgering, though they understood her concern and tried to be patient with her. Doctors gently told Nancy it might be better if she left the room. As she did, she paused at the door for what seemed like several minutes, staring at her husband’s face with worry etched on her own.

Tension soon developed between Nancy and the White House physician, Daniel A. Ruge, who had trained under Loyal Davis and worked as her father’s partner for twenty years. Ruge had been standing near Ronnie when he was shot. He and Deaver jumped into the follow-up car as the president’s motorcade sped off. At the hospital, Ruge made the call that the president should be treated by the trauma team on duty there rather than taking charge himself or bringing in high-powered surgeons from other medical centers to confer. Renowned heart surgeon Michael DeBakey had already called, offering to fly in from Houston with his own emergency specialists. Ruge declined. All of that would have taken too much precious time. Nor did he allow the president to be moved eight and a half miles to Bethesda Naval Hospital, as the Secret Service wanted.

Ruge told the GW medical personnel at hand to move quickly and treat the president as they would any other seventy-year-old man who had come into the ER with a gunshot wound. They should not wait for a plan to be developed by a consensus of more senior specialists. That was a controversial decision in the moment, but the right one, and it probably helped save Ronnie’s life. Still, the White House physician bore the brunt of the First Lady’s second-guessing and her anxiety. At one point, Ronnie groggily handed his doctor a note in faint and wobbly handwriting that said: “I am aren’t alive aren’t I?” Nancy snatched it out of Ruge’s hand, and he never saw the