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

This was one of many missives to his doctors and nurses that Ronnie would write in pencil and felt-tip pen on a pink-and-white pad stamped George Washington University Hospital. Some were funny: “If I’d had this much attention in Hollywood, I’d have stayed there.” And to pretty nurse Denise Sullivan, who had tended to him in the recovery room: “Does Nancy know about us?” Others were not so lighthearted: “What happened to the guy with the gun?” “What was his beef? Was anyone hurt?” “Will I still be able to work at the ranch?” Nancy gathered as many as she could find and saved them in a manila envelope.

Her brother, Dick, who came from Philadelphia that night, witnessed intense arguments between Ruge and Nancy over Ronnie’s care. As a surgeon himself, Nancy’s brother sympathized with the doctor, who would move into the White House for a month while Ronnie recuperated. “Dan was a marvelous surgeon and also a very, very kind, good man. He couldn’t stand Nancy. The two didn’t get along at all, which he and Mrs. Ruge were never hesitant to tell me, how awful she was to them,” Dick recalled. His sister’s feelings about the White House physician were mutual. “She couldn’t stand him. She didn’t like him at all,” Dick added. Ruge’s daughter, Charlotte Wiessner, offered a similar assessment of the relationship between the president’s physician and the first lady, saying, “My father wasn’t crazy about her.”

Nor was Ruge, a distinguished figure who stood six foot two, crazy about the job itself. Though he would be regarded as one of the heroes of the day that Ronnie was shot, Ruge found most of his duties as White House physician to be, as he put it later, “vastly overrated, boring, and not medically challenging.” Unlike most presidential physicians, he did not come from the military. In private practice, his specialty had been spinal cord injuries, which was not an expertise he was likely to be called upon to use in the White House. Nor was he quite prepared for the reality of being just another member of the staff. During state dinners, he was required to don a tuxedo to be at the ready if he was needed, and then had to sit in his office, where he did crossword puzzles and read medical journals. One White House official who knew both Ruge and Nancy well said that their long relationship, which revolved around Loyal, stirred mixed feelings in the first lady: “Dan was a very comfortable reminder of her father and connection with her father, but also an uncomfortable reminder of her past.”

Nancy asked her stepbrother to spend that first night with her at the White House, but Dick opted to stay with the Ruges instead. The next morning, he joined his sister for a prayer service. “I was amazed at her self-control. She didn’t cry. She didn’t say how awful this was,” Dick recalled. “I cried during the service. She showed no emotion at all.”

The other three Reagan children arrived from California, via an uncomfortable overnight ride aboard a military cargo plane. Patti had gotten news of the shooting when a Secret Service agent interrupted a session with her therapist. Michael also heard it from an agent, who assured him his father was unhurt; through news reports on the radio, he soon realized otherwise. Maureen received a call from her fiancé, Dennis Revell, who couldn’t summon words to tell her what had happened, and so he asked her to turn on the television. As they all boarded a plane that night, it occurred to Patti that none of them had spoken to Nancy or reached out to one another. “What kind of family is this?” she thought. “Even a bullet can’t bring us together.”

For most of the flight, the three Reagan children sat in different parts of the C-140, on canvas seats. Patti realized that their only connection was a man who might be bleeding to death in a hospital bed thousands of miles away. “There was something else uniting us. Each of us knew, in some part of our hearts that, although our presence was expected there, it wasn’t really important,” she recalled. “Ronald and Nancy Reagan are two halves of a circle; together, they are complete, and their children float outside.” At Nancy’s funeral thirty-five years later, her daughter would use almost exactly those words to describe the bond between her parents.

Patti, Ron, and Doria made a midmorning visit to Ronnie in the hospital. Nancy told Maureen and Michael they would have to come later, which hit them as a hurtful, infuriating reminder of their secondary status as the children from Ronnie’s first marriage. They decided to use the time checking in on Delahanty and McCarthy, and to thank them for their valor in the line of duty. They also saw Sarah Brady, who was hovering over her bandaged husband and begging him to live. Eventually Maureen and Michael got into their father’s room for a short visit, but only after pleading with a doctor to let them see him. Within a day, all four of Ronnie’s children had left Washington, though Maureen and Patti would return while he recuperated. The family would not all be together again until the following Thanksgiving.

Nancy did summon others to lend support. Frank Sinatra and his fourth wife, Barbara, were asleep in Las Vegas when the phone rang. “Ronnie’s been shot,” Nancy blurted on the other end of the line. “Can you come?” Sinatra canceled the final three shows of his weeklong engagement at Caesars Palace and arranged for a flight. When he and Barbara arrived at the White House, they were met by Nancy and evangelist Billy Graham. The Reagans’ pastor, Donn Moomaw, flew in from Los Angeles. Old friends like the Wicks also were on hand. From around the country, get-well letters and gifts—flowers, Ronnie’s favorite jelly beans, chocolates—were flooding in. But Nancy still felt that without Ronnie in the bed beside her, she