Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (10 page)

Since a central plotline of
Taxi Driver
had been the determination of a loner—Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro—to assassinate a politician, this was the course Hinckley decided upon in his quest to prove to Foster his devotion. After leaving New Haven, Hinckley first fixed on the idea of shooting Jimmy Carter and, following him to Nashville, back in early October, wound up arrested instead on a concealed weapons charge. After paying a fine of $62.50, he was released.

• • •

On March 30, 1981, at two thirty in the afternoon, a lunch being given by the National Conference of the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO in the International Ballroom of the Washington Hilton was just ending. The event’s speaker had been Ronald Reagan, who’d launched into his speech at 2:03 p.m. Among the topics were the deficit, his tax-cutting agenda, his determination to reduce federal regulations, and the intensive military buildup he planned. He also told the audience,
“I hope you’ll forgive me if I point with some pride to the fact that I’m the first President of the United States to hold a lifetime membership in an AFL-CIO union”—which in his case was the Screen Actors Guild.

As soon as he’d finished speaking, Reagan left the building
by the side exit on T Street to approach the waiting presidential motorcade—where, nearby, John Hinckley was lying in wait. Raising a .22-caliber revolver, he fired six shots. One hit James Brady, the president’s press secretary. Another wounded D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty. A third struck Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy. Although Hinckley missed hitting President Reagan directly, one of the bullets ricocheted off the presidential limousine and entered President Reagan’s lung, lodging approximately an inch from his heart.

Following the Secret Service rule of “cover and evacuate,” Jerry Parr, who’d been standing right behind Reagan, grabbed him and shoved him onto the backseat of the waiting limo, then jumped on top of him.
“Let’s get out of here,” he yelled to the driver. “Haul ass!”

Here’s Reagan’s account from his journal of those harrowing moments:

My day to address the Bldg. & Const. Trades Nat. Conf. A.F.L.-C.I.O. at the Hilton Ballroom—2 P.M. Speech not riotously received—still it was successful. Left the hotel at the usual side entrance and headed for the car—suddenly there was a burst of gun fire from the left. SS Agent pushed me onto the floor of the car & jumped on top. I felt a blow in my upper back that was unbelievably painful. I was sure he’d broken my rib. The car took off. I sat up on the edge of the seat almost paralyzed by pain. Then I began coughing up blood which made both of us think—yes I had broken a rib & it had punctured a lung. He switched orders from W.H. to Geo. Wash. U. Hosp.

Here’s
White House detail chief Parr’s statement to the FBI:

We were, I suppose, three or four feet from the limousine when I heard what sounded like firecrackers or a small caliber weapon. I heard one shot. There was a short interval then three or four other shots. My reaction was instantly to shove the President forward into the limousine.

. . . at Dupont Circle he started spitting up this blood—profuse amounts of red, bright red, frothy blood. And I thought, “Well, what would cause that? Maybe landing on top of him cracked a rib. Maybe I punctured a rib.”

We really were moving quite rapidly at that time. The president said, “I’m having trouble breathing and I think I cut the inside of my mouth.”

Suddenly Agent Parr noticed an alarming change in the injured man’s condition: Reagan’s lips were turning blue. From his training, Parr knew this indicated bleeding in the lung. Recognizing the perilous situation, he knew it would waste precious time continuing on to the White House. “I think we should go to the hospital,” Parr told the president.

“Okay,” Reagan agreed. Though he’d recoiled at hearing the gunshots at the Hilton, he hadn’t even realized at first he’d been hit, and was obviously in shock, though alert. And so Parr directed the driver now to change course and turn west, making for George Washington University Hospital.

Barely three minutes after leaving the Hilton, the speeding motorcade screeched to a halt in front of the emergency room doors. “This is the president!” yelled Parr. It was a magnificent execution of duty. There’s almost no question that Jerry Parr’s quick thinking was what saved his wounded companion’s life.

The rest of the performance upon their arrival was pure Reagan.
Despite the high stakes and the very clear danger, it took a veteran showman to understand so beautifully the role he now needed to play, knowing that the front-row audience would be his country. He was determined to walk through the doors of the hospital under his own strength. More remarkably, even now he stopped to chat with people standing outside the building. But Reagan’s determination could carry him only through the hospital doors. Twenty feet inside, Paar saw his eyes suddenly roll back in his head and he collapsed. He and another agent caught him before he reached the floor. Despite the brio he exhibited, the president had lost 50 percent of his blood supply through internal bleeding and now would require a surgeon’s skills to extract the unexploded slug resting precariously near his heart.

“Honey, I forgot to duck,” he confessed sheepishly upon spying his distraught wife, Nancy, who’d been rushed to his side. No one minded that he’d taken this one from Jack Dempsey, who’d said the same thing after losing the 1926 heavyweight title to Gene Tunney. He then topped it with his quip to the medical team about to operate on him. “I hope you’re all Republicans,” he said before succumbing to the anesthesia.

• • •

Within a week of the attempt on his life, President Ronald Reagan seemed to be going about the business of running the country, issuing new proposals on such issues as air quality and auto safety regulations. That at least is the story the public was getting. The truth was far scarier. The country’s leader was in far worse condition—a reality Jim Baker and the others around him decided should be kept from the American people and the world.

This alone became a challenge.
Baker learned that Senator
Strom Thurmond, the aging Dixiecrat-turned-Republican, had talked his way past hospital officials into Reagan’s presence. This had infuriated Nancy Reagan, which prompted Baker to assign Max Friedersdorf to take charge 24/7 of keeping the president from being disturbed.

“Jim called me with the story,” Friedersdorf reported. “Told me to get over to the hospital and stay in the president’s room and make sure no one, despite any credentials or rank, got into the sickroom.”

Jim Baker, ever strategic, had ruled that the first representative of official Washington to visit the convalescing president would be the leader of the opposition. Eventually, after several days, once Reagan was able to start receiving approved company, the first person to be admitted to his bedside was Tip O’Neill.

“I was in the room on my chair where Baker had posted me,” is how Friedersdorf remembers it. When the Speaker came in, “he nodded my way and walked over to the bed and grasped both the president’s hands, and said ‘God bless you, Mr. President.’

“The president still seemed groggy . . . with lots of tubes and needles running in and out of his body. But when he saw Tip, he lit up and gave the Speaker a big smile, and said ‘Thanks for coming, Tip.’ Then, still holding one of the president’s hands, the Speaker got down on his knees and said he would like to offer a prayer for the president, choosing the Twenty-third Psalm. ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . . ’ ” It seemed clear to Friedersdorf, witnessing the encounter, that Reagan, though weak, was paying attention. “He recited part of the prayer with the Speaker in almost a whisper.”

Once they’d finished, the Speaker let go of the president’s hand,
stood up, and bent to kiss him on the forehead.
“ ‘I’d better be going,’ he told the patient. ‘I don’t want to tire you out.’ ” During this privileged visit to GW Hospital, Tip saw firsthand the reality of Reagan’s condition. Like the rest of the country, he’d been led to believe the president was experiencing a robust recovery. Instead he found himself kneeling within inches of a seventy-year-old man lying there in great pain.

The Speaker had been asked by the White House not to comment on the president’s condition.
“I suspect that in the first day or two after the shooting he was probably closer to death than most of us realized,” he later said. “If he hadn’t been so strong and hardy, it could have been all over.”

The week before the shooting Reagan and Nancy had spent the evening at Ford’s Theatre. The benefit was for a cause important to Millie O’Neill, its chairwoman. The two couples sat together in the first row. Captured on videotape taken that night, the president and the Speaker can be seen laughing and enjoying themselves while a juggler-comedian performs with antic precision on the stage, his long knives whirling barely an arm’s length away in front of them. I can remember Tip talking in the office about his uneasiness at those knives flying so close.

Yet Reagan had glimpsed a shadow there in Ford’s Theatre.
“I looked up at the presidential box above the stage where Abe Lincoln had been sitting the night he was shot and felt a curious sensation. . . . I thought that even with all the Secret Service protection we now had, it was probably still possible for someone who had enough determination to get close enough to a president to shoot him.” Tip O’Neill, who’d greeted Reagan at the street door that night, would say later that he, too, actually had had the same thought, undoubtedly inspired by the historic surroundings
and suddenly realizing how vulnerable Reagan—as president—was.

Ronald Reagan had dodged death, but only narrowly. He would return to the White House the same but different, changed by this close brush with his own mortality. The causes that had mattered so deeply to him in the past now became his life’s abiding purpose.

“Go West, young man.”

—H
ORACE
G
REELEY

Tip O’Neill viewed Ronald Reagan as a man who’d gotten ahead in life by virtue of the enviable gifts—good looks, athleticism, a voice made for the broadcast booth or the cowboy movie—bestowed on him at birth. What bugged the Speaker so much about the former California governor and movie star was the belief that handsome guys like his new rival had to have had it easy, and being handsome
and
having it easy was an affront to those who weren’t and didn’t.

Yet in life, just as in the movies, the illusion is everything. When you’re seeing the finished, glossy production, as Tip was, you’re not
rooting around for the discarded scenes. As any student of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s origins knows, the script for the future president’s story threw plenty of obstacles in his way early on.

He’d come into the world
in Tampico, Illinois, a hamlet around one hundred miles west of Chicago.
Over the next seven years the Reagans moved five times in Illinois, including a stint in Chicago itself, but eventually returned to Tampico, where they lived above the local variety store until young Ron—
nicknamed “Dutch” (“he looks like a fat Little Dutchman,” his father said of the newborn)—
was nine.
Now they moved again, to the much larger town of Dixon.
His father, Jack, a salesman, proved a not so able provider, and keeping two growing boys fed was often a struggle for Nelle, his mother.
Neil Reagan, Reagan’s older brother and only sibling, remembered being sent out for a ten-cent soup bone; it would have to stretch through an entire week of dinners. In ways like this Nelle Reagan continually put her natural optimism to work for her, a trait she’d pass on to her second son.

The family situation wasn’t helped by the fact that
Jack Reagan drank too much, suffering—and forcing his wife and children to suffer—from what his younger son would term
“the Irish curse.”
Reagan would write, painfully, of having returned home one afternoon to the sight of his father sprawled out on the front porch, a spectacle for the neighbors to see, judge, and share. And yet the difficulties of his home life didn’t prevent Dutch Reagan from
playing varsity football his last two years—though passionately determined, he’d been too small until then—and being popular
enough to be elected Dixon High student body president when he was a senior.
He was also president of the Dramatic Club.

As he entered his late teens, Reagan looked past his family and its difficulties to begin taking charge of the future he wanted for
himself, a path that would test both his ambition and his ingenuity.
Setting out to convince Eureka College to help with the costs of his education—it was 1928, the year before the Great Depression began—he did the job so well they wound up offering a scholarship fully covering his tuition as well as half his board. To pay for the difference he worked as a “hasher,” serving meals,
first for a fraternity, later at a girls’ dorm.