Zero fail, p.16
Zero Fail, page 16
In Trauma Room 5, several doctors rushed in to assess the president, who had collapsed into agents’ arms after walking in the emergency room entrance. They thought he might have had a heart attack. Parr felt sick when he heard one nurse say she couldn’t get a pulse reading. The unconscious patient’s blood pressure was dangerously low. A thought flashed through his mind: This must be how JFK’s agents felt at Parkland Memorial.
Then nurses cut Reagan’s blue suit from his frame with big utility shears. George Washington’s trauma surgeon, Joseph Giordano, scanned the president’s chest. Aided by a surgical intern who had seen plenty of bullet wounds in Vietnam, they found the bullet’s well-concealed entry point under Reagan’s left arm. It was a tiny slit. They couldn’t see the bullet yet, but they could tell it had been flattened. It must have ricocheted off something hard. They were lucky they figured it out as soon as they did.
* * *
—
STANDING IN THE trauma bay, Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver helped relay the early, chaotic reports from GW to the White House. He had absorbed a painful lesson: Two seconds of gunfire could ring out on any downtown Washington street and wreak havoc.
Within minutes of his arrival, Deaver had called Chief of Staff Jim Baker and deputy Ed Meese to report what had happened at the Hilton. He told them White House spokesman Jim Brady and a Secret Service agent had been hit by the shooter’s gunfire. Luckily, he said, the president sustained only a bruised rib.
But then one of Reagan’s doctors emerged into the trauma bay with news. In five minutes, Deaver got back on the open White House line with a far grimmer report. “It looks like the president has been nicked,” he said. Reagan was also losing blood rather rapidly, he added.
As Deaver held the receiver, a team wheeled through the trauma bay with a stretcher carrying Jim Brady. He sighed a bit seeing his grossly swollen head. “He’s in very bad shape,” Deaver explained.
Deaver urged Baker and Meese to go find Mrs. Reagan in the residence and persuade her not to come to the hospital. Too much blood, Deaver said, too much chaos. They agreed and sent someone to the residence. They didn’t realize that the First Lady had already left.
Less than ten minutes later, Deaver was shocked to see Mrs. Reagan, in her red raincoat, bursting into the trauma bay. Special Agent Opfer trailed behind.
“He’s been hit,” Deaver told Mrs. Reagan.
“But they told me he wasn’t hit,” she said.
“Well, he was. But they say it’s not serious,” he said.
“Where?” she demanded. “Where was he hit?”
“They don’t know. They’re looking for the bullet now.”
Mrs. Reagan had heard enough. “I’ve got to see him!” she said.
Deaver was afraid of precisely what she might see. The First Lady didn’t know it, but her husband had lost consciousness and was losing blood quickly, and doctors weren’t entirely sure how to stop it.
Deaver told her he needed to check with the doctors first. He needed a place to park her for a few minutes. The deputy found a small hospital office and a familiar, fatherly face that he knew could provide her some comfort: John Simpson of the Secret Service.
* * *
—
JOHN SIMPSON, ONE of the two Secret Service agents with the closest bonds to President Reagan, had arrived at the hospital with a high-speed police escort. Simpson was the assistant director over all protective operations, and he had been getting a physical that day at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He didn’t hear about the shooting, because the radio in his car wasn’t working. The Secret Service sent out an alert to local police asking them to track down Simpson’s car using his license plate numbers, stat. A trooper with flashing lights pulled him over on Rockville Pike.
“Sir, they need you right away,” he said. “The president’s been shot.” With that, they hightailed it to George Washington University Hospital.
Reagan wasn’t just any protective assignment to Simpson. The Boston native had forged a special bond with the First Couple, dating back to when Reagan had first campaigned for the White House in 1968 and Simpson headed his detail. Simpson was short, with a compact, athletic build. His feathery white hair added to his general aura of gravitas. He had mentored many of the agents in the Service, who looked up to him for modeling quiet strength and personal integrity. He wasn’t a puritan, but he frowned on agents who drank heavily and chased women. Simpson was the former head of President Carter’s detail and had handpicked many of the agents leading the protection team for the Reagans, including DeProspero and Opfer.
When he arrived at the hospital, Simpson first tracked down Parr to learn more about what happened at the Hilton. He worried that Parr looked a little wide-eyed, but Parr insisted he was fine. Simpson met with DeProspero in an empty hospital office that had become a small command post. They went over the ring of security he had set up around the hospital with the help of extra Metropolitan Police officers. DeProspero gave a status report on agents’ efforts to locate and secure some key people under their protective wing—the Reagan children, the Bush family. They had to consider the possibility that this could be part of a broader attack on the country.
Now in a small empty office with the First Lady, Simpson reminded Mrs. Reagan how hale and hearty her husband was. The president was going to be fine, he told her.
“I just knew he was an extremely strong individual. His faith, physically,” Simpson later recalled. “If anybody is going to make it, it will be him.”
The surgeons, however, were just now discovering that a flattened Devastator slug—a bullet designed to shatter upon impact in order to cause maximum damage—had punctured Reagan’s lung. This one hadn’t shattered, however, and they had to operate to get that bullet out and find the source of his steady bleeding. They wheeled him into surgery at roughly 3 p.m.
* * *
—
SIMPSON PULLED ON green scrubs and joined Parr toward the back of a large operating suite. The two sentries stood watch for the next three hours. Two things struck the Secret Service men. First, they were in awe of the two surgeons, a middle-aged man and a younger female resident, who refused to give up the hunt for the flattened slug and the source of the bleeding. And they noticed the bags of blood hanging next to the operating table that the nurses kept replacing. The president had lost nearly half the blood in his body before the surgeons found a nick in a slender artery under his lung and stitched it shut.
“I prayed all the prayers I knew from being Catholic,” Simpson recalled of that day. “The Lord’s Prayer. Hail Mary. You name ’em, I did ’em.”
* * *
—
THE PRESIDENT SURVIVED his surgery. Despite the doctors’ and nurses’ nagging fears that Reagan had been close to dying when he was on the operating table, Reagan’s surgeon concluded the next morning that he would make a full recovery. The lives of so many people who had been helping protect him that day would be forever changed, though. The bullet that struck James Brady would leave him permanently disabled. Parts of his mind still worked fine, but the wiring connecting them had been severed. He laughed at sad news and cried on happy occasions. He remembered that he “answered questions for a living” but didn’t know for whom. But Brady had lived, thanks to the fierce insistence of White House advance man Rick Ahearn. He demanded that the ambulance driver change course from a trauma hospital and take Brady to the closest one, GW.
McCarthy would fare the best. Doctors removed the bullet from his chest, and he was able to visit and talk with his family a few hours later.
At Washington Hospital Center across town, doctors initially chose to leave the bullet in Officer Delahanty’s neck to reduce risk of more damage. But three days later the FBI lab alerted the medical team that it was a Devastator bullet and could explode at any time. They consulted with Delahanty, who agreed to another surgery to remove it. He suffered nerve damage and retired early.
Jerry Parr’s wife, Carolyn, survived the shock of her life that day. She worked as a lawyer in the building across from the Hilton. At her husband’s suggestion, she had come out onto T Street to see the president leave. As the shots rang out and the limo sped away, one woman’s shrieks could be heard above all the male agents barking instructions. Carolyn Parr ran across the street, straight toward the bloodied sidewalk and an agent brandishing an Uzi. “My husband! My husband!” she wailed, thinking hers was one of the men on the ground. “My husband is Jerry Parr.”
The agent who had grabbed the Uzi in case of more attacks realized who she was. “He’s in the car!” he yelled over the noise, pointing in the direction the limo had headed. “He’s with the Man!”
Back in her office, Carolyn Parr called the command post at W-16 to check on him. Jerry Parr had gone straight into surgery with Reagan and never had time to call her. The agents told her they thought Jerry was okay. She hurried that afternoon to reach their three daughters before they heard any news of Secret Service agents being shot. Their father was fine, she said. The two older ones broke down on the phone, having already heard about the shooting at the Hilton. Their mother kept her voice steady. She didn’t want to reveal just how badly the scene outside the hotel had shaken her.
A worried co-worker drove Carolyn Parr home. As she crossed through the laundry room to enter their house, the agent’s wife stopped in her tracks and broke down in tears. Her husband’s bulletproof vest hung on a hook in front of her.
* * *
—
“ARE YOU OKAY, Jerry?” the assistant director asked Parr.
John Simpson could sense the adrenaline still pumping through the detail leader. They had left the operating room after the lead surgeon told them the president was no longer losing blood. While Reagan wasn’t out of the woods yet, his condition had stabilized. The two men now stepped into the Secret Service’s makeshift command center in an office of the hospital’s intensive care unit. It was the first time Parr had a chance to sit down. The shooting had occurred nearly four hours ago.
“What happens now?” Parr asked.
Simpson sketched out the basics: The FBI would investigate the attempt on Reagan’s life. The Service would do its own internal review to see whether any of its security plans had unknown gaps or had failed. Parr would be placed on a brief administrative leave to be evaluated for physical and psychological shock. Simpson felt Parr had performed impeccably, but he was glad at that moment for a reason to make Parr take a break.
Parr had one more thing to do before heading home. He walked back to W-16 to write his statement, a first-person account of everything that had happened that day, while it was still fresh in his mind. When he finished typing up several pages of notes—from assigning the advance security plan five days before to carrying a collapsed president through the emergency room doors—it was after nine o’clock. It finally dawned on Parr that he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. He trudged to the White House mess. There he found Ed Hickey, a former agent who had been on Reagan’s detail in 1968. He had resigned to run Governor Reagan’s security team and become one of Reagan’s lifelong friends. Now he worked as a White House aide.
“Why don’t we have a drink?” Hickey suggested. Parr drank two glasses of vodka as if they were water. He felt nothing.
“I think you saved the president’s life,” Hickey told the agent.
Parr was surprised. He had agonized in little fitful moments in the hospital about what he might have done wrong. He hadn’t stopped to think about all he had done right.
CHAPTER 8
BATTENING DOWN THE HATCHES
While the surgeons were still working to save Ronald Reagan’s life on Monday, March 30, the Secret Service inspectors had already begun the deep inward look at the strength of its force field around the president. Director Stuart Knight and his assistants scanned the news cameramen’s film clips from every angle, freezing each frame for a closer look.
President Reagan had come closer to dying that afternoon than anyone in the White House or the Secret Service wanted to share publicly. But the agents’ snap reflexes and judgment had saved the president. McCarthy had literally taken a bullet for him. The agents had proved the wisdom of the agency’s focus on routinized training after Kennedy’s death. They had cheated an assassin.
Knight took immense pride in their collective performance. The Secret Service, and the administration, rightly applauded them as heroes. “After viewing the video tapes, we believe the presidential protection was as effective as it could possibly be,” spokesman Jack Warner told reporters the next morning. “These guys were competing with a bullet.”
The world, watching the same newsreels, wholeheartedly agreed.
“The Secret Service did an absolutely marvelous job,” Paul Laxalt, the Republican senator from Nevada, said in an interview the next day on NBC’s Today show. “Those close to the situation believe the Secret Service handled itself in exceptional fashion.”
But inside the Secret Service family, agents knew the shooting also revealed a serious weakness in their procedures for taking the president to events. A man with a gun had been able to walk within fifteen feet of the most heavily guarded person in the country and open fire. The Secret Service’s screening for the union members attending the speech inside the Hilton had been far more rigorous.
The First Lady gave Deaver his marching orders the next morning. “Give the Secret Service whatever they need,” she said. “This will never happen again—you see to it.”
“Ronnie could have died!” she reminded Deaver.
In the Secret Service hierarchy, Deaver was closest to John Simpson, the assistant director over protection, whom Deaver had gotten to be friendly with when Simpson ran the detail protecting Reagan in his 1968 campaign for the presidency. Both were hearing directly from the First Lady that she wanted to see the security rules tightened. She didn’t know how they should do it—she just wanted it done. When they were alone, Deaver and Simpson strategized about the next steps they should take to put her—and themselves—at ease. Simpson had in mind a man who had been itching for years to ramp up security at the White House and around the president: Bobby DeProspero. Simpson had mentored him. DeProspero proudly acknowledged his reputation for “overkill” when it came to reducing risk. Bobby D treated protection as a kind of religion.
Jerry Parr, Tim McCarthy, Ray Shaddick, and others had just saved President Reagan’s life. Simpson figured Bob DeProspero could help the Secret Service stop the next bullet from getting so close.
* * *
—
DEPROSPERO, A SON of Italian immigrants who had settled in West Virginia coal country, had grown up wrestling, playing football, and dreaming of being an Air Force pilot. He married his high school sweetheart, Pat, and headed to Travis Air Force Base for training, but an officer erroneously turned him down for flight school because he was missing two molars. DeProspero took a job as a high school biology teacher and wrestling coach in Vienna, Virginia. He was driving home from wrestling practice one afternoon when he heard on the radio that the president had been shot and killed in Dallas. DeProspero’s emotions surprised him. He pulled the car to the shoulder to focus. He felt tears on his cheeks.
One thought kept going through his mind on the roadside: I wonder how the man in charge of his security feels right now.
At the time, DeProspero was coaching the sons of two senior Secret Service agents, including Lem Johns, the head of the president’s detail. They encouraged him to apply for the Service. He got hired in the summer of 1965, one of the two hundred new agents Director Rowley had fought so tirelessly to add to his force. When the twenty-six-year-old had been on the job only nine months, Johns brought DeProspero over to President Johnson’s detail. No rookie had ever joined the elite president’s team that fast. Many of the veterans on the detail looked askance at the rapid promotion of this new favored son.
He couldn’t win the acceptance of most of them, but DeProspero got to study the strange art of security under the man who would become his most important mentor, John Simpson. He watched Simpson sweat over every doorway, highway ramp, and storefront in an advance plan.
With just three years under his belt, DeProspero got a call from headquarters at 4 a.m. one night. It was a history-making assignment. An hour after presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy had been shot in a Los Angeles hotel, President Johnson had summoned Director Rowley to the West Wing. Overnight, the president had ordered that teams of agents begin shadowing all presidential candidates. Roy Kellerman, who had been the detail leader with President Kennedy in Dallas when he was killed and now oversaw operations, called DeProspero, waking him from his sleep with gruff instructions. “Pack your bags. Pack a lot,” Kellerman told DeProspero. “Don’t know where you’re going. Don’t know when you’ll be back.”
DeProspero walked out of his Northern Virginia home in the early light that June morning and didn’t return to his wife, Pat, and two kids until after the November election. In the first six weeks, DeProspero single-handedly crafted the advance security plans for eleven cities where Rockefeller campaigned. It was a record-setting pace for one agent—the equivalent of choreographing a modest-sized high-security wedding every four days.
After Rockefeller dropped out of the race in late July, DeProspero didn’t get sent home. Instead, the Service flew him to Chicago to shield Democratic nominee George McGovern from rock-throwing antiwar protesters gathered for the party’s convention. Pat barely recognized him when he showed up at their front door five months later. Her muscly weightlifter had lost twenty-five pounds.
