30 years later, nurses recall their role in saving Reagan’s life

Hines, who had inserted a IV line into Reagan’s right arm when he arrived, smiled. She was pretty sure she knew what he was really asking: Am I going to be okay, or am I going to die? Patients, afraid to pester the doctors, asked her that question all the time. “I think you are doing all right,” she replied gently. “They are taking you to the OR. If you were really bad, they would be opening you up right here. I really think you are doing fine.”

The president grinned at her through his oxygen mask and was soon wheeled to the operating room, where he would undergo about three hours of surgery to stop his hemorrhaging — he would ultimately lose more than half of his blood — and to retrieve the mangled bullet from his lung. In the recovery room that night, two other nurses — Denise Sullivan and Cathy Edmondson — took over his care. When he struggled with the breathing tube snaking down his throat, they gently admonished him not to touch it; holding his hand, they told him everything would be okay. Eventually, someone gave Reagan a pen and pencil and a clipboard, and the president began jotting notes.

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At 2:27 p.m. on March 30, 1981, a gunman opened fire on Ronald Reagan as the president left the Washington Hilton hotel. An agent, Jerry Parr, pushed him into a limousine that sped from the scene where three other men lay wounded. The president, who would lose just over half of his blood as the day wore on, nearly died. This is a tape recording of the radio calls from the limousine to the Secret Service command post at the White House. "Rawhide" is Reagan's Secret Service codename. "Crown" is the code name for the White House.

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“I keep on breathing?” he wrote at one point.

Yes, the nurses said.

While clearly uncomfortable and struggling to breathe, the irrepressible entertainer couldn’t stop himself from delivering jokes and one-liners. “All in all I would rather be in Phil,” he wrote, reprising a famous W.C. Fields line. Sullivan and Edmondson chuckled. Okay, Sullivan thought, he’s going to make it.

A bit later, the president jotted a final note to Sullivan, a hazel-eyed and petite 34-year-old, just before the end of her shift. “Does Nancy know about us?” he asked in an innocently flirtatious way. A decade later — in writing the letter to Sullivan and thanking her for comforting him — Reagan would confess that he worried his note from a decade earlier may have offended her.

Over the next few hours, two other nurses would take over the president's care — Joanne Bell and Marisa Mize. While Bell monitored his machines and blood pressure, Mize held Reagan’s hand. At one point, she noticed that he was clutching at his breathing tube. While patting the president’s head and reassuring him it was all right to be scared, she persuaded him to relax and to let the machine breathe for him.

Soon, Reagan began writing notes to Mize. “What does the future hold?” the president wrote at one point. Mize, 26, wasn’t quite sure what he meant, nor did she know how to answer. As she thought about how to respond, Reagan scribbled, “Will I be able to do ranch work, ride, etc.?”

“Give yourself three months,” Mize told him, “and you’ll be able to do those things again.”

Other notes were funny.

By about 3 a.m., just over 12 hours after he had been shot, the breathing tube was removed, and Reagan held court for an hour or so, bantering and cracking jokes with a small crowd of doctors and nurses, and his first words were: “What was that guy’s beef?”

An hour later, Bell grew worried that the president wasn’t getting his rest. Deciding it was time to intervene, the no-nonsense nurse placed a wet washcloth over his eyes. “In the most polite way I know how,” she told Reagan, “I’m putting this cover over your eyes, and I want you to shut up and go to sleep."

A few months after the shooting, Reagan began trying to track down the nurses who had comforted him through the difficult night. One afternoon, Mize received a call from the White House, and before long she was on the phone with the president. “You were the one who told me it was okay to be scared and that you wouldn’t leave me,” Reagan said. “Nancy thanks you. God bless you.”

Years later, Nancy Reagan was touring a different hospital where Mize happened to be working. Mize approached the first lady but barely get out an introduction before she was enveloped in a tight hug. “I know who you are, Marisa Mize,” Nancy Reagan said.

This article is adapted from Wilber’s new book, “Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan” (Henry Holt).