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

Nearly a decade to the day after Denise Sullivan tended to Ronald Reagan during the darkest night of his life, the nurse received a handwritten letter from the former president. “Your hand clasp was one of the most comforting things done for me during my stay,” Reagan wrote, describing his gratitude toward a nurse who hovered by his bedside in the hours after surgeons removed a would-be assassin’s bullet lodged just an inch from his heart.

The letter, which came days after Reagan had been reintroduced to Sullivan at a ceremony naming the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital in the former president’s honor, highlighted the instrumental and often overshadowed role that nurses and technicians played in saving the president’s life after he was shot on March 30, 1981. It was during those tense hours — while inserting IV lines, checking his vital signs and monitoring his breathing — that a small cadre of nurses got an unvarnished glimpse of a president. And, as happens every day in hospitals across the country, it was the nurses who left a lasting impression on their patient.

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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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The nurses’ brush with history began at 2:30 p.m. on March 30, when Reagan arrived at GWU’s emergency room. He had just been hustled away from gunfire outside the Washington Hilton, where three other men — James Brady, his press secretary; Thomas Delahanty, a District police officer; and Tim McCarthy, a Secret Service agent — had been wounded at close range by a young man named John W. Hinckley Jr., who was attempting to assassinate the president. On the race back to the White House in the presidential limousine, it initially seemed that Reagan had not been harmed by any of Hinckley’s six shots. But then the president started spitting up blood and complaining about his breathing. A quick-thinking Secret Service agent, Jerry Parr, diverted the armored Lincoln to the hospital, where Reagan insisted on walking into the ER.

Kathy Paul Stevens was one of the first nurses to see the president as he hobbled through the doors. He looked ashen and very sick, and suddenly collapsed into the arms of nurses and agents. To Stevens and other medical personnel, Reagan looked like he might die. While tending to the president, Stevens’s hands shook, and only one thought went through her head: Please don’t die, please don’t die, please don’t die. Not here. Not today. Please don’t die.

Another nurse, Wendy Koenig, battled back tears as she strapped an inflatable cuff on the president’s arm to ascertain his blood pressure. But she couldn’t hear anything through her stethoscope.

“I can’t get a systolic pressure,” Koenig said in near panic while other nurses and technicians sliced off Reagan’s new blue suit and hooked up IV lines that would provide critical fluids to help prevent the president from slipping into shock. Finally, Koenig got a reading: around 60 — very low for a man whose normal blood pressure was 140.

Surgeons arrived and soon discovered a bullet wound in Reagan’s left chest, about five inches below his armpit. A doctor inserted a tube to drain blood, which poured into a container. As the tube relieved the pressure in Reagan's chest, he began to feel a bit better. At one point, after being told he was going to the operating room, Reagan turned to a technician, Cyndi Hines, who worked alongside the ER nurses. “What do you think?” the president asked her.