I think this is the end of our little walks in the park.
—JOURNAL, JAN. 10, 1992
The First Lady did not take the President’s surprise announcement at all well.
I received a call from Mrs. O’Dwyer the next morning at eight, when the President and First Lady usually took breakfast. She was in a state.
“Mis-ter Wadlough,” she said. I always got the feeling she held me personally responsible for the goings-on in the residence. “I’m very sorry if they’re not getting along, but I won’t have the crockery being thrown about. It’s not their house, after all, is it? It belongs to the—”
“Mrs. O’Dwyer,” I said peremptorily, for I was in no mood for one of her lugubrious sermons, “what exactly is going on?”
She hooted and told me that, to judge from the sound of it, the President and First Lady were experiencing marital trauma.
“What are they saying to each other?”
“I am not in the habit of eavesdropping.”
“Well, are they shouting?” I said. “Can you hear that?”
“I can tell you this, Mr. Wadlough: she isn’t a bit pleased that he’s running again. And if you ask me—”
“I did not ask you, Mrs. O’Dwyer.”
“Well, it isn’t proper. She may be a young woman, and I can’t speak for what being in the film world does to you. All the world may be a stage, but I’ve been here since Mr. and Mrs. Nixon and I’ve never witnessed such displays as these, and I don’t care to witness any more.”
“Thank you, Mrs. O’Dwyer.” I’d be glad to see to it you don’t, you impossible woman, I thought.
Gloomy premonitions crowded in on me. I’d known Mrs. Tucker would not be pleased by his decision to run again, but, as anxious as she was for him to quit politics, she was a strong woman and a good wife and I was sure she’d “stand by her man,” as the country-western singers put it.
She and Firecracker left for New York that morning on the 10:30 New York Air flight. She could have been flown by Air Force Jet Star. Oh, I thought, that is not a good sign.
She spent the next three days at the Sherry Netherland. She would not accept the President’s phone calls. This was a tense period for the senior staff, and a difficult one personally for the President.
Christmas was over, so we could hardly announce that she had gone on another shopping trip. Feeley told the President it would seem “too Republican.” We put out the story that she was simply on a “private visit.” I made several secret trips up to New York, carrying messages back and forth between them. At the President’s insistence, I wore a disguise—that same vexatious, scratchy beard I had worn during one of our Cuban trips. My hair had also been sprayed gray. Not recognizing me, the First Lady’s Secret Service detail wrestled me to the ground outside her suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, putting me in a foul humor.
The First Lady was unresponsive to my entreaties, but at no point attacked me physically, which I took to be a good sign. Her anger with her husband was pronounced. She felt betrayed by his decision to run again. I said that throughout history a number of great leaders had kept matters of state secret even from their wives. She was unresponsive to this argument. When I said that Thomas Tucker had a chance to be remembered as a great President, but only if he had another term in which to fulfill his greatness, she became antagonistic in her response.
In fairness, I could understand her position. On the other hand, the prospect of her making a film during the re-election campaign was unappealing in the extreme. I argued with her forcefully. Let me be frank: I begged her to return.
I think if it had not been for the events of January 9, she might not have returned to the White House.
Bamford Lleland writes in his memoir: “The timing of Hamchuk Hartoonian’s attack on the President was so favorable, in terms of the marital crisis, as to be propitious. Herb Wadlough, who in addition to his role as White House baggage handler and food taster had also been given the job of trying to cajole Mrs. Tucker back to Washington, was positively jubilant over the incident, since it solved his immediate problem. We chided him afterwards, congratulating him on his ‘coup’ in masterminding the attack. As usual, poor Herb failed to see the humor in the remark.”
I do not propose to comment on these smug, untrue, and libelous remarks, except to say that among my failings is a failure to find anything “humorous” in attempted assassinations of the President of the United States by Commandos of the Armenian Genocide. At Harvard, perhaps, such incidents are considered “good sport.”
I was, in fact, returning from one of my undercover missions when the attack took place. I was aboard the 6:30 p.m. New York Air flight to Washington. (My Air Force Jet Star had developed a mechanical problem on the ground in New York, so I had been forced to return on a commercial flight.) At 7:02 the pilot’s voice came on and announced, with what I thought was indecent calm, that the President had just been shot. I wish I could report that the atmosphere aboard the 727 was stunned and grief-stricken, but all I recall is the fellow next to me asking if I knew any good hotels in Washington.
I presented myself to a stewardess in the front and told her I was White House deputy chief of staff and had urgent need of a telephone. She looked at me dubiously and asked for identification.
Since I was known to the guards at the White House, I’d long ago gotten out of the custom of carrying my White House carnet. Grumbling that I was surprised she did not know my name, I offered her my driver’s license.
She looked at it, then at me, then back at it. It was then I remembered I was incognito.
She was now regarding me with some alarm. I told her to summon the pilot immediately, whereupon she told me to return to my seat. I became somewhat indignant—understandably—and demanded to speak with the captain.
It is true, as the press accounts of the incident related, that I yanked off my beard at that point. It is not true, as those same reports allege, that I became “hysterical.” Certainly I was forceful—anyone in my position would have been. At any rate, moments later I found my arms being pinioned behind me by several burly passengers and the co-pilot was speaking to me in tones indicating that he thought he was addressing a person of deranged mind. Thus I was incommunicado until we arrived on the ground and the White House driver Mrs. Metz had sent to meet me made my identity clear to the FBI agents who had been sent to arrest me.
On the drive to the hospital I called the First Lady. The White House operator told me she was already en route to Washington.
The scene at George Washington University Hospital was chaotic, the security tighter than I had ever seen it. Sniper teams were already in place on the rooftop. A helicopter was circling. I made my way through a long corridor toward the emergency room. Outside were agents with German shepherds and drawn Uzis. A nurse was arguing with one of the dog handlers. A large black man on a gurney who appeared to have been shunted aside in the general excitement, and who, from the sound of it, had ingested no small amount of controlled substances, was expressing his dissatisfaction with the arrangements.
I moved as if in a daze through the emergency room. The operating area is in the back. I saw Colonel Frye, the President’s military aide. I recognized Rod Holloway, wearing a surgical gown. Major Arnold was also there. Rod brought me up to date.
The President had decided, without any warning, to take one of his walks in Lafayette Park. He’d allowed only one other agent besides Rod to accompany him. To the horror of the two agents, he decided to go talk to the permanent protesters on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the park. He’d just engaged a few of these specimens in conversation when Hartoonian sprang out from behind and began firing. Jake Thompson, the second agent, brought down the swarthy Armenian with one shot, but not before the assailant had gotten off three rounds with his Smith and Wesson .41 magnum.
One of Hartoonian’s shots hit the President, passing through the left bicep muscle and grazing his side. From there it passed through two placard-carrying supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment. Extremely unfortunate. The other round pierced the roof of a D.C. city bus, exited, and lodged in the northeast cornice of the Old Executive Office Building.
An agent led me into an examining room they had converted into a recovery room. I heard a nurse’s voice: “Please, Mr. President. I must ask you to put that out. It’s dangerous to smoke in here.”
The President was propped up in bed. His upper right arm was bandaged. An IV was dripping into his ankle. His left arm was folded behind his head. His eyes looked a bit glassy—from the anesthetic, I guessed. A cigarette hung at a forty-five-degree angle from the left side of his mouth. By way of response to the nurse’s entreaties, he winked and asked for a cup of coffee, black.
“Got to stay alert,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “in case of attack.”
“In case Reigeluth tries to have me declared dead.” He shook his head. “Where is he anyway?”
“On his way back from Manitoba, sir,” said Colonel Frye. “Air Force Two will wheels-down at Andrews half an hour from now.”
“Well, tell him to turn around. I’m all right.”
“Mr. President,” I said, “we can’t do that. It wouldn’t look right.”
“Well, tell him no interviews. I don’t want him impressing everyone with how calm and in control he is in a crisis. This is my crisis, dammit, and I intend to enjoy it.”
I went off to check with Feeley and see how the press end of things was going. He had been answering questions for an hour.
“Half an hour,” he said. “If she’s not here in half an hour, it’s going to be a fucking disaster. That’s all they want to know. Why isn’t she at his side?”
I told him she was on her way.
“What? In a blimp? He was shot two hours ago. He could have had a goddam liver transplant in this time.”
I said that, all things considered, we were lucky she was even coming.
He said that from a women’s-vote point of view it couldn’t be worse. The President’s wife off in New York pursuing a film career, and two ERA supporters seriously perforated. “On the other hand,” he allowed, “this is going to mean a jump in the approval ratings of fifteen points.”
I chided him for thinking of such a thing at a time like this. But Feels was pure politics.
He went on to say we would have to “control” the medical reports. “I don’t want this thing played as a scratch. This was a close call with death.”
“It does appear to be a flesh wound,” I said. “But those poor ERA ladies—”
“Herb,” he said, “this is our crisis. We earned it.” He said we should talk to Dr. Lawrence Saladino, the attending physician.
Saladino, a cheerful and highly competent ex-Navy doctor from Brooklyn, told us that, as far as he was concerned, the President could leave the next morning. The arm and chest wounds were “essentially superficial,” he said.
“Superficial?” said Feeley.
Dr. Saladino nodded and described how lucky the President was.
Feeley frowned. “And you’re saying he could leave tomorrow?”
“Sure,” said the doctor. “He’d be more comfortable there anyway.”
Feels looked depressed and said darkly he was sure Saladino was a Republican.
I told him we should be giving thanks to the Good Lord it wasn’t more serious. He did not respond to this line of thought.
“The way it’s going,” he said, “ERA is going to get more out of this than we are.”
In the elevator he said to me: “Pray for complications.”
Feeley tried hard to persuade Major Arnold to get the President transferred to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he thought the military doctors might be less “release-happy,” as he put it. Major Arnold was all for transferring him, but the President, who had taken a liking to Dr. Saladino, refused—despite the political advantages, which Feeley made quite clear to him—and said he wanted to go home.
The First Lady arrived a few minutes after nine. Feeley had prepositioned a White House photographer outside the President’s door, so the first moments of their reunion were recorded in the famous photograph. It is just as well, since the second moments were of a less tender nature, what with her berating the President for his historic decision to run again. But at least she was back in Washington. The late Hamchuk Hartoonian had accomplished that much, as well as the subsequent passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, of course.