A mending President must confront some bruising battles
"It was, I must say, the most paralyzing pain. . . as if someone had hit you with a hammer." Thus did the nation's premier convalescent describe last week just what it felt like to have been shot in the chest. Admitting that the assassination attempt a month ago "still seems unreal," Ronald Reagan recalled that at first he thought he had been hurt only by being shoved into the limousine by Secret Service Agent Jerry Parr. "When I suddenly found I was coughing up blood, we both decided that maybe I'd broken a rib and punctured a lung." On the way to the hospital, he began having trouble breathing. "The more I tried to breathe, it kept seeming as if I was getting less air. You know that panic that you can get if you're strangling on something." Only after arriving at the hospital did Reagan learn that he had been shot.
The President recounted those scary moments in a 19-minute interview—his first since the assassination try—held with James Gerstenzang of the Associated Press and Helen Thomas of United Press International in the White House family quarters. Acknowledging that he still felt pain "constantly" in his chest, he assured the reporters that he was feeling a little better each day. Joked Reagan: "I don't think I'm going to hurdle any tables here in the room for a while, but really, the recovery is astonishing to me." As for would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr., who last week was taken from a federal prison in Butner, N.C., to Duke University Medical Center, in Durham, for four hours of medical tests, Reagan said: "He seems to be a very disturbed young man. I hope he'll get well too."
Though he may not have been hurdling any tables, Reagan was gradually easing himself back into his job. He placed two dozen or so calls during the week to Congressmen and others to lobby for their support of his economic program. Assisted by Speechwriter Ken Khachigian, he began drafting the address he will deliver this week to a joint session of Congress. He read briefing papers daily and even found time to dip into a book chronicling the physical ailments of previous White House occupants. He also met with eight Governors—seven Republicans and one Democrat, Forrest James of Alabama—for nearly an hour. One participant, Richard Thornburgh of Pennsylvania, said later: "The President in my view looks in fighting trim."
Reagan needs to be in the best of shape, since he now faces a number of possible skirmishes with Congress, any one of which could blow up into a major battle. The Administration faces a host of nettlesome foreign policy issues on which it seems not to have any clear policy: arms control talks, Middle East peace negotiations, relations with South Africa. These could explode at any time, but most of the problems confronting the Reaganauts are of the domestic variety. Foremost is Congressional passage of the President's economic package, but other issues may also prove troublesome for the Administration. Among them: