I remember March 30, 1981 quite well. I had come back to my dorm at
Notre Dame in mid-afternoon for some reason and learned that President Reagan had been shot. On TV, the footage of the shooting was shown over and over, and there wasn't much hard news available besides that. I would have stayed to watch, but I had a physics recitation session to attend. Our professor came in at the start of the session and told us that the President was in surgery. (No, the session wasn't canceled, but, if we'd known how serious Reagan's condition was, it probably
would have been.) That night was
the NCAA championship game between Indiana and North Carolina, and it was touch-and-go right up until game time as to whether the game would be played. By then, Reagan was "out of danger," at least such was the story at the time.
The story of Reagan's survival of
John Hinckley's assault -- which, let it not be forgotten, cut down three other men and would have claimed the President as a fourth victim had it not been for quick action by a Secret Service agent and heroic efforts by a team of medical specialists at
George Washington University Hospital -- finally gets the book-length treatment it has long deserved, thanks to
Wilber. This effort will likely remain the touchstone account of the shooting for some time to come. The book suffers some from the inherent "...and then X happened" weaknesses of "tick-
tock" reporting, but
Wilber does sketch in enough background on
Hinckley and his bizarre crush on
Jodie Foster, Reagan's earliest months in the White House, the key Secret Service and White House personnel, and so forth to prevent the blow-by-blow 3/30/81 narrative from seeming to exist in a vacuum. Wilbur also does a good job of depicting the chaos at the White House as the unprecedented emergency, with its serious
25th Amendment implications regarding the temporary relegation of Presidential duties, unfolded. It's unfortunate that all that people remember of that particularly controversy is the
serio-comic moment of
Alexander Haig declaring himself to be "in control."
If I have one specific criticism to make, it is that
Wilber does not do enough to capture the broader national reaction and impact (apart from news reports, of which
Frank Reynolds' on-screen blow-up over incorrect reports that Reagan's wounded press secretary James Brady had died is certainly the best remembered). The controversy over whether or not to play the
IU-
UNC title game was not a trivial one, raising as it did unpleasant memories of the
NFL's decision to play regular-season games on the weekend of the JFK assassination in 1963. The last Final Four consolation game ever to be played, between Virginia and
LSU, was also allowed to go on, though the stands were all but empty. (John
Feinstein tells this story in some detail in his book
LAST DANCE.) In all other respects, though, the story of what
could have been a very dark day in American history is well-told. This is a valuable addition to the growing literature on the Reagan Presidency and the 1980s in general.
In lieu of typing out my picks for the NCAA Tournament, as I did last year, I'm simply displaying my entry in the ESPN Bracket Challenge. Click on the image for a better view. The slenderest limb onto which I crawled this year was picking Harvard to get to the Elite Eight; I think that Syracuse's loss of its best big man to academic ineligibility gives the Crimson a good puncher's chance of getting past the Orange. Notre Dame is probably good for one win, no more, but that's still a lot better than the sub-NIT fate that seemed to be in store for the Irish after their terrible start.
* Of the electronic persuasion, that is. This is the first book that I've purchased and read on my recently acquired Kindle. Nicky has had one for some time, but, occasional technophobe and full-time nickle-nurser that I am, it took some persuading on her part -- along with a fall in the device's price, of course -- before I was willing to take the plunge. By that time, there was an ulterior motive, as well. Some of you know that I've been working on a book -- a history of the NCAA Basketball Tournament -- since some time between the date of the Earth's cooling and the good Dr. Naismith's finalization of the rules. At least, it seems that long sometimes. In any event, after trying to place the book with several publishers but having no success, I've decided to go the e-route and publish it to Amazon in Kindle-ready format (in parts, to be sure -- it's MUCH too long to be published as a single e-entity). In order to do this the right way, I wanted to make sure that I understood Kindle formatting and other issues related to electronic publication. Getting one of the things seemed like a logical way to start.
I remember March 30, 1981 quite well. I had come back to my dorm at Notre Dame in mid-afternoon for some reason and learned that President Reagan had been shot. On TV, the footage of the shooting was shown over and over, and there wasn't much hard news available besides that. I would have stayed to watch, but I had a physics recitation session to attend. Our professor came in at the start of the session and told us that the President was in surgery. (No, the session wasn't canceled, but, if we'd known how serious Reagan's condition was, it probably would have been.) That night was the NCAA championship game between Indiana and North Carolina, and it was touch-and-go right up until game time as to whether the game would be played. By then, Reagan was "out of danger," at least such was the story at the time.