Shots at the President

Delegates of Nicaragua's Nationalist Liberal Party convened in the steamy town of Leon one day last week and, as usual, picked portly, genial President Anastasio Somoza, for 22 years Nicaragua's unchallenged boss, to be their candidate in next year's election. Flattered and proud, "Tacho" Somoza went that night to mingle with the shirtsleeved crowd in the local Somoza-founded Workers' Club. It was just after 11 o'clock on Sept. 21--Somoza has always thought that 21 was his lucky number--when one of the celebrators pulled a snub-nosed Smith and Wesson .38 revolver and opened fire on the strongman.

Before he got off his fifth shot, Gunman Rigoberto Lopez Perez, 27, was riddled by a deadly fusillade from presidential bodyguards. But he had hit Tacho four times.

The White House Acts. At 1 a.m. U.S. Ambassador Thomas Whelan, a poker-playing personal friend of Somoza, got the news and urgently notified Washington. The White House moved fast. A radio flash to the Panama Canal Zone awakened U.S. doctors, ordered them to fly to Nicaragua. A U.S. helicopter took off to whisk the wounded President back to Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, at first light. Then President Eisenhower, who met Somoza at last July's conference of Presidents in Panama, sent off another plane from Washington carrying Major General Leonard D. Heaton, commanding officer at Walter Reed Hospital and chief surgeon at Ike's recent ileitis operation.

One of the bullets hit Somoza in the right forearm and broke it. Two others lodged painfully in his right shoulder and right thigh. The fourth, Dr. Heaton found, was the most serious: it had entered through the upper right thigh and stopped at the base of the spine. The doctor's recommendation was an operation at the Canal Zone's famed Gorgas Hospital. At 3 a.m. a blue ambulance crept through the lonely, moonlit streets of Managua. Only four hours after Heaton's Constellation reached Managua, it was headed toward Panama with Somoza, his wife, and the task force of doctors. At Gorgas four surgeons, including Heaton, worked for four hours and 20 minutes removing the bullets in the thigh and near the spine.

The Sons Take Over. Gunman Lopez Perez was a slight, short, pencil-mustachioed Nicaraguan who had worked until lately as a salesman of phonograph records in neighboring El Salvador. He could never reveal his motive: witnesses counted 20 bullet holes in his body. But as an occasional contributor to local newspapers, he had left at least one clue that hinted at an obsession for martyrdom. In a piece of literary criticism written ten days before for the Leon Cronista, Lopez Perez said: "Immortality is the aim of life and of glorious death." His acquaintances said that he grumbled incessantly against President Somoza. His act was patently suicidal, and his motive may well have been an itch for self-glorification.

The Nicaraguan Cabinet declared a state of siege, but no sign of revolution appeared to make the shooting seem like part of a large plot. Instead, Somoza's elder son Luis, President of Congress, smoothly took on his father's powers, with the complete support of the chief of the Guardia Nacional (army), Anastasio Somoza Jr.

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