A Sense of Where We Are

By Roger Rosenblatt

Reflections on a week of anxiety, sadness and outrage

It took a week to get the picture. First came the gasps and "not agains"; then the nation assumed its old too familiar position before the tube, reluctant pros in this business by now, ready to take in the slow-motion replays, the testimony of experts, the edgy reporters, a bloody head, a shot-up limousine, another blank-faced gunman. There was a jumble to sort out. The President was O.K. But then he wasn't. They took him to the White House. No, to a hospital. Was it serious? Not very. Yes, very. Maybe ... And so on through the long Monday afternoon, the emotions buffeted by every bulletin--sinking at the report of White House Press Secretary James Brady's death; rising warily when the report is denied; a freeze at news that the President is undergoing surgery; a thaw when someone repeats a Reagan joke. Who was that fool who asked if the operation was going to be filmed? More questions still--the public's tensions not at all alleviated by the figure of Alexander Haig claiming "I am in control here," in a voice full of jelly.

The press was hard on Haig after the recent who's-in-charge tempest. Suddenly the Secretary of State is playing air raid warden again and rearranging the order of succession to the presidency to suit his pride. Yet he was only trying to do what everyone wanted: to establish order and clear things up. By 7 p.m. there was at least the start of a clearing up. To stage center stepped Dr. Dennis O'Leary of George Washington University Hospital, a gentle, cool customer, another instant media star. Secret Service Agent Timothy J. McCarthy was hit in the stomach, but doing well. D.C. Policeman Thomas K. Delahanty was hit in the shoulder and neck; his condition was stable. A .22-cal. bullet passed through Jim Brady's brain. And the President? He became his chest for the moment: the bullet entered here, bounced off this, settled in that. There was "oxygenation" and a "thoracotomy" and some "peritoneal lavage" to boot.

But was he O.K.? Yes, he was fine, chipper. By nightfall the country was beginning to do some oxygenating of its own.

Within a day or two pieces were beginning to fit, even the weirdest. To the bare fact of the suspect's name, John W. Hinckley Jr., were added the details of a strangely American life, or half life. The son of oil-rich respectability quits school, takes to the road, joins the American Nazi party, but can't make it there.

He has a guitar, of course; drives a tan Plymouth with Texas plates; watches TV in cheap motels where he stops briefly. He is a traveling man. Soft-spoken and polite. He dines on Whoppers and writes love notes to a teen-age movie star at Yale--while going madder by the minute, buying guns and hitting the dream cities of Denver, Nashville, Dallas and L.A., until he arrives by Greyhound at the city of the country's heart, which he is driven to penetrate. So after a while even he becomes real. At week's end one understands not everything, but a lot more than seemed possible on frantic Monday. The people were in control here.

The interesting thing is that people can actually do this; can take a terrifying, chaotic act and eventually make some sense of it. What occurred outside the Washington Hilton was irrational and destructive. Yet the reactions it generated were both sane and helpful; and they were connected to one's best feelings about the country and the Government. When the President was shot, Americans prayed very hard, not for the life of an abstraction, but for a man, one who as leader of the democracy carries some thing of everyone in that mortal chest. If people were ashamed and dismayed that such horrors could continue to happen in a civilized place, they were also proud and relieved that the Gov rnment of that civilized place could not be rattled.

But there were even more basic feelings brought out by Mon day's events. Trust, for one thing: the belief that in spite of all the initial misinformation, the facts would eventually be known. Patience, for another; and a general absence of panic. Faith in science, as the doctors were relied on to tell the country what its future looked like. Faith in God, for those who have it. Faith too in the press, remarkably; the same press that is excoriated as a matter of daily habit, still counted on in a real emergency to get the truth as best it can, as fast as it can -- and to tell it. A sense of national unity, in sadness and anxiety. A sense of outrage at violence. If the U.S. really were as fundamentally violent as it is made out, there would never be such uniform despair and disgust when violence occurred.

Then too there was kinship with the suffering, with Jim Bra dy, especially; old Brady "the Bear," Brady the joker, the poker-faced inventor of Goat Gap Texas Chili and Captain Brady's Nightie Night, who wasn't kidding when he described his new position as "the toughest p.r. job in the world." And kinship with life, with Sarah Brady holding her husband's hand, waiting for the squeeze to be returned.

Such feelings make it possible to survive a week like the last one. They attest to the normalities of our lives, and suggest that in the long run there is a gentleness and decency that pre vails over the berserk flashes and the threats of sudden death.

Yet these shootings leave scars, and they ought to. Why are all these handguns still around? Why can 't creatures like Hinckley be reached before they reach others? When the President en tered the hospital, he told his friend, Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt: "Don't worry about me. I'll make it." By the weekend the country was thinking the same thing, with the same uncertain bravery.

--By Roger Rosenblatt

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.