Reagan Is Doing Fine

By Kurt Anderson

But he will have to ease back into full-time command

The President's fever was gone and his lung unclogged. Slightly gaunt, but on the mend, he padded last week at half speed around his hospital room. Then at week's end Ronald Reagan was driven in a limousine from George Washington University Hospital back home to the White House. Awaiting him there were some 75,000 letters and telegrams, several meadows' worth of flowers and an even ton of jelly beans.

The national surge of relief may have raised too far and fast expectations about the speed of Reagan's recovery. For at least a month, his presidential duties will remain pared to the minimum, and until well into summer the U.S. may have a part-time Commander-in-Chief.

Says a top aide of his boss: "He knows that he will have to slowly work to get his strength back." Nancy Reagan rushed along the redecoration of the White House solarium in anticipation of her husband's homebound days. The President will probably not leave the family quarters this week, but the only medical care he now requires is penicillin pills, daily checks of his temperature and blood pressure and thrice-weekly chest X-rays. His work load last week was limited to two hours a day. For the time being, Reagan's daily official meetings, outside of those with his staff, will be kept to one or two. Says Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver: "We're going to take it easy."

Fortunately, perhaps, Reagan has always parceled out authority. Even before the shooting, three members of his staff--Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese, Chief of Staff James Baker, and Deaver--had achieved a kind of supereminence. With restrictions on the President's time for months to come, this troika's power will grow more entrenched. It remains to be seen how well this apparatus would serve if events called for a 24-hour-a-day President.

Last week was generous to the convalescing President. There was no festering political problem, no diplomatic crisis--although Reagan did draft a message to Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev warning him against an invasion of Poland. Even if Reagan had not lain wounded, his official obligations would have been slight. One of those chores was rich with irony--Reagan formally proclaimed next Sunday the beginning of Victims' Rights Week. Said the country's most prominent criminal prey: "Only victims truly know the trauma crime can produce."

Reagan described his own victimization to a pair of FBI agents who were piecing together an official picture of the assassination attempt. They were among a stream of visitors who made Reagan's schedule seem chockablock with appointments. Said Hospital Spokesman Dr. Dennis O'Leary: "He likes visitors more than his doctors do." Baker, Deaver and Meese arrived together at 7:15 every morning and spent 15 or 20 minutes supplying a distilled overview of the day's business. Nancy Reagan arrived in time for lunch, and remained at the hospital until 9 at night, slipping in and out between meetings and medical tests. In all, the President received about two dozen well-wishers last week, including Daughter Maureen. Reagan will miss her wedding if it is held as scheduled in Los Angeles next week; meanwhile, he has postponed a state visit to Mexico set for a few days later.

Especially worrisome to Reagan's lieutenants, however, is his absence from the battle for the Administration's economic program. The President was to have gone on the hustings this spring, in state legislatures and citizens' meetings, rounding up popular support for his proposed budget and tax cuts. His convalescence has scrubbed what would have been the campaign's canny opening salvo--Reagan appealing on network television for the tax cut, just as taxes came due. Said one political adviser: "There is no question we are handicapped with the President laid up." The most prominent surrogate campaigner available is Vice President George Bush, who substituted for Reagan in announcing a White House plan to ease air-quality and safety regulations on automobiles (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). But Bush is no match for his boss as a political salesman. Said one uncharitable White House aide: "I forgot how miserable Bush is on television. He's got all the punch of Jerry Ford."

Charismatic or not, Bush continued to acquire respect within the White House as a consummate team player. Said one Reagan intimate: "He has enhanced himself. He didn't rub anybody the wrong way." Indeed, Bush has scrupulously avoided filling in for Reagan when to do so might smack of usurpation: for instance, he sits in his own chair--not the President's--at Cabinet meetings. Nonetheless, Bush has remained unusually well apprised of national security details since Reagan's shooting--more current, in fact, than the hospital-bound President.

Reagan's fellow victims were also on their separate roads to recovery. Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy left the hospital headed for a month's R. and R. in Acapulco. Washington Policeman Thomas Delahanty was not seriously wounded in the shooting. But surgeons last week removed a bullet from his neck, necessitating a longer hospital stay. Delahanty had his homecoming Saturday.

Presidential Press Secretary James Brady, the most gravely injured, was able to sit up and converse last week, doctors said, but may require a year to recuperate. His doctors hope that he will recover the "majority" of his mental capacity and 90% of his physical. But they worry about a "flattening" of his personality, since the bullet partly lobotomized Brady's brain. Said Dr. O'Leary: "It is possible he could walk with a cane. We do not," he added, "expect miracles."

The President, thanks to his remarkable physical constitution, has apparently been spared complications. Besides the six-inch scar on his left side, Reagan's only hospital vestige will be a bill--to be paid by insurance for federal employees injured on the job. --By Kurt Anderson.

Reported by Douglas Brew/Washington

With reporting by Douglas Brew/Washington

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