President Ronald Reagan came perilously close to death 35 years ago on Wednesday — "and the day was so dramatic, so fast moving, there was no script for it," author Del Quentin Wilber told
Newsmax TV.
"People don't really understand how close Reagan came and how that transformed the president and thus transformed the world," Wilber told "Newsmax Now" host John Bachman.
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Wilber is the author of the 2011 book,
"Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan." Wilber's latest work is
"A Good Month for Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad."
On March 30, 1981, at 2:27 p.m., Reagan "walked out of the Washington Hilton Hotel after giving a rather regular, normal speech — and he was 15 feet away from his limousine and 15 feet away from a crowd when John Hinckley … opened fire, unleashing six shots at the president in 1.7 seconds," Wilber said.
As Reagan underwent surgery at the George Washington University Hospital, his aides — fearing that the president might not make it — fretted feverishly over whether to invoke the 25th Amendment, which would have transferred power to Vice President George H.W. Bush.
"There was such a consequential conversation, one of the most consequential conversations in U.S. presidential history, between Ed Meese and Jim Baker, two of the top aides to Reagan," Wilber told Bachman. "Do we transfer power to the vice president? Do we invoke the 25th Amendment?
"That conversation happened in a broom closet just down the hall from where Reagan was undergoing surgery," he said. "It was that insane."