Seated in a den high in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Jim Brady, known as ”the Bear,” growled.
A ”physical terrorist,” as he calls them, massaged his left leg to bring up the circulation. His wife, Sarah, rushed forward with a comb. ”Let me do your hair, Jim,” she said. ”Leave my hair alone,” Jim snapped. As she turned away, he hooked up her skirt with his cane.
”Whoops,” she said, skittering forward. With a hint of fond annoyance, she added, ”Oh, he does that all the time.”
The Bradys-Jim and Sarah-are on the road these days with ”Thumbs Up: The Life and Courageous Comeback of White House Press Secretary Jim Brady,” by Mollie Dickenson (Morrow, $19.95). None of it has been easy. Not the promotion tour. Not the writing of the book. Certainly not living through an extraordinary medical and human drama, the pulling back from a death that, at one point, was moments away.
Most of the country saw the start of the story. In front of TV cameras, crazed John Hinckley Jr., seeking to impress actress Jodie Foster with a dramatic act, stepped out of a crowd gathered outside the VIP door to the Washington Hilton Hotel, dropped into a combat crouch and fired six bullets. He hit President Reagan, a policeman, a Secret Service agent-and Brady.
The book goes into what the cameras did not show, the grisly physical mess that began inside Brady`s head at 2:27 p.m. on March 30, 1981:
”The bullet hit just above the middle of Jim`s left eyebrow. It exploded upon impact, the only one of the six Devastator bullets to do so. It burst into 20 to 30 fragments, the largest four or five of them continuing on to wind up within the brain itself. Other tiny pieces lodged in the flesh surrounding his eyes and over the bridge of his nose.
”The four or five fragments that entered the bullet hole splintered into tiny pieces as they plowed through the tip of the left front lobe of Jim Brady`s brain. They crossed the midline and continued on through a large portion of the right lobe. The largest fragment ended up in an area of the brain just above Jim`s right ear.
”Jim never heard the gunshots. When he was eight feet away from the press line, the first bullet out of the gun tore into his forehead. He pitched forward, coming close to hitting Hinckley as he fell. His 250 pounds slammed his face partly into the sidewalk and partly into a metal gate that crossed the sidewalk-the grate soon becoming a conduit for the blood from Jim Brady`s wounded brain.
”In his left hand he still held a felt-tip pen. Jim always carried pad and pen for note-taking. This would be the last useful function his left hand could ever perform for him. He had been the president`s press secretary for only 84 days.”
Medics lifted him onto a stretcher, removed his tie, opened his shirt, loaded him into an ambulance and clamped an oxygen mask to his face. ”Jim was aware of what we were doing,” one said later, ”but his head was swelling so fast I was afraid he`d lose his airway before we got him to the hospital.”
The ambulance driver`s instructions were to take the patient to the Washington Hospital Center, four miles away through heavy city traffic. A presidental staffer, riding with Brady, ordered the driver to go to the nearer George Washington University Hospital. The decision saved Brady`s life. Quickly he was put into the hands of Dr. Arthur Kobrine, a professor of neurosurgery.
”I have never seen a face on a patient that grotesque and ugly,”
Kobrine said later. ”Jim`s face was purple. His eyes were purple. His left eye was the size of an egg. His nose was swollen and his lips were swollen. He had abrasions all over his forehead and cheeks.”
Blood and brain tissue, oozing toothpastelike from his wound, dribbled down his face. ”It`s a terrible injury,” Kobrine called out to a colleague. ”I don`t think he`s going to make it, but I think we should try. He is still breathing, and we will operate.”
Meanwhile, at the Brady home on a hillside in Arlington, Va., friends were watching coverage of the unfolding drama when CBS anchor Dan Rather passed along an unconfirmed report that Brady had died. Scott Brady, 2, saw his father`s picture suddenly displayed on television. ”There`s my daddy, there`s my daddy,” he exclaimed. A family friend folded his arms around Scott. He carried him upstairs out of view of the television.
Now, seven years later, Jim Brady, 47, was trading quips in a Chicago hotel room. His wife passed around pictures of son Scott, now 9, on horseback. ”He`s learning to ride, just like his father is,” she said. They talked about difficulties of adjustment-and the problems of writing this book with Washington freelancer Mollie Dickenson.
”If you know Dr. Kobrine, you know he`s a perfectionist,” Brady said.
”Every movement in surgery had to be described to a cat`s meow. Mollie had to learn all that. She had to go to surgery, watch and listen. She was like a dead mackerel afterwards. She`s not a devotee of brain surgery.” In addition, each morning, ”she`d call up with a list of what we called her questiones,” Brady added. ”It was like making minute rice over many months.”
Though one purpose of telling the story was to earn money, both Bradys note that several years ago they turned down a chance for a quick made-for-TV movie. Instead, they wanted a book that would be both medically accurate and offer hope to others who suffer head injuries. The 3 1/2 years they spent with author Dickenson was worth it, they feel.
”Mollie got everything in,” Brady said.
”We knew that someone someday would write this book. We felt we should do it and make it historically accurate,” Sarah Brady added. ”I think we achieved that.”
The comeback of Jim Brady, as he himself noted, speaking slowly but clearly, waiting for thoughts but expressing them well, has been a long, slow process. When home, he is in daily therapy at George Washington Hospital. The routine will continue for the rest of his life ”if I want to continue walking and talking.” But, he added, pausing to look out the window at Chicago`s skyline, ”We want your prayers, not your pity.”
Almost daily, his book recounts, decisions have had to be made that could have long-reaching consequences. One was where to begin the healing.
”Our doctor, Dr. Kobrine, felt that with a head injury the best thing was familiar surroundings,” Sarah said. ”But the thought occurred to me that since Jim was from Chicago maybe he`d be better off here. So at Dr. Kobrine`s suggestion, I called Dr. (Henry) Betts (of Chicago`s Rehabilitation Institute) for a second opinion. Dr. Betts said, `Absolutely not. The best place would be back in his own home. The sooner he could get reoriented with what he was doing previously the better.` ”
Another decision was to include friends, neighbors, work associates and anyone else who cared to join in the recovery process. ”The wider your support circle, the more it helps you,” Sarah said. ”I sat by his bed and read mail to Jim. You don`t let yourself get down when everyone around is being supportive.” She also organized Friday night soirees in his room.
At first, they were uneasy gatherings. Many first-time visitors, devastated by his appearance, talked over or around him. People stood on each side of his bed and said to each other, ”Gee, Jim looks good, doesn`t he?”
Finally, one friend addressed the room. ”Dammit,” he said, ”we`re all acting as though Jim isn`t even here. I want us to start talking straight to him. He`s still alive. He isn`t a corpse lying here.”
In turn, Brady has his own complaints.
Even now, he said, ”People talk like you`re not even there, particularly physicians who should know better. If you don`t understand a question the first time, they raise their voice and talk at you loudly.” Nurses, he finds, have a tendency to talk ”in the third person invisible. `We`re now going to take our bath and eat our din-din.` ”
Also, he said, ”people don`t make eye contact with you. They look at the point of entry. It`s described in the book, where the bullet went in.”
”Disabled people,” Brady noted, ”have not lost all our faculties. People think that head injury equals half-wit, that all instructions have to be drawn in Crayola.” As he put it, ”we are real people.”
Still, there were difficult moments. As a result of his injuries, the book notes, ”Jim had trouble suppressing the emotion in his voice. He sounded as though he were crying-his `wailing,` Sarah called it.”
As Kobrine explained: ”It`s not really crying at all. It`s a sign of a sort of stress which tends to show up more when Jim is meeting with people less familiar to him. We all undergo that stress, but we have learned to control it. More importantly, we have all the interconnecting brain cells we need to control it.”
Also impaired was Brady`s ability to remember faces, particularly new ones, a disorder known as prosopagnosia. ”It`s almost as though there is a single brain cell for every face you will ever see in your whole life,”
Kobrine said. ”It is what enables us to see a face once and never forget it.” For right-handed people, he noted, the ability is located in the right parietal lobe, about where Hinckley`s bullet wound up.
Also, Brady`s short-term memory was moderately impaired. His emotions were raw. He did not see his mistakes. Nor, also typical in head-injury cases, could he effectively program his responses. Nonsequential exercises, such as
”pick up the pen and put it in the cup, but before that, turn over the brush,” would confuse him.
His life now? He still carries the title of White House press secretary. He absorbs newspapers, reading voraciously. Though he admires Marlin Fitzwater, assistant to the President for press relations, he admitted, ”It is hard to sit on the sidelines” while Fitzwater handles the daily duties. Brady needs help to get dressed and get around, but every Friday he goes to the White House to answer hundreds of letters.
As for a matter of deep concern to the disabled, the book reports: ”In the fall of 1984, Sarah wept as she confided to her closest friends that she and Jim had resumed making love.”
Today Brady is amused by his new fame as an author.
”I can`t hide out,” he said. ”Everywhere I go, people know that `Fat Man in a Wheelchair` equals `Bear.` ”
He is, he admits, ”a Bear with a sore tail,” on a trail slower than his fast-paced, friend-filled, often rowdy early years.
The book has many Illinois memories, among them Brady`s high school years in Centralia, times at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and early political work as a field representative for Sen. Everett Dirksen (R., Ill.). Street smart, a natural promoter, he was at ease with everybody, though not always successful. Once he planned an appearance in Downstate Harrisburg that had Dirksen standing on one side of a highway and the crowd on the other, with cars and trucks whizzing between.
Later Brady handled legislative and public affairs for the Illinois Medical Society. Known in Springfield as ”a walking party,” he kept an unkempt apartment in Chicago`s Marina City, hung out at Butch McGuire`s and spent time at Wrigley Field. ”Remember Rich Nye, the Cubs pitcher?” he asked. ”He dated a girl who was a friend of my friends. Whenever Rich could get us tickets, we went to Ray`s Bleachers bar, got up a good head of steam and went out and harassed the left fielder.”
Divorced, ”Jim was kind of a prowler,” recalled one longtime friend in the book. ”You`d have dinner at one place, then go to four or five different bars. And he`d know everybody.” In March, 1970, at a Washington conference for Republican campaign managers, he met Sarah Jane Kemp, 28. She was
”totally taken with him,” she said, and flew to Chicago the next weekend to see him.
”I got in Friday night, March 16th, in time to celebrate St. Paddy`s Day the next day,” Sarah said in the book. ”First we went to Hobson`s for beer and gumbo, then to the St. Patrick`s Day parade. Then to Elfman`s for potato pancakes and large pickles and to a German place for Austrian food and to Butch McGuire`s for hot dogs and beer. Then Jim said, `As long as we`re downtown, we might as well have dinner.`
”First we went to Su Casa for nachos and margaritas, then to a Polynesian restaurant for more hors d`oeuvres. We went to a party and decided it was too late for dinner, so we had pizza. It was the most fun I`ve ever had. He was so bright, so much fun, that combination I loved seeing. I hadn`t run into too many people like that.” They were married in 1974. Brady`s daughter, Missy, then 12, was one of the attendants.
The Bradys remain very much a team. ”We became involved with a support group, the National Head Injury Association,” Sarah said. ”It was founded by two physicians in Massachusetts only a year before Jim was hurt. Now there are chapters across the country. Jim is the national spokesman.”
Still, politics remains very much on his mind.
”If I were still running the (White House press) office, Iran-gate never would have happened,” Jim said as the interview ended. His wife raised an eyebrow but said nothing to contradict. ”You bet I would have found out about it,” Jim added, ”and I would have done something about it.”
