Patti Davis: How My Father’s Assassination Attempt Shaped His Legacy

When I walked into my father’s hospital room the day after he was shot, one of the first things I noticed – other than his paleness, his weakness – was a different look in his eyes. There was a light there that drew me, mystified me; I thought then, and still think, that at some point he crossed over, left this life and returned. There is nothing clinical to support this. He never coded, he did not have to be revived after flat-lining. But I still believe that, for an instant at least, he left and returned. I flew back to Washington a couple of weeks later when he was released from the hospital and I still saw that look in his eyes, although not quite as dramatically. When I had a moment alone with him, I tried to ask about it, measuring my words. I asked if he saw anything when he was fighting for his life. He didn’t answer my question, and I told myself that it was between him and God.

Einstein said this about God: “I want to know His thoughts – the rest are just details.”

More often than not, when someone has a brush with death, they think about God. They wonder why they were spared; they examine and re-examine how close they came. In my father’s case, a fragment from the devastator bullet that John Hinckley used ended up less than an inch from his heart. In Donald Trump’s case, it might have been less than that. Only turning his head at the last moment saved him.

My father believed that God spared him so that he could make the world safer from nuclear annihilation by forging an agreement with the Soviet Union, as it was called then.  He did end up achieving that with Mikhail Gorbachev when they signed the INF treaty in 1987. Donald Trump’s initial comments after he was shot were about unity, pulling back from the rancorous and often cruel rhetoric that has come to characterize American politics. He was re-writing his Convention speech. I was curious to see how this would manifest.

I tuned in when it was announced that he was about to appear at the Convention on the first night, and I did see a different look in his eyes. There was something humble there, something that hinted of change, of transformation. I then tuned in for his speech, and at first I had the same feeling. Gone was the hubris, the rancor…for a little while. But then it all returned – a bandaged version of the man we have known for years. I tuned out when “drill, baby, drill” began, my heart breaking for this fragile blue ball we live on that we are methodically destroying, with species going extinct at an unprecedented pace, with oceans turning toxic and swaths of land becoming uninhabitable. I popped back in occasionally to see if he was still speaking – yep, still there.

I can’t know the thoughts of God, but here is my guess. I think God is always trying to work on us to turn us toward our better angels, wake us up to the humanity that resides in all of us, but that some choose to bury and ignore. We always have a choice as to whether or not we want to change. Death grazing us should be a wake-up call, and often is. But someone has to want to change, they have to be willing to step into unknown territory, ask questions of some power greater than themselves, and then listen quietly for the answer.

Not everything changed about my father. It took him 10 years to alter his mindset about gun control and support the Brady Bill in 1991. Stubbornness was a big part of who he was. But coming close to death made him ask God why he was saved and, most importantly, made him listen for an answer.  Politics aside, I simply wanted to see a man who had changed, who had listened to the whisper of something higher and greater than himself. I like the arc of that story. We need that story right now. Sometimes I imagine God holding up His hands in frustration, saying “I really thought that would work.

Patti Davis is an author of many books, including The Long Goodbye, in which she explored the experience of losing her father to Alzheimer's. The lessons she learned from the ten years of her father's illness inspired her to create a support group program for caregivers of people with dementia called Beyond Alzheimer's. Her most recent book is Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter about Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew.