Of Course You Can Have Ice Cream for Breakfast!

Early on the afternoon of March 30, 1981, only 69 days into his presidency, Ronald Reagan stepped out the door of the “President’s Walkway” at the Washington Hilton Hotel. This utterly private presidential passageway had been built shortly after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 — the Hilton was taking no chances of a similar tragedy at the sprawling hotel. Washington was overcast and rainy that early spring day as Reagan, after addressing a labor group, stepped out the side door where a couple of dozen well-wishers — and John W. Hinckley — awaited. Infatuated with Jody Foster, a star of “Taxi Driver,” a movie he had seen 15 times, Hinckley suddenly whipped out a blue steel Rohm handgun, bent on assassinating the president in a deranged, incomprehensible plot to win Foster’s affections. In the blink of an eye — 1.7 seconds — Hinckley fired off a half-dozen “Devastators,” bullets designed to explode on impact to inflict maximum damage. The first hit Jim Brady, Reagan’s popular press secretary, lodging in his head and inflicting wounds that seemed destined to be fatal. The second, which struck Washington cop Tom Delahanty in the back of the neck, sent him reeling and left Hinckley with a point-blank shot at Reagan. But the gunman's third shot was high. Meanwhile, Secret Service Agent Jerry Parr was shoving Reagan into the presidential limo just as the fourth bullet struck fellow agent Tim McCarthy, who had flung his body atop the president. The fifth ricocheted off the bullet-proof glass of the limo, but the final slug struck Reagan under his left arm, grazed a rib, and lodged in his lung -- less than an inch from his heart. Parr's reacting precisely the way he had been trained doubtlessly saved the president's life. Dean Reynolds, a reporter for United Press International who had been covering Reagan’s speech, was inches from the limousine when the fusillade began. He rushed back into the hotel, bolted up a down escalator to the lobby, and flung himself atop the registration desk, commandeering a phone and dialing UPI’s Washington bureau. “The President has been shot” he shouted when Eliot Brenner picked up the phone on the UPI editing desk. Thus began the most frantic 14 hours in Ron Cohen’s 42-year journalism career. In his new memoir, “Of Course You Can Have Ice Cream for Breakfast!” Cohen plants readers in a first-row seat to the barely controlled frenzy of a big-time newsroom covering a huge, international story. You will be right there in the middle of the excitement as Cohen describes the high-stakes, nonstop drama — UPI rushing to beat the competition as newspapers and broadcast stations around the world screamed for details. You will learn how UPI, unlike its competitors, refrained -- under the most intense deadline pressures -- from incorrectly reporting that Brady had died on the operating table. And you’ll learn why his world-famous neurosurgeon was shocked a few hours after the operation when he stepped into Brady’s ICU room at George Washington University Hospital. You’ll smile when you read that the president, waking from a post-op fog, groggily turned to wife Nancy and grinned the patented Ronald Reagan grin: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” “The President Has Been Shot” is one of 50 chapters in Cohen’s book, a quirky, funny, nostalgic, “not-your-garden-variety" memoir that takes readers through 80 years of his personal life and 42 years as a professional journalist with a front row seat to history. You will read how he almost got fired the first day of work at three different newspaper jobs. How, although he had almost flunked high school French, 15 years later was able to recall enough of the language to fashion a major international news story from information given him — in French — by a policewoman in Montreal who spoke no English. Walk with Ron on South Munn Avenue in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1944, when he was seven and bullies stole his pillowcase filled with Halloween candy. New Jersey’s most notorious gangster made it good by filling another pillowcase with Hershey bars and sending two personal bodyguards to walk him safely home. — Climb the stairs with Ron at 16 Rowland Street in Newark: Even at the age of 2 he knew his grandma, Filomena Figliuolo, would be waiting at the summit with the most blissful meatballs on planet Earth. — Join Ron at ringside in 1964 when, in a studio in Burlington, he and the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor wrestled to a draw on live TV on a newsmakers program broadcast across the state of Vermont. — Transport yourself to Champaign, Illinois, that autumn eve in 1956 when Ron and Helene Anne sat gazing at a full harvest moon at the end of a very promising first date. Suddenly breaking the romantic serenity, another suitor clambered up the porch steps, dropped to his knees, and proposed. Yes, to Helene Anne. When you finish “Of Course You Can Have Ice Cream for Breakfast!” you will find yourself chuckling. Or feeling flushed with nostalgia. Or even shedding a tear. Or all of the above.