Joseph Giordano, who as the lead trauma surgeon at George Washington University Hospital helped save the life of President Ronald Reagan after he was shot outside the Washington Hilton in 1981, died on June 24. He was 84.
His son Christopher said the death, at MedStar Georgetown hospital in Washington, was from complications of an infection.
A little after 3 p.m. on March 30, 1981, Dr. Giordano was examining a patient on his hospital’s sixth floor when an announcement came over the loudspeaker calling him to the emergency room.
It was only when he got down there, and through a scrum of Secret Service officers, that he realized the purpose of the call. And it was only after he and his team cut open the president’s suit, revealing a hole below his left armpit, that they realized that Mr. Reagan had been shot.
Just minutes earlier, and not far from the hospital, the president had been exiting the Hilton hotel after giving a speech to union representatives when John Hinckley Jr. approached him on the sidewalk and fired six shots from his .22-caliber revolver.
The last shot ricocheted off the presidential limousine and hit Mr. Reagan. Two more shots hit Timothy McCarthy, a Secret Service officer, and James S. Brady, the White House spokesman, both of whom were also taken to George Washington.
A third victim, Thomas Delahanty, a D.C. police officer, was sent to a different hospital.
Dr. Giordano, the son of an Italian immigrant and the first in his family to go to college, had been preparing for moments like this for years. In the late 1970s, he created one of the country’s premier — and only — Level One trauma units at George Washington. He and his team knew what to do. The only surprise was the patient.
Tubes were inserted. Tests were run. And Dr. Giordano and Benjamin Aaron, the hospital’s lead cardiac and thoracic surgeon, realized how little time they had to act — the president had already lost about six pints of blood, and his pulse barely registered.
Moving with practiced precision, they stabilized the president, then prepared to operate. By the time they got him into the operating room, Mr. Reagan was conscious, and joking.
“I hope you all are Republicans,” he said.
“Today, Mr. President, we’re all Republicans,” Dr. Giordano replied, despite being a staunch Democrat.
The procedure lasted two hours. They removed the bullet, which had bounced off one of Mr. Reagan’s ribs and lodged itself in his lung, an inch from his heart. The president returned to the White House 11 days later.
The events that day made Dr. Giordano a public hero, though he tried to divert praise onto others, especially Jerry Parr, the Secret Service agent who pushed the president into his limousine. Although Agent Parr did not yet know that Mr. Reagan had been hit, he decided that the president would need some medical attention and directed the car to the hospital, not the White House, saving precious time.
“Five or 10 more minutes may have made a difference,” Dr. Giordano told The Washington Post in 2006. “You lose blood pressure slowly, then it’s off the edge. He was almost there. If there had been much more of a delay, it would have been a different ending.”
Joseph Martin Giordano was born on June 22, 1941, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Joseph Giordano, was an Italian immigrant who owned a milk-delivery company. His mother, Linda (Lubrano) Giordano, was a secretary.
He graduated from Georgetown University in 1961 and, in 1967, received his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College, today the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, in Philadelphia.
During and after medical school, Dr. Giordano joined missions in Haiti and Honduras, spending months at a time working in rural hospitals.
He married Orfa Munoz in 1974. Along with their son, she survives him, as do two other sons, Andrew and Michael, and eight grandchildren.
Following residencies in Hartford, Conn., and Washington, Dr. Giordano spent three years at the Walter Reed Army Center for Research before arriving at George Washington in 1976.
His specialty was vascular surgery, but his first task was to build a trauma unit.
“When I started all this, our trauma unit was nonexistent,” he said in a 2012 interview for Thomas Jefferson University. “But by the time President Reagan came in five years later, our unit was solid. The late ’70s and early ’80s saw a real emergency care revolution that changed medicine forever.”
Despite their political differences, Dr. Giordano and Mr. Reagan remained friendly long after the president recovered from his wound. In a 1984 speech during his re-election campaign, the president singled out Dr. Giordano as an American immigrant success story.
Dr. Giordano appreciated the gesture, but pointed out that he had succeeded in part because of low-interest federal loans, something Mr. Reagan had tried to cut from the budget.
He later became the head of surgery at George Washington. He retired in 2010.
Dr. Giordano continued to teach at his hospital, and he joined the board of Partner for Surgery, an organization that sends doctors to work in impoverished parts of Guatemala.
That, he insisted, was his real legacy.
“A president being shot, that’s a big piece of history, and I’m glad I was there to help,” he said in the interview for his alma mater. “But all over the world, there are countless people in need, and I’d like to be remembered for improving health care access and delivery for as many patients as possible.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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