'THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT'

"Constitutionally, gentlemen," Haig said to the reporters, "you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order. As for now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending the return of the vice president. . . ."

At the time of the shooting, the vice president, George H.W. Bush, was on Air Force Two returning from a trip to Texas. He and Reagan had been in office about 70 days.

But Haig seemed unaware that the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1967, decrees that if the vice president is not available, the speaker of the House takes power, followed by the president pro tempore of the Senate and then the secretary of state.

In the film, a remark is made to Haig that the change was made after he had finished his formal schooling, an escape clause of sorts for Haig, a four-star Army general who also had been chief of staff to Richard Nixon.

(In April, on CBS's "60 Minutes II," Haig said: "I wasn't talking about transition. I was talking about the executive branch, who is running the government. That was the question asked. It was not, 'who is in line should the president die.' ")

Whether Haig was trying to reassure the world that there was not a power vacuum at the center of the free world, whether he misunderstood the line of succession or whether he was revealing his own political ambitions, Haig never lived down those words. He resigned the next year.

Now comes Showtime's "The Day Reagan Was Shot," airing Sunday at 9, written and directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh and produced by Dan Halsted and Oliver Stone.

Stone, who made the controversial feature film "JFK," lent his name to help get the Reagan movie made, said Nowrasteh. "It's my baby. He read the script, he saw cuts, he had comment, but he was really hands-off."

The movie traces the events of that day, when John W. Hinckley Jr., 26, apparently attempting to impress actress Jodie Foster, emerged from a crowd of onlookers and reporters outside the Washington Hilton, where Reagan had finished giving a speech, and fired six times. His bullets hit Reagan, Press Secretary James S. Brady, Secret Service Agent Timothy J. McCarthy and District police officer Thomas K. Delahanty (called Delmonico in the movie).

Reagan, 70, managed to walk into the George Washington University Hospital emergency room, then collapsed. But he had not had time to transfer power to anyone before he underwent surgery to remove a .22 bullet lodged between a lung and his heart, an inch from the aorta.

With some of the president's men at the hospital and others at the Situation Room in the White House, for at least a short while, according to the film, they determined that no one outside the White House should learn that Reagan's condition was critical or that there was any question about who was in charge.

To complicate matters that day, it appeared that the Soviet Union was about to move into Poland and seemed to be readying an attack on the United States.

If Nowrasteh's movie is anywhere near accurate, a lot of Americans would have been shaken by the lack of cooperation, the sniping and the battle of egos that occurred among the cabinet members.

As he wrote his script, Nowrasteh said, he drew from books and memoirs, interviews and articles but did not talk to anyone involved in the events of March 30, 1981.

"I didn't want to alert anyone that I was up to this," he said. "I'm basically in a room writing it myself without any assurances that anyone would produce it."

His movie was already finished by the 20th anniversary of the shooting when Richard V. Allen, Reagan's chief foreign policy adviser and first national security adviser, appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live" with audio tapes he had made of the cabinet's discussions that day. Allen also wrote a piece using the tape transcripts for the Atlantic Monthly's April issue.

"There was a thing in the transcripts that I didn't know," said Nowrasteh. "They were considering going up in the special 747 [the National Emergency Airborne Command Post] . . . . That's extraordinary. If I'd come across that, I would have put it in."

Aside from that, his script "matched up pretty well" with Allen's tapes, he said. "I wanted to keep it true to the facts and the essence of what happened, and all trails led to Haig. Haig's actions were at the center of what happened and people's memory of it."

Actors Richard Dreyfuss, Richard Crenna and Holland Taylor were complimentary about Nowrasteh's script and his direction of the film.

"Most of the time scripts that pertain to history are distorted, distorted in terms of fiction," said Dreyfuss. "The thing that I liked best about Cyrus's script is that 98 percent is absolute truth. Given that, it's a very accurate portrayal. I think it's the best historical script I've ever read."

He also called the portrayals by Crenna and Taylor as the Reagans "disarming."

"I did not try to impersonate Ronald Reagan," said Crenna. "I think that would be a disservice. What I tried to do was minimize his speech patterns and his gestures, tried to sketch that out briefly."

Crenna said he was at the Washington Hilton for the National Italian-American Federation dinner two years ago.

"I remembered that the Reagan incident had taken place there and I asked one of the security officers to show me the route, and I reflected on the images I had seen on television," he said. "And then, lo and behold, a few weeks after that, I'm sent the script."

Crenna, whose long career includes a recurring role on CBS's "Judging Amy," said he had known Reagan "casually through the years" but was among only eight people at a small dinner party given to welcome the Reagans to the Bel Air area of Los Angeles after they left the White House.

When Reagan was shot, said Crenna, "None of us realized how close to death he was. The length of time it took him to recuperate was close to six months. We didn't know that. It was all part of a very determined effort on the part of the government to calm the waters of the nation."

Crenna said he was impressed that a critically injured Reagan was able to keep his sense of humor: "When Reagan looked up at the doctors and said, 'I hope you're all Republicans.' And to Nancy: 'I forgot to duck.' And to the nurse, 'Does Nancy know about us?' -- if a writer of fiction had written that, we would say, 'You've gone too far.' "

Taylor, who plays Judge Kittleson on ABC's "The Practice," said she "focused just on the aspect of [Nancy] that is featured in this film, which is as a wife. As far as I'm concerned, she is nonpareil, just judging from his wonderful notes and doodles and love letters to her over the years."

In the film, Nancy Reagan, determined to present her husband in the most favorable light, combs his hair and applies her own makeup to him so that he can be propped up in bed after his surgery and sign a dairy bill for photographers.

"It's very hard to imagine that she didn't snap," said Taylor. "She was under pressure, and she was also known not to put up with incompetence. If she would happen to see this, I hope she appreciates how much I admire the stress she was under. Her sense of obligation as first lady and her adoration of this man -- talk about being between a rock and a hard place."

Some viewers will be surprised to find Dreyfuss, who stars in CBS's "The Education of Max Bickford" this season, playing the much taller Haig. So was the actor when the offer arrived.

"But I'm never one to look a gift-horse in the mouth," said Dreyfuss. "I thought of me and him as different kinds of people physically. But I'm very much like him," he added facetiously, "I'm brilliant and egotistical and napoleonic and absolutely indispensable.

"We all carry around a lot of cultural references of him in that time and that day," he went on. "So a lot of this was already in my head. I didn't meet him. I didn't want to. I don't think it would be very fruitful for any actor playing a living person. I wouldn't have expected him to agree with the portrayal or the script, even though I think he comes off far better in the writing of Cyrus's script than people would expect . . . He was an extraordinarily capable guy who had these character flaws, like everyone."

Dreyfuss doesn't recall whether he saw Haig at the press conference live or on tape, but he said "the thing about being in control did not freak me out. The thing about succession, even that didn't bother me. What bothered me at the time was his state- -- it was nerve-wracking. He was the secretary of state and he's behaving this way."

Dreyfuss plays Haig as short-tempered, agitated, shouting, tense and heavily perspiring, a somewhat bombastic man who complains that "I'm being undermined by . . . second-rate hambones."

He ridicules CIA Director William J. Casey and grills Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, played by Colm Feore, over whether Weinberger has increased the defcon (defense condition), a military alert that would signal alarm to other nations.

He calls the Soviet ambassador to find out why the U.S.S.R.'s missile-carrying submarines are moving closer to the U.S. coast than usual. (Later, it is learned, the feared attack by the Soviets was a simulated missile attack coincidentally planned for that day.)

But in the movie, while confusion reigns -- both the president and vice president are unavailable and there's the seeming threat of a nuclear attack -- the cabinet is frantic. No one can launch the nuclear weapons without secret codes that are kept in a case called "the football," which is usually carried by an aide at the president's side -- and which seems to have disappeared for the moment. And the code for the nuclear attack missile card has been left in Reagan's wallet, now in the hands of FBI agents who won't hand it over.

In addition, the telephones in the Situation Room are malfunctioning, and the vice president, on Air Force Two, can't hear Haig.

In short, March 30 is a heck of a day.

"I think it's naive of people to think the government, especially the executive branch, is peopled by either idiots or saints," said Dreyfuss. "The fact that these things happened doesn't and didn't surprise me, but the detail of it is fascinating. There were equal amounts of brilliance and stupidity for everybody. There was a lot of blame to go around."

"I think it is a picture that has a subversive angle to it in the sense that it is very realistic about what human beings are," said Taylor. "Alexander Haig is somebody I would want to be in charge. He was decisive, but he conducted himself so much better than the others did. His mistake was one of ignorance -- pretty appalling ignorance, considering his position -- but you could tell he was not being righteous because of ego, but because he thought he was in charge."

As the film neared its air date, Nowrasteh said: "Mr. Haig said he did not want to discuss the film in the present crisis because it portrays the country in disarray, and that was unpatriotic. But overwhelmingly, the reaction at screenings has been patriotic."