Public television has never been kind to Ronald Reagan. All through the 1980s, shows like Frontline and Nova assailed him, depicting him as a buccaneer, a menace, and worse. Conservatives, understandably, developed a thirst for eliminating PBS altogether.
Now, however, the world is a different place: Reagan is suffering gracefully in California, the effort to abolish public television has cooled off, and we have been given a PBS documentary on Reagan that, despite touches of ignorance, is a commendable achievement.
The American Experience, one of public television’s more palatable series, is engaged in a study of recent presidents, and its Reagan installment airs on February 23 and 24. It was produced by WGBH in Boston, perhaps the most offensively biased PBS station in the country (which is saying something). Reagan, though, is remarkably balanced. It scores the usual points against our fortieth president, but at least it spares us deference to his current condition — nothing could insult a warrior more than to be treated with condescension.
The program opens with a common plaint about Reagan: that no one can ” figure him out.” Portraying him as simultaneously a simple man and a maddeningly complex one, the show decides that the theme of “rescue” is central to his life: the rescue of swimmers in a river, when the young Reagan was a lifeguard; the rescue of a country from self-doubt and economic distress; the rescue of the world from totalitarian aggression and nuclear annihilation. The show also lays out a couple of premises: first, that Reagan is a man of greater religious conviction than is widely known; and, second, that “we” have always “underestimated” him. (But as Reagan might say, what do you mean, “we”?)
The documentary is particularly compelling in its first forty-five minutes. The story of Reagan’s growing up in small-town Illinois is a familiar one, but always absorbing: His father, Jack, was an itinerant shoe salesman-ever on the lookout for his “big break” — and a severe alcoholic. The future president, as a result, was remote, fretful, and relatively friendless. He harbored what the biographer Edmund Morris identifies as a “moral disdain” for his father: How could Jack be so weak and dependent? Reagan’s mother, Nelle, was a devout woman, and Reagan soon adopted her fundamentalist Christianity, asking to be baptized. He never left his faith. During his presidency, he was mocked for his unwillingness to attend church — “He doesn’t know the structure of a prayer!” Jesse Jackson once thundered from a pulpit — but he studied the Bible daily and strove to practice his religion unostentatiously.
At Eureka College, Reagan was in his glory, playing football, debating, and dabbling in theater. The documentary does not mention that Reagan also savored his first taste of politics there: He led a student strike and marveled at the power of oratory to move a crowd. After college, he failed to land a job at Montgomery Ward — another fact that the documentary omits, but one that Reagan has always considered crucial — and set out on the road, thumbing rides until he persuaded a radio-station owner in Davenport to let him announce ball games. The Depression had the Midwest on its knees, but Reagan was obstinately hopeful. The journalist Hugh Sidey, who was a boy in Iowa, later remembered, “There was something about that voice that made me think life was going to get better.”
Then came Hollywood and Hollywood politics. Reagan fell in quickly with left-liberal activists, among them members of the Communist party. In 1940, he married the Warner Brothers beauty Jane Wyman, and the two became the darlings of the studio’s publicity machine, symbolizing wholesomeness in a community famed for libertinism. But Wyman left Reagan in 1948, stunning and devastating him — it was a sadness of which historians have taken little note and of which Reagan has never, ever spoken.
Reagan also experienced a rude political awakening, discovering that Communists were something other than liberals-in-a-hurry. He watched them crack heads outside the studio gates and was himself subjected to threats: He once received a call from a Communist enforcer who vowed to disfigure his face. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, he fought strenuously against Communist influence (one of his many attempted “rescues”) and put in an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Here, the documentary provides invaluable footage — Reagan speaks with astonishing eloquence, pressing the liberal case for toleration of all political parties but not for lawbreakers. He never forgot what Hollywood taught him about Communist tactics: In his second term, when he was warming to Mikhail Gorbachev, an adviser said to him, “You know, Mr. President, some think you may be too trusting.” Reagan responded, “Oh, don’t worry about that: I learned all about Communists back in Hollywood.”
Around 1950, Reagan’s career began to falter. He was no longer winning the parts, and, when things were bleakest, he was forced to join a minor song-and- dance revue in Las Vegas. Nancy Reagan — giving in this documentary her first on-camera interview since leaving Washington — recalls the difficulty of the situation: “Sure, it hurt when his career dried up. Who wouldn’t it hurt?” But Reagan regained his footing as host of television’s GE Theater, a weekly show in which he supplied introductions to brief dramas.
It was then regarded as humiliating for a movie actor to descend to the small screen, but for Reagan it meant steady employment. And when General Electric asked him to serve as its corporate spokesman, he took up the role that prepared him for politics: For eight years, he traveled the country, speaking to audiences, honing his oratory, trying out lines and ideas. In 1964, he delivered his seminal “Time for Choosing” speech in behalf of Barry Goldwater, and, as Reagan later remarked, that occasion “led me on a path I never expected to take.”
Reagan’s first run for governor, in 1966, is related in a series of fascinating clips: He was nimble, spirited, and tough. And he was also having a rollicking good time. The Democrats burned with contempt for him. The incumbent governor, Pat Brown, charged that Reagan was all glamour and no depth, an ambitious lightweight suitable only for “such unforgettable screen epics as Bedtime for Bonzo.” Reagan merrily responded, “You can’t have it both ways”: Either he was a smooth-as-silk star, hoodwinking the public with his looks and glibness, or he was a laughable failure, reduced to acting beside an ape. (Reagan, by the way, had no insecurity whatsoever about the course of his career. He used to sign pictures of himself with Bonzo, “I’m the one with the watch.”) The Democrats never behaved more vilely than when they ran an ad that had a little black girl sitting on Governor Brown’s knee: “You know,” he told her, “it was an actor who shot Lincoln.” Reagan thumped Brown by more than a million votes.
Reagan failed to wrest the Republican nomination from President Ford in 1976, but he went all the way in 1980, and the documentary gives us the scenes we know so well: the gas lines and the hostages; the convention in Detroit and Reagan’s Labor Day kickoff in front of the Statue of Liberty; the grim desperation of Jimmy Carter and the jaunty self-confidence of his challenger. We remember, too, that Reagan had only nine weeks as president before he was shot, and that, in those nine weeks, he was markedly more sure- footed than he would be again. When he emerged from the hospital, says the biographer Morris, he had “lost his quickness,” never fully recovered.
About Reagan’s presidency, the documentary is ambivalent: It harshly criticizes his economic plan, playing ominous music as he signs the 1981 budget accord and laying heavy blame on him for the recession that peaked in 1982. We see farmers bewailing their plight, the jobless in line for government cheese, and homeless men sleeping in the cold. Meanwhile, White House chefs prepare elaborate meals, Nancy’s china glitters brightly, and the Reagans appear in tuxedo and gown. This is the type of sleight-of-hand that filmmakers like to employ when they wish to tip the scales: What president has not held state dinners?
In foreign policy, the documentary is less grudging, crediting Reagan with discerning the fragility of the Soviet Union. The nuclear-freeze movement is shown to have been spectacularly wrong, and we are almost embarrassed for such figures as Robert McNamara and Ted Kennedy, who prophesied doom. The documentary applauds Reagan for his early recognition of Poland’s Solidarity, but the spooky music returns for the Nicaraguan contras. The Reykjavik summit — one of the Cold War’s key moments — is replayed with near-cinematic intensity. The Iran-contra affair is dealt with equitably.
Reagan, for many viewers, will be welcomed above all for its reminding: of the passion and momentousness of the times; of Reagan’s matchless voice, which grew raspier as his presidency wore on; of the looks on the faces of students in Moscow as he addressed them in 1988. And it is simply asking too much not to contrast him with the current occupant of the Oval Office: Reagan never bragged, never whined, and when he had an admission to make, he did so manfully. Through the force of his beliefs, Reagan indeed shook the world. And PBS, at last — on these two nights — understands.
Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
