Reagan's return

With Gipper boosterism peaking, a new documentary comes to PBS

Talking Politics by Michael Crowley

These are tragic days for Ronald Reagan the man, but Ronald Reagan the president has never had it better. Reagan turned 87 this month, and even as he succumbs to Alzheimer's disease, he is being celebrated more than at any time since he left office in 1989.

In symbolic ways, Reagan is popping up everywhere. His February 6 birthday was the occasion for the Republican Congress to rechristen Washington National Airport as Ronald Reagan National Airport. Acting Governor Paul Cellucci proclaimed the date "Ronald Reagan Day" in Massachusetts. Last summer saw the grand opening of D.C.'s 3.1-million-square-foot Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. Some ideologues even talk hopefully of etching the old Gip's twinkling eyes into Mount Rushmore.

More significant, however, is Reagan's re-emergence at the center of national political debate. With a spate of new books and big-think articles, conservatives have seized on the supersonic US economy as evidence that the "voodoo economics" of the Reagan Revolution succeeded after all. Said Representative Bill Paxon (R-New York) on CNN's Capital Gang last weekend: "This is Ronald Reagan's economic recovery!" That argument is now so common that the online magazine Slate even conducted a reader poll asking "who deserves more credit for our healthy economy" -- Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. (Reagan won, 58-42.)

Next week, Reagan chic gets another lift with PBS's Reagan, a four-and-a-half-hour biography of the 40th president and the man who brought modern conservatism into the mainstream. (The first installment, two hours long, airs Monday, February 23, at 9 p.m.; the conclusion is Tuesday, also at 9.)

Following its subject from birth to the onset of Alzheimer's, Reagan is a documentary delight. The film makes up for its daunting length with a quick pace and a sharp dramatic edge, and producers Austin Hoyt and Adriana Bosch artfully weave vivid flashback footage with interviews (Mikhail Gorbachev and Nancy Reagan among them).

Reagan's story is told crisply and colorfully, from his days as a young lifeguard through his Hollywood years and his two terms in the White House. One highlight is the footage from his mediocre film career, which bottomed out with his appearance opposite a chimpanzee in 1951's Bedtime for Bonzo. There's also a neat anecdote from his 1966 campaign for governor of California: handler Lyn Nofziger recounts ordering Reagan to ditch his traditional, dandyish riding clothes for a cowboy getup before a horseback interview with a reporter (thus was born the Marlboro President). Once he reaches the White House, it's one '80s-nostalgia blast after another: John Hinckley, the '87 stock market crash, The Day After.

All told, this film will hardly stem the tide of Reagan boosterism. Even with its many critical asides, Reagan overflows with the Great Communicator's charm and the historic drama of the Cold War's end. As a result, it tends to let Ronald Reagan off a little easy -- much the way America always did.

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"Ronald Reagan was America's most ideological president in his rhetoric, yet pragmatic in his actions," says narrator David Ogden Stiers at the film's outset. "He believed in balanced budgets, but never submitted one; he hated nuclear weapons, but built them by the thousands; he would write checks to a poor person as he cut the benefits of many; he united the country with renewed patriotism, but his vision of America alienated millions; he preached family values, but presided over a dysfunctional family."

That's a keenly critical assessment. But Reagan dwells little on these contradictions, pursuing instead a more telegenic story: the final days of the Cold War. Reagan is credited here with an arms buildup that forced the USSR to cry uncle, and with swallowing his anti-Communism to deal with Gorbachev when it did.

No doubt many viewers will want to hear more about the costs of this strategy, and about the less heroic aspects of the Reagan presidency: the $1.8 trillion increase in the national debt from 1981 to 1989, the widened income gap between rich and poor, the explosion of the homeless population, the neglect of AIDS, the psychological damage wrought by nuclear brinksmanship, the public betrayal of Iran-contra.

One suspects that PBS may have felt a little pressure to go easy on a GOP hero like Reagan. Congressional Republicans, after all, have long derided the network as too liberal, and have even threatened to cut off its funding.

Perhaps it's for this reason that Reagan spends less time than it could on its subject's personal and intellectual failings. Although we do see Reagan as out-of-touch, forgetful, and distant ("I don't think in my life I've ever had a real conversation with him," says son Ron), the inspirational romanticism carries the day.

It's worth remembering just how bad the truth seems to have been: the obeisance to Nancy's whims, the astrological edicts, the obsession with Armageddon, the belief that an alien invasion would unify humanity, the confusion of movies and reality, the poor grasp of policy details -- all chronicled devastatingly in Hendrick Hertzberg's 1991 New Republic essay "The Child Monarch," which pronounces Reagan "dumb, superstitious, childish, inattentive, passive, narcissistic, and oblivious."

Even Reagan's fiercest critics, however, will succumb to the wrenching account of his descent into Alzheimer's, which sets to sad piano chords the 1995 letter in which he disclosed his illness to "my fellow Americans."("I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.") It's enough to choke up Cambridge's most hardened leftist.

Reagan closes on that sympathetic personal note, and no doubt the American public will consider Reagan's legacy more charitably as a result of his long, slow good-bye. But the conservatives now trying to spin a glorious legacy for Ronald Reagan have a supremely difficult case to make. For it's not at all clear whether Reagan deserves any credit for today's peace and prosperity.

What is clear is the price we are still paying for the Reagan presidency. Never mind the income gap, or the militarization of the economy, or Ollie North. Reagan inherited a $1 trillion national debt and nearly tripled it; the aftershocks of his policies have ballooned it to over $5 trillion today. Sound abstract? Consider that this year, interest payments on that debt will cost $250 billion -- or one in every seven tax dollars.

This is Ronald Reagan's true legacy. Worthy of the history books, to be sure, but certainly not of Mount Rushmore.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.