Was Reagan a Precursor to Trump? A New Documentary Says Yes
“The Reagans,” a new Showtime docu-series, presents Ronald Reagan as an
early practitioner of dog-whistle politics. But some historians and
journalists disagree with that position.
Ronald Reagan is a well-chronicled figure, so for “The Reagans,” the
filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer looked for new thematic and aesthetic angles.
Ronald Reagan is a well-chronicled figure, so for “The Reagans,” the
filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer looked for new thematic and aesthetic
angles.Credit...Los Angeles Public Library
Adam Nagourney <https://www.nytimes.com/by/adam-nagourney>
ByAdam Nagourney <https://www.nytimes.com/by/adam-nagourney>
* NYT, Nov. 11, 2020
*
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Was Ronald Reagan a kindhearted conservative who remade government and
merits his standing as a beloved icon of the Republican Party? Or was he
a glorified actor who won election with a coded racist appeal to white
voters, setting the stage for the rise of President Trump?
That debate has long absorbed Reagan historians and biographers,
particularly these days as Reagan’s legacy seems ever more gauzy when
held up against these past four years of the just-defeated president.
And it is now being tackled in “The Reagans,” a four-part documentary on
Ronald and Nancy Reagan premiering Sunday on Showtime. It is the work
ofMatt Tyrnauer
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/style/roy-cohn-movie.html>, a
documentarian whose past subjects have includedRoy Cohn
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/movies/wheres-my-roy-cohn-review.html>,
the fashion designer Valentino and Studio 54.
Tyrnauer grew up in Los Angeles when Reagan was governor of California.
As a boy being driven to school by his father, he sat in traffic as the
motorcade taking the newly elected president from his home in the
Pacific Palisades to a postelection news conference in Century City sped
down Sunset Boulevard.
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From the second installment of “The Reagans,” it is clear where
Tyrnauer, who began his career as a junior aide in Democratic politics
before moving into magazine writing and directing documentaries, comes
down on Reagan’s place in the nation’s fraught history of race and
politics. The episode opens with 40-year-old footage of Reagan in
Mississippi, affirming his support for “states’ rights” at a county fair
filled with white voters.
ImageReagan in around 1942, in a still from the documentary. Tyrnauer
hopes to “show how Reagan in many ways paved the way for Trump,” he said.
Reagan in around 1942, in a still from the documentary. Tyrnauer hopes
to “show how Reagan in many ways paved the way for Trump,” he
said.Credit...Photofest, via Showtime
“The reason I wanted to make this was to show how Reagan in many ways
paved the way for Trump — and the Republican Party that has now fallen
into Trump’s hands,” he said in a video interview from his Coldwater
Canyon home in Beverly Hills a week before Trump’s defeat was called. “I
really thought it was very important to show that the Republican Party,
certainly after the 1950s and since the era of this country’s civil
rights movement and reckoning, has been on the wrong side of history.
And Reagan was right at the center of that.”
Over the course of nearly four hours, the documentary explores Reagan’s
boyhood in Illinois. It recounts his Hollywood years and the skills he
learned as an actor — the bright smile, his affable if slightly
inscrutable affect — that made him such a powerful candidate for
president. Recalling Reagan’s first screen test, the studio head Jack
Warner said, in a 1960s interview clip included in the documentary, that
the actor’s “personality projected off the screen and into the audience.”
The series offers a portrait of Nancy Reagan as a powerful and
manipulative behind-the-scenes player who was essential to her husband’s
success. It follows Ronald Reagan’s evolution from a liberal, the son of
two Democrats and the former head of the Screen Actors Guild, to a
staunch anti-Communist conservative.
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And it is striking, after this polarizing election and four years of the
Trump presidency, to hear Reagan’s tough talk about law and order, to
note his 1980 campaign slogan — “Make America Great Again” — and to
watch the parallels between a movie star and a reality television star,
both of whom knew how command the attention of the American public and
the media.
But more than anything, this documentary is animated by the notion of
Reagan as an early practitioner of dog-whistle politics, a member of the
generation of politicians who used coded appeals directed at an attuned
audience of white voters.
“I believe in states’ rights,” he said in the summer of 1980 at the
Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Miss., seven miles from where
three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. It is a dramatic
moment in which he seemingly affirms the power of Southern states to
defy a federal government trying to end discrimination: The camera
follows as he steps off his campaign plane to be greeted by a grinning
Trent Lott, then a United States Representative from Mississippi, and
shadows his motorcade winding through crowds of white voters.
To be clear, the idea of Reagan as a politician who swam in the waters
of American racism, preparing the way for a Trump presidency, is not a
consensus position.
“To me, Reagan is the anti-Trump,” Lou Cannon, the former Washington
Post reporter and Reagan biographer who appears in the documentary, said
last week. “If you look at Reagan’s presidency, you did not see a career
of racial incitement. It’s not a fair rap.”
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“Reagan is the antithesis of Trump in so many ways,” he added. “He was
uniformly courteous and nice and decent to people. Trump, by the way he
acts, has made us see that human decency in a political leader is
important. Second, he was a compromiser. He always said that he was
willing to take half a loaf. He got legislation through because of that.”
Image
The series offers a portrait of Nancy Reagan, pictured with Ronald in
the 1950s, as a powerful behind-the-scenes player.
The series offers a portrait of Nancy Reagan, pictured with Ronald in
the 1950s, as a powerful behind-the-scenes player.Credit...Photofest,
via Showtime
The historian Rick Perlstein cautioned against reading too much
significance into the Mississippi speech, arguing that it oversimplified
Reagan’s complicated relationship with race. “Liberals, and I am a proud
liberal, are always looking for smoking guns to prove that conservatives
are racist,” Perlstein said an interview.
In his new book, “Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980,” Perlstein
says the former president’s invocation of states’ rights was
halfhearted, buried midway into his speech, inserted at Lott’s
suggestion. (And to what end? Reagan barely squeaked by Jimmy Carter in
Mississippi.)
Tyrnauer is not a presence in any of his documentaries, and he is heard
only twice in “The Reagans,” asking questions off-camera. He builds his
case with interviews — Ron Reagan Jr., surviving members of Reagan’s
White House, journalists from the era and historians — along with
contemporaneous news clips and rare archival film footage.
“What I look for is the obscure stuff, or the angles you never saw,” he
said. The documentary opens with behind-the-scenes footage in which
Reagan’s advertising team is filming the president speaking in the Oval
Office for a 1984 campaign commercial. At the side of the shot, aides
look at a stopwatch, impressed that this former actor clocked in for the
60-second advertisement at 57 seconds. Tyrnauer tracked down a lost
documentary about Nancy Reagan from when Reagan was governor, with
intimate shots of the new governor and his family moving into their new
home in Sacramento, and scenes of Mrs. Reagan back in Los Angeles
shopping for dog food at the Brentwood Country Mart (and admitting, with
obvious chagrin, that she did not have money to pay for it).
Most of all, in making his case against the former president, Tyrnauer
draws on footage of Reagan in his early days as a politician, as he
likened streets in crime-stricken urban areas to “jungle paths” and
talked about “welfare queens” in disparaging what he described as a
liberal state.
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“What was really astonishing to me was seeing how much film there was of
Reagan in the act of dog whistling,” Tyrnauer said. “And some of his dog
whistles at the time would be considered foghorns today.”
I met Tyrnauer while covering the 1988 presidential campaign; he was an
assistant at the Boston headquarters of Michael Dukakis, the Democrat
who would lose to George H.W. Bush. Tyrnauer left politics to become a
writer at Vanity Fair before turning to directing documentaries. His
first,Valentino, the Last
Emperor,”<https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/movies/18vale.html>released
in 2009, was based on a profile he wrote in Vanity Fair.His Cohn
documentary
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/style/roy-cohn-movie.html>, “Where’s
My Roy Cohn?,” explored the relationship between Cohn and one of his
most famous law clients, Donald J. Trump.
Image
Reagan on set with his then-wife Jane Wyman and Gregory Peck. The film
explores how the skills Reagan learned as an actor made him a successful
candidate for president.
Reagan on set with his then-wife Jane Wyman and Gregory Peck. The film
explores how the skills Reagan learned as an actor made him a successful
candidate for president.Credit...Everett Collection, via Showtime
Needless to say, it’s an eclectic portfolio.
The Reagan documentary would have been challenging at any time — the
Reagans are well-plowed ground. It may have been 32 years since the end
of his presidency, but he is remembered by millions of Americans,
defined for many of them by theupbeat advertisement
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU-IBF8nwSY>that opened with the words
“It’s morning again in America,” which helped lift him to a landslide
re-election over Walter F. Mondale in 1984. Nancy Reagan was, apart from
Hillary Clinton, arguably the most powerful and polarizing first lady of
the past 75 years.
But this project was complicated by the onset of the pandemic. Tyrnauer
and his staff were forced to work from their homes. Archives, and in
particular the files and videos collected by the Ronald Reagan
Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., abruptly shut down.
Interviews became far more complicated. Most of the subjects are, not
surprisingly, older and thus wary of letting a film crew into their
homes. Tyrnauer finished his interview with Lesley Stahl, the Reagan
White House reporter for CBS, a week before she was hospitalized with
Covid. Tyrnauer, changing gears, conducted half of the project’s 30
interviews by video from his home, sending in local film crews.
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Many top figures in Reagan’s world sat down for interviews, including
James Baker, who was Reagan’s chief of staff, George Shultz, the
secretary of state, and Colin Powell, the national security adviser. The
Reagans’ son, Ron Jr., is a prominent voice throughout the series,
chatty and candid. But their daughter, Patti Davis, is notably absent.
(Tyrnauer said she was working on another project.)
Stahl, in her interview, describes the allure this first family had over
the media as she recalls the first time he stepped into the White House
briefing room to talk to the press. “We all kind of melted,” she says.
“We were puddles on the floor.”
Most jarring, for anyone looking for parallels between the Trump and
Reagan years, is the appearance by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The
coronavirus crisis is not his first experience with either a pandemic or
a president who failed to deal with one: Reagan largely ignored the
deadly AIDS epidemic during its early years, and the documentary
presents this as one of his most consequential failures as president.
“I was very frustrated with seeing an emerging catastrophe, and he
wanted nothing to do with it,” Fauci says*.*
As a rule, Americans’ views of presidents soften with time — Trump may
prove to be the exception — and that certainly happened with Reagan. But
this documentary invites a reappraisal. It is a harsh portrait of Reagan
as a politician and as a president, and it seems likely to reignite old
arguments. Tyrnauer argues that Reagan has been protected by historians,
Republicans and journalists because of his political success and likability.
“You can listen to podcast after podcast today of respectable historians
talking about all of the dog whistle sins of the past,” Tyrnauer said.
“George Wallace comes up, and Richard Nixon comes up with the Southern
Strategy. And Willie Horton comes up and George H.W. Bush comes up.
Reagan is shockingly absent from all those narratives and discussions.”
“He was an extraordinarily intuitive politician and ultimately among the
most successful of his generation,” Tyrnauer said. “But how is he not
held accountable?”
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