A Time to Reflect on the ‘Reagan’ Revolution

What will future documentarians, biographers and historians say about Bill Clinton and his presidency? Will Chapter 1 be his erasure of the federal deficit? Economic prosperity? Saddam Hussein? Or Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones?

Given the electrified buzz and tangle of dangerously hot TV wires encircling today’s Oval Office, it’s impossible not to keep one eye on the Clinton legacy while watching this week’s 4 1/2-hour PBS biography of the president who is widely credited with ending the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan, of course.

The latest in a chain of fine presidential documentaries by that scintillating PBS series “The American Experience,” the two-part “Reagan” delivers a message that is mixed. “Ronald Reagan had almost no experience in foreign policy, little knowledge of history and a capacity to be disengaged that grew worse as he grew older,” David Ogden Stiers narrates from Part 2 producer Austin Hoyt’s script. The good news? “But he never lost his sense of America’s mission.”

To many of his critics, he was the Oval Office’s perilously empty suit, to his admirers a magnificent minimalist whose approach yielded stunningly positive results. Or as George Will here affectionately recalls Reagan’s inclination to govern by broad outline: “Government was too big, taxed too much--and the Soviet Union was getting away with murder internationally. You guys work out the details.”

Whatever else is said of him, there’s no disputing the cataclysmic global shifts that were nourished and accelerated on Reagan’s watch, from sweeping changes in East Europe to riddance of that “evil empire,” the Soviet Union. His legacy is “what you don’t see,” Will informs the camera. “You don’t see the Berlin Wall. You don’t see the Iron Curtain.” Nor, critics surely would add, the exploding federal deficit that resulted from his stubborn merging of tax cuts and increased defense spending, and a widening of the gap between rich and poor.

“Reagan” is fascinating on many levels, even though its subject seems to lack the pathos and personal demons that drove edgier presidential portraits in this series, such as those on Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Here is a guy for whom sentimentality was invented.

What’s missing here at one critical point, too, is context, some words from nonpartisan historians, political scientists and other specialists either endorsing or rejecting the notion that the Soviet dissolution and other profound global make-overs are owed exclusively to Reagan’s tenaciousness. Or were some of these now-defunct regimes so corroded at the base that their toppling from decay was just a matter of time, no matter who occupied the White House?

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In any case, “Reagan” is never more arresting than when examining Reagan’s fixation on the “evil empire” and his mid-1980s summitry with reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, especially from the perspectives of former top Soviet officials. “It’s easy to say President Reagan was anti-communist or anti-something,” says one of them, admiringly. “No, he was a romantic. He was the last romantic of this generation.”

A romantic at the mercy of steely realists in the opposite camp? There was great concern, notes Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, that “our gentle, slow, slightly doddery, aging president” could not hold his own in private disarmament talks with Gorbachev. But he showed surprising grit and canniness, we hear. And his son, Ron Jr., notes: “I think people don’t reckon with the power of charm. When my father turns on the high beams, even somebody like Gorbachev tends to melt.”

Those high beams lit up America on numerous occasions, for the ultimate message of Ronald Reagan was less what he said than who he was and how he shone. Just how much of himself he actually revealed to the nation is still unclear. He was definitely a man of striking contrasts--his own dysfunctional family, for example, belying his strong public advocacy of “Ozzie and Harriet” values.

That President Ozzie was not Parent Ozzie is stressed repeatedly by Ron Jr., who while acknowledging the tragedy of his father’s present erosion from Alzheimer’s, adds: “Things haven’t changed that much, you know. We’re not missing something that we had to begin with.”

Reagan has always been easy to underestimate, but difficult to measure as both a public and private figure, as “Reagan” itself affirms despite labeling itself as the first TV work on the nation’s former leading man to gain his family’s participation (making his oldest son Michael’s absence especially notable). Despite comments from Nancy, Maureen, Patti and Ron Jr., and some fairly intimate glimpses in both Hoyt’s section and producer-writer Adriana Bosch’s Part 1, the Reagan of “Reagan” is never fully formed and remains somewhat of a translucent hologram. As he appears to be even to those who have known him the longest.

There are some revealing moments, though, among them Helen Caldicott’s memory of an audience with Reagan that she calls “the most disconcerting meeting of my life.” Caldicott, founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, was a leader in the nuclear-freeze movement at a time when Reagan felt that eliminating peril from missiles required making more of them. Her chat with the president was arranged by his anti-nuke activist daughter, Patti.

Caldicott recalls Reagan pulling a piece of paper from his pocket and telling her what he’d written on it: “People who work for the nuclear weapons freeze are either KGB dupes or Soviet agents.” Caldicott said that when she asked where he’d heard that, he replied, “It’s from my intelligence files.”

Is this Reagan confusing fantasy and reality, an example of what another biographer, Lou Cannon, says is his refusal to “see things he doesn’t want to see”?

“Reagan” ends and begins on notes of poignancy, the Alzheimer’s descent of his declining years contrasted with the son of Main Street USA, proudly notching into a tree stump the 77 rescues he claimed during six summers as a lifeguard on Rock River, upstream from Dixon, Ill., a photo capturing the strapping, here-I-come-world young hero exuding confidence while posing in his bathing suit.

Then it’s on to jobs in radio and a career as a forgettable actor in forgettable films, then the famous political flip-flopping between marriages to Jane Wyman and Nancy as big government and communism become his twin foes and obsessions. A high-profile hosting gig on “G.E. Theater” helps elect him California governor, and in 1981 he’s in the White House, where the low point of his presidency will be the Iran-Contra affair.

Yet that memory surely will not outlast that of Ronald and Nancy Reagan bravely disclosing his Alzheimer’s. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” Reagan wrote to the American people, the suit sadly getting emptier.

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* “Reagan” airs on “The American Experience” at 9 p.m. tonight and Tuesday on KCET-TV Channel 28.