Michael Rogin, 64; Professor and Author of Reagan, Melville Books

Michael Rogin, UC Berkeley political science professor and unabashed liberal author who skewered actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan for “merging his on-screen and off-screen identities,” analyzed the “Gothic horror story” of McCarthyism and psychoanalyzed the social motivation behind Herman Melville’s writing, has died. He was 64.

Rogin died Nov. 25 in Paris of hepatitis, which he contracted there during a sabbatical from the university.

A gifted teacher, Rogin joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1963 to teach American politics, but later expanded his classroom repertoire to include such humanities and social science subjects as film, feminism, race and racism, and Marxism. He was selected by students for the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1978 and earned one of the first Chancellor’s Professorships in 1996.

He also was a prolific writer, penning eight books that attracted academic and mainstream audiences, plus numerous scholarly articles and reviews for such prestigious publications as the London Review of Books.

“He invented ways of thinking about things. He was just so perceptive and so much his own vision. No one can duplicate that,” said UC Berkeley law professor Robert Post, Rogin’s coauthor of the 1998 book “Race and Representations.”

Rogin’s other books were: “The Intellectuals and McCarthy” in 1967, “Political Change in California” in 1970, “Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian” in 1975, “Subversive Genealogy: the Politics and Art of Herman Melville” in 1983, “ ‘Ronald Reagan,’ the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology” in 1987, “Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot” in 1996, and “Independence Day, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Enola Gay” in 1998.

Rogin garnered the most international attention for his book of essays on America’s attitude toward countersubversives published when Reagan was president. The leading essay on Reagan echoed Rogin’s earlier speeches and interviews in which he said the president’s perception of himself and the world was largely shaped by the movies in which he had starred.

The educator said, for example, that Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense concept was rooted in the 1940 film “Murder in the Air” in which Reagan played American secret agent Brass Bancroft, who was battling Communist spies.

The film, as Rogin described it in 1985, depicted “attack on subversion; merger of communism and fascism; the flippancy about matters of life and death, peace and war; the obsession with intelligence agents as the means to national security; and, most strikingly, the existence of an airborne defensive superweapon that will make America invulnerable. All these look forward beyond World War II to the ‘Star Wars’ militarization of space and the Reagan presidency.”’

‘Real World and the Movie World’

Rogin pointed out that Reagan frequently lifted lines from movies to illustrate a speech or argument, including “The Force is with us” from George Lucas’ landmark 1977 “Star Wars” to support his missile defense plan.

“I’m saying there is some confusion between the real world and the movie world for him,” Rogin told an interviewer in 1985, “and the confusion between life and film produced ‘Ronald Reagan,’ the image that has fixed our gaze.”

Predictably, when the book was published, reviewers both panned and praised Rogin’s work. The conservative New Republic discounted the author’s statement that “Reagan . . . found out who he was through the roles he played on film,” noting that a 1940s actor had little control over what roles he played, that Reagan’s scripts merely reflected public opinions of the day and that most Americans, not just Reagan, were eager in the 1940s to slay such demons as nazism and communism.

The New York Times review called the book “patronizing, if not downright sour” while the Christian Science Monitor lauded the “well-written essays” in the “important book.”

Reviewing Rogin’s earlier book comparing Melville’s family and political history with his writing, the Monitor praised the professor for marshaling previous studies on Melville, but added:

“Unfortunately, the attempts of scholars to draw parallels between a writer’s life and work tend to lie in the misty landscape of speculation, and while the cautious investigator pursues such studies carefully and tentatively, Rogin has ridden the horse of his thesis boldly into the murk. At times it has shied at some notion and thrown him into the bushes.”

The Los Angeles Times review similarly praised Rogin for recognizing that Melville may have hoped to foster change in America’s 19th century racial prejudice, but added: “Fascinating as it is to make Melville a social and political activist in a thousand large and small ways, this political scientist has to be joking when he cuts out all the art and philosophy of Melville and makes his writings political allegories.

“Is it really possible,” The Times’ review continued, “to believe that because ‘Moby Dick’ draws upon prophetic books of the Bible it is therefore prophetic of the Civil War 10 years hence? Is Ahab’s hickory harpoon really Old Hickory (Andrew Jackson). . . . Is Ahab really John Calhoun dooming the country? Is the white whale really Daniel Webster destroying American life?”

He Taught in Uganda

A Times review of Rogin’s 1975 book on Andrew Jackson called it “a convincing and erudite work” of “sophisticated and eclectic . . . retrospective psychoanalysis.”

Born in Mount Kisko, N.Y., Rogin earned his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in government from Harvard and earned master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from the University of Chicago. He taught for a year in Uganda before starting his career at Berkeley.

Rogin is survived by two daughters, Isabelle of Honolulu and Madeleine of Berkeley; a brother, Edward of Honolulu; a sister, Andrea Stanger, of Monroeville, Pa.; and his companion of more than a decade, UC Berkeley professor Ann Banfield, who was with him in Paris.

The UC Berkeley political science department has scheduled a memorial service at 2 p.m. Jan. 20 in the Faculty Club.