A Plastic President Representing A Phony Party!

Uproar as soap fails to clean up Reagan's image

Liberal left accused of hijacking Hollywood as TV prepares to run warts-and-all biog of former US leader

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday October 22, 2003
The Guardian

Facts are stupid things, as Ronald Reagan once observed. They can also be extremely difficult to pin down, particularly when they concern the ever controversial former president.

That is what CBS television has found since taking the risk-laden decision to make a mini-series about the life of the US actor turned president.

The show has already started an uproar a month before it is due to be broadcast. While Mr Reagan sits at home in California in the grip of Alzheimer's disease and unaware of the struggles swirling around him, the battle lines in America's latest culture war have been drawn.

Conservative Republicans, for whom Mr Reagan is a living icon of a golden age, are deeply suspicious of the biographical soap opera, entitled The Reagans, convinced that it will turn out to be a liberal hatchet job. They point to accounts from leaked scripts which play up the former president's absent-mindedness, laziness and moral righteousness, and question their factual underpinnings.

In one scene, Nancy Reagan urges her husband to do more to help Aids sufferers, but he blocks the discussion, declaring: "They that live in sin shall die in sin." His supporters claim he would never had said such a thing. And they can claim support from at least one of his biographers, Lou Cannon, who told the New York Times that though Mr Reagan was "a bit asleep at the switch", he was, however, "not intolerant".

But in the official biography, entitled Dutch, by Edmund Morris, the former US president is quoted as saying of the condition Aids: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague", because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments".

Also likely to draw controversy is the hint made that Mr Reagan informed on his fellow actors, tipping off the McCarthy commission on the identity of communists in Hollywood. The allegation has circulated for a long time but was never conclusively proved.

At one point it is also suggested that he drew the inspiration for the star wars missile defence scheme from a 1940 film, in which he starred, entitled Murder in the Air. That appears to be a bit of a stretch. In the film, Mr Reagan plays an FBI agent trying to protect a US secret weapon that has some star wars characteristics but which is only vaguely discussed.

Hands-off

On the other hand, even the most fervent Reagan supporters will find it difficult to argue with the portrayal of his hands-off, laidback approach to governing. This was, after all, the man who famously said: "They say hard work never hurt anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?"

The two-part programme gives President Reagan credit for forcing an end to the cold war and for sticking to his principles and his determination to do an arms deal with Moscow despite the advice of his own aides. But, to the dismay of Reaganites, there is no mention of the Reagan-era economic boom.

The series producers insist that there are two sources behind every significant factual element in the film but at the same time confess to dramatic licence.

The former president's son, Michael, host of a radio talkshow, complained in an online column: "I haven't seen the script, which I understand has been leaked around Hollywood and is anything but friendly to my dad. Hollywood has been hijacked by the liberal left."

Mr Reagan's supporters are hardly likely to be reassured by the cast. The former president is played by James Brolin, a liberal actor who is married to the Democratic party's fundraising diva, the actor Barbra Streisand.

Nancy Reagan is played by the celebrated Australian actor Judy Davis, who has said she expected attacks from the right and welcomed them. In one interview about the series she said: "If this film can help create a bit more questioning in the public about the direction America has been going in since the 1970s, I guess then I think it will be doing a service."

Mrs Reagan has refused to comment on the mini-series, which is being transmitted next month, but she is unlikely to be happy about it. She is depicted as a bit of a control freak who appeared to organise the president's schedule according to the recommendations of their astrologer.

Her stepson Michael is not quarrelling with that assessment. He says he just challenges the focus of CBS on his family problems. "I'll admit that there are some crazy and wild things that go on in our family," he has written. "Nancy, for example believes that before you visit you should call and make an appointment, as if you were going to the dentist or the doctor.

"It's crazy, but that's what she does. That's the way she is. Do I think it's nuts? Sure. But it's nothing to get all riled up about. I still see my dad - I just have to do it by appointment. So what?"

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