HBO’s Reagan — Where’s the Rest of Him?
The new documentary Reagan treats its subject in as fair and balanced a way as would seem possible — for a while.
Liberal filmmaker Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight) shows how a handsome radio broadcaster named Ronald Reagan channeled his ambition into a film career that gave way to a remarkable political run.
But once we see Reagan taking the oath of office, Jarecki’s ability to rein in his ideology collapses. The film lulls conservative viewers into a sense of calm only to trap them into a dishonest account of the 40th president’s legacy.
Reagan, screened at the Sundance Film Festival last month, makes its TV debut at 9 pm EST on Monday, February 7, on HBO.
Jarecki sets his trap early, using a musty clip of Reagan discussing how images don’t always match the reality.
“Seldom, if ever, do we ask if the images are true to the original. Even less do we question how the images are created. This is probably more true of presidents in our country because of the intense spotlight that follows their every move,” Reagan says.
Jarecki wants to rob the right of using Reagan, or at least the symbol he’s become, as a rallying point.
The film begins with the outpouring of affection during Reagan’s public funeral, then segues to Reagan’s teen days as a near-sighted lifeguard.
He was a dashing young man who made his own luck, and for a while that combination helped him land a series of big screen roles. But after serving in the military during World War II, Reagan returned to a film industry where antiheroes were the hot new trend. A straight up hero type need not apply.
So he became president of the Screen Actors Guild, a position that shifted his political compass from a self-described “hemophiliac liberal” to a conservative. He later served six years as a GE spokesman, letting him flex his budding political ideals to the consternation of his bosses.
That’s where Reagan learned to sell himself and his political principles, according to his son, Ron Reagan, Jr.
Jarecki’s film to this point relies on traditional documentary techniques to fill in Reagan’s formative years. The tone is reverential, not flashy. The content may lack depth, but it’s breezily stitched together in a way that should enlighten those who know little about Reagan prior to his years in the Oval Office.
The first sign that the fix is in comes in retelling the end of the Iranian hostage crises and the dawn of Reagan‘s presidency. A voice tells us Reagan had nothing to do with the hostages’ release, preferring to give credit to outgoing President Jimmy Carter even though common sense tells you the pressure of a new, no-nonsense commander in chief clearly made it happen.
Acutally Jimmy Carter got them released via the Algiers Accords.
Reagan had nothing to do with it. You are wishfully thinking here.
I like reagan, but what you are saying is historically inaccurate.
To assume reagan’s mere presence made it all possible is flat out wrong. Espically, since this had been in the works for sometime and only just happend to come into fruition a day before carter left office. The hostages being released on the same day that reagan was sworn in as President is correlation without causation. A mere coincidence.
Nothing more.
http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/j/Jimmy_Carter.htm
Iran hostage crisis
“To assume reagan’s mere presence made it all possible is flat out wrong.”
To assume Regan’s presence was NOT causation is flat out naive. The Iraians knew:
Carter–dove
Reagan–hawk (Regan proved this to Gaddafi when a slow-on-the-uptake Gaddafi subscribed to your “mere coincidence” school of thought)
“Especially, since this had been in the works for sometime…”
Perhaps kicked into high gear after the previous Nov. election when Carter was defeated by Reagan?
“…and only just happend to come into fruition a day before carter left office.”
Only just happened to come to fruition? Are you serious?
Twenty minutes after Reagan’s inauguration. Not 20 mins before. Not the day before. Twenty minutes after. That is as sure a sign of disrespect to Carter as there was. They knew full well what was going to happen to them if they didn’t fork them over, or if they killed them. Carter couldn’t secure their release for four hundred and forty four days. 15 months in captivity, but they are released twenty minutes after Reagan’s inauguration. Oh there was plenty causation, it was called the November election. That caused the Iranians to rethink their current situation.
The correlation is easy. Jimmy Carter was weak. The Iranians didn’t respect him, and they chose the day after Reagan was officially Commander in Chief to facilitate the release. Gosh that dissonance has to be uncomfortable, Zac.
Nothing surprising. I’ve yet to meet an admitted liberal who didn’t try to whitewash the Iran Hostage Situation in favor of Jimmah. It’s Pavlovian at this point. It’s like the guy who sees his wife open the jar and says “I loosened it.” They are desperate to give Carter credit where none is deserved. Likewise they all tell me Reagan had nothing to do with the fall of the Soviet Union. Many of them secretly hate to think about that anyway, as its implications to their ideology are not something they take well.
As time goes on, and more and more people who weren’t even born yet come to a point of having a political opinion, it’s more an important than ever for liberals to attempt to modify the simple accepted truths of those who were alive when it happened. So it must be our duty to refute them to anyone who will listen.
“Reagan, screened at the Sundance Film Festival last month.”
Ah yes, that bastion of “conservative” thinking, the Sundance Film Festival headed by none other than the “ultra-conservative leader” of the far right, Robert Redford. Please, if this piece of trash got good reviews at Sundance, it may as well have been made by Stalin.
Don’t waste your time on trash like that. But I’m sure Bill Maher loved it. And, by the way, he’s got a show on HBO too. Tells you something, doesn’t it?
So when is the HBO film coming out about JFK? You know how he lowered taxes and hated communists and how LBJ, Bobby and Teddy all distorted his memory and capitalized on it. I guess they will get to it right after the “Bill Clinton, President of the World” special on MSNBC with Chris Mathews.
Don’t forget, he was murdered by a Castro admiring communist too. Chances of that film being made? Somewhere between zero and none.
They were released because Regan made it very clear that if they weren’t by the time he was in office, that we were coming to get them.
He made it clear, huh? Was it going to be in the same manner that he went after the terrorists responsible for killing several hundred Marines? By ‘cutting and running’?
Of course, Reagan got revenge on those Iranians when he backed Saddam during the Iraq-Iran war. We all know how well that turned out for the US!
U.S. backing for Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War was de minimus. How de minimus? According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (hardly a pro-American NGO), the U.S. ranked 16th in arms transfers to Iraq — behind such military powerhouses like Switzerland.
Our main goal was to protect Gulf shipping, which came under attack by both sides. We also hoped to ensure that neither side got the decisive upper hand, which Iran increasingly gained as the war wore on. As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”
Whether I agree with President Reagan’s decision in this matter (and I do not), I do understand that at that time terrorism was simply not an issue, and that the larger issue and the one he focused on was the cold war. Which he won, with the help of PM Thatcher and to a certain extent, the Pope.
Conservatives tend to look at our heroes in toto, not picking apart one thing or another that we may disagree with. President Reagan was a great and honorable man. I say this not ignoring what I would call his mistakes, but simply taking them along with the whole package.
Saw ‘Reagan’ last night on the BBC. First half was good, but a typical ‘Bait and Switch’. As you say, the number of Reagan supporters fell off dramatically when discussing his time in office, especially when talking about ‘Reaganomics’. So, overall, an interesting first half spoiled by a bit of a hatchet job in the second half.
I saw the second half, and was disappointed with the bias of a few. Some blatant misrepresentations by the man from MIT…but he’s from MIT dontcha know. (suggested that deficit spending started with Reagan< and consequently he's responsible for where we're now at.)
I'll watch the first half now…maybe the second hour should be edited out. I'm not sure who this is targeted at, but for those of us that were of voting age when he was in office, this really was revisionist to some extent.
The Left has always believed in the effectiveness of agit-prop, and it is their favorite carrot in the carrot-and-stick approach they take in attacking free societies. I’d say the US today is a good example of its success. So, if we allow the Left to produce and distribute these propaganda pieces, whose fault is that? Not theirs — they are working hard to destroy American society. The fault is in ourselves, to coin a phrase.
Why should we as conservatives expect anything less coming out of the modern American entertainment media? This should be no surprise and of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. Tune it out. The first clue and the only one needed is this: “Liberal filmmaker…..” Are there any conservative filmmakers? That liberal label tells me to make better use of my time.
I remember the election well.
I was in my senior year of high school.
We had a joke about Reagan and the Iran hostages.
Very simple joke with a grim ha ha kind of ending…
What is flat and glows?
Tehran; The day after Reagan is elected.
Oh it was pretty funny and a very widespread “joke”
But I bet the Iranians did not think it was so funny.
And it was VERY close to the truth.
If you think they released the hostages because of Carter then you need to get help with your crack addiction.
Thank you for reminding me of something. I was in eighth grade when Reagan was elected. In addition to that joke, Do you remember this fine ditty from 1980.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGj6iSZvak
Is anyone surprised that the liberal filmmaker did not do an objective job preparing his “documentary?”
They no longer control the narrative, try as they might. It’s like babies playing in the sand.
You provide no evidence to support your claim that the Iranians were so scared of reagan so they released the hostages. NONE. You just make the claim because Reagan was a hawk they didn’t want a piece of him. What horse crap. Show me the Iranians thinking or shut up. It was all jimmy carter. Sorry, Facts are so hard for you to accept.
“You provide no evidence to support your claim that the Iranians were so scared of reagan so they released the hostages. NONE. You just make the claim because Reagan was a hawk they didn’t want a piece of him. What horse crap. Show me the Iranians thinking or shut up. It was all jimmy carter. Sorry, Facts are so hard for you to accept.”
Rather like common rules of usage, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization are hard for YOU to accept?
“…Reagan, [so] they…” (cap, ind. clauses separated by comma and coordinating conjunction)
“…was a hawk, [and] they…” (Either missing the CC ‘and’, which simply makes the point you seek to disprove, or disordered clauses – your point is that OUR point is spurious; that the Iranians didn’t want a piece of Reagan BECAUSE he was a hawk.)
“…Iranian’s thinking…” (Possessive use requires apostrophe)
“…Jimmy Carter…” (Proper nouns not capitalized, also missing the needed verb ‘DO’, indicating Carter accomplished the deed. Your usage would only work if a hurricane named Jimmy Carter caused the result.)
“… [I am]Sorry [that] facts…” (Sentence is missing the subject, there should be no comma after ‘sorry’, and why is ‘facts’ capitalized? Additionally, simply claiming that unnamed, unsupported, and uncited ‘facts’ support different conclusions is a logical fallacy.)
If you really want revisionist, left-wing rants to be taken seriously (which I imagine you do not, being a troll as you clearly are) on a right-wing forum, how about showing you have the intelligence and education to use the written language as well as any 6th grader? Failing that, perhaps you could simply run it through WORD to avoid looking like a fool? Your command of such rules and conventions is indicative of the general quality of your thinking, as well as the general quality of the public schools of which your side is so proud. Let me translate that into text language for you:
“Lawl! You been pwned by teh internets!”
I met some Iranian students in spring ’79 shortly after I graduated from college…during the time of the revolution. They were concerned about going home. Then the hostage crisis. They were doubly concerned about going home but moreso for their families in Iran if the next President was a hawk…then Reagon won the nomination….I don’t believe they ever went home but certainly met with some hostility here in the US until the crisis was over…so although not hard evidence, at least I had perspective from some Iranian acquaintances. I moved to another city in ’81 so don’t know the end of the story.
No, you’re all sadly disinformed. The unsung Admiral John Poindexter was the driving force behind their release. Can you prove he didn’t? Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
I tend to believe the conspiracy theory about Reagan promising arms for their release given the later Iran-Contra scandal. I like Reagan, but he could be shrewdly conniving.
Carter was engaged in negotiations to secure the release of the hostages, as evidenced by Reagan appointing him to meet and greet them as they landed in Germany, then escort them home. I believe that was Reagan’s way to recognize what was accomplished by the previous administration and would have been useful to have seen in the documentary.
Likewise, instead of speaker after speaker lambasting Reagan for cutting funding to welfare, education and the like, it is worth noting that what was actually cut was the rate of growth.
Finally, it has been widely established thatafter his cuts to the marginal rates, tax revenue more than doubled from the time he took office until the end of his presidency.
hey bravo! bless your heart for writing this review. I watched this last night and I was OUTRAGED! While I knew that this would be a hatchet piece–what could you expect from the liberals at HBO (Home of Barack Obama)?–I had no idea it would be this bad! and like you said, the way they did it, setting up the beginning w/ great footage but then came the lies, damn lies!
they highlighted the 10% joblessness in the first two years of his term and never mentioned that he brought the UE rate down to 5%. and here we go again with the Iran Contra bullshit. these scum would like you believe that Reagan somehow committed a terrible crime, b/c his administration sold old guns to the enemy in exchange for hostages. you know what? I didn’t give a shit then and I don’t give a shit now. Reagan, the man, sat down with desperate family members, looked them in the eye and told them he would get their loved ones back home safe. and he did and that’s all that matters.
oh and look at how much screen time they gave to the conservatives and even his own son Michael and then look at the screen time they gave to Ron Jr., that disgrace, and you can see the unbalance right away.
How about that fool at the end shrilling that he would’ve voted for Carter if he knew then what he knows now. yeah, hindsight is 20/20. I wish we COULD go back in time so that you could live through such a misery.
JML
I cancelled HBO long ago because of their political bias and I haven’t regretted it. If you are really that interested in movies or HBO original programming, rent it when it comes out on DVD.
The HBO “mockumentary” should have just added “An Amiable Dunce” to its title. At least I’d have known it was a hachet job in advance.
ABC’s invitation to Alger Hiss to comment on Nixon’s election loss in 1962 was tasteless. The photographer that did the awful work on John McCain was too (leftists are so angry all the time).
But this was tasteless and lame. HBO could have simply hired Maplethorp to put a Reagan picture in feces and saved the pretense of a documentary.
Some lightweight in the HBO special, with faux sincerity, says Reagan “caused” the deficits of the 80′s. He just “knows” Reagan did.
Must be nice to forget that spending bills come from Congress which Reagan did not control. Doubly nice to forget who tried to impound excess spending in 1969 (Nixon), which party challenged Nixon and “won” the right to spend irresponsibly.
The HBO feature was a disgrace. The director’s low class behavior is no better than a man asked to deliver a eulogy and trashes the deceased instead.
Good reminder of why NPR and NEA need to be defunded. There is more than enough leftist opinion as it is.
I’m afraid you’ve misconstrued the point of the film. Jarecki says simply that characterizations of Reagan – those either vilifying or glorifying him – are inaccurate, nor matter how inconvenient that fact may be.
Apparently it’s quite inconvenient for you, given your response. Why not address this point on its merits, instead of offering more stale ad hominem non-arguments? You should be happy at the opportunity to educate yourself.
If so much of your own beliefs depend upon Reagan as God, there’s not much to your convictions at all.
I just watched this as I got HBO as a package deal. I would never buy HBO outright as they are ridiculously politically motivated and don’t care what truths they twist.
This documentary was a perfect example. I went to other sites to read the reviews and you can really tell which sites get the liberal crowds. Their comments are so filled with hate and venom, you really get a glimpse into their beliefs and how bad they want to exaggerate things to fulfill their needs. It’s a sad thing.