Saturday, February 21, 1998

Documentary on Reagan worth seeing

By WILLIAM A. RUSHER / Newspaper Enterprise Assn.

In a sense, it isn't quite reasonable to expect, at this early point in time, a balanced assessment of Ronald Reagan. When it comes to presidents, even the indisputably great ones must expect a considerable bouncing around. (Thomas Jefferson, for example, is going through an especially bad patch just now.) And of course the situation is even worse when it comes to the more recent presidents. Their policies are still ferociously controversial, and many of their most loyal friends and severest critics are still alive and in no mood to be contradicted.

In addition, a genuinely fair appraisal of Ronald Reagan faces problems all its own. For Reagan is the human Mecca toward which all conservatives bow five times a day, and by the same token the central figure in the contemporary demonology of liberalism. It will be decades, perhaps even centuries, if ever, before students of our era can agree on his place in American history.

So it borders on the astonishing that PBS will air nationally, at 8 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday, Feb. 23 and 24, a documentary on Ronald Reagan that is neither a smear job nor an exercise in hagiography but a long, deep and thoroughly fair study of the life and presidential administration of this remarkable man.

One of the basic facts that made this possible is that matter of length. For four and a half hours, spread over two evenings, we examine his career. This son of an alcoholic father and a deeply religious mother is traced through his early years in small-town Illinois, his teen-age job as a lifeguard on a nearby river, his stint as a sportscaster on a Des Moines, Iowa, radio station, and his arrival in Hollywood.

There, for a while, it seems that the story will have its climax and its end. Reagan became a well-regarded actor, albeit never a superstar, and even his presidency of the Screen Actors' Guild seemed, at first, simply an extension of his interest in films. But it was in this capacity that Ronald Reagan encountered and battled the Hollywood Communists, who were immensely influential. He learned to detest communism with a vigor that would have historic consequences.

As the documentary notes, Reagan's subsequent work for General Electric, giving talks on free enterprise at its plants, was an equally formative experience. In 1964, this lifelong Democrat endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater. Just two years later he was elected governor of California by a million votes, and the curtain rose on a new and very different career.

It is here that the documentary really earns its spurs. Every major event of his presidency -- the assassination attempt, the 1981 tax cuts, the 1982 recession, the 1983 deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe, the replacement of the loyal team that powered his first administration by a new and highly possessive chief of staff (Donald Regan) in the second, the drawn-out agony of the Iran/contra affair, the seemingly disappointing and yet profoundly significant Reykjavik summit, and his spectacular visit to Moscow in May 1988, among others -- is carefully described and thoughtfully assessed.

Both admirers and critics of the man are heard from; but there can be no doubt that the interviews with major figures in Reagan's life, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Nancy Reagan (her first since leaving the White House), are what give this remarkable production its unmistakable air of authority. His official biographer, Edmund Morris, is almost Olympian in his detachment. And the interviews with three of Reagan's four children, who longed to be closer to him, are profoundly touching.

Here and there I would lodge an objection: It is, for example, preposterous to blame the phenomenon of "the homeless" on Reagan's cuts in welfare. But that is nit-picking. We are not likely to see again, in our time, a television study of Ronald Reagan so thoughtful, so balanced, and so absorbing. Don't miss it!

William A. Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.