STUPID IS...:

Reagan was the original Forrest Gump who struck lucky (Trevor Royle, 06 June 2004, Sunday Herald)

It was fitting perhaps that Ronald Reagan died on the eve of the D-Day celebrations. Unlike other Hollywood actors such as Jimmy Stewart who gave up tinseltown to fly for the US army air force, Reagan remained an actor, not a doer. Later in life, before Alzheimer’s disease cruelly felled him – he called the affliction “riding into the sunset”, another Hollywood cliché – he would tell Israeli politicians that he remembered seeing the liberated concentration camps at the end of the second world war. It sounded good, but too bad that he was not wearing a uniform at the time but was working for a documentary unit.

In that sense there was always more than a touch of vaudeville about Reagan. He was a bad actor who knew his limitations. Not for him Gary Cooper’s heroic sheriff role in High Noon (a White House favourite for successive presidents). And not for him the youthful John Wayne in John Ford’s Stagecoach, two movies which helped to define 20th century America. He was always on the outside looking in, the minor bit-player who was always small-town America.

Perhaps because he saw himself as a patriot, a Forrest Gump before his time, he allied himself with the McCarthy faction and joined those Hollywood bigots who lined themselves up against anything that smacked of communism and the perils of the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. It was unworthy of him and unworthy of the country at the time, but it marked him and had he not entered politics he could have ended up a bad actor who chose bad politics.

There's nothing wrong with having had honest policy disagreements with Mr. Reagan, but this column is just an embarrassing mixture of ignorance, lies, misunderstandings, and idiocies. Setting aside for now the obvious point that the lesson of Forrest Gump is that the neanderthal Right was correct all through the 60s and 70s, here are some of the other problems with the piece:

(1) Far from being an ineffective demagogue when it came to communist penetration of Hollywood, Ronald Reagan rather carefully sorted the innocent dupes from the Soviet tools. (Indeed, he met Nancy while helping clear her name.)

(2) He didn't dodge big roles in soon-to-be-classic films, knowing himself to be inadequate. Legend has it he was even up for the part of Rick in Casablanca.

(3) He was never a major film star, but nor was he a bit player. Meanwhile, he did become a genuine tv star, unless hosting a primetime show for 8 years doesn't qualify.

(4) When working with footage of the concentration camps he may well have been in uniform, since he was working in his capacity as an Army reservist.

(5) Finally, that odd bit about "an actor not a doer" seems amply refuted by his becoming president of the Screen Actors' Guild, Governor of California and President of the United States, no? We all like Jimmy Stewart, but he flew a plane, he didn't lead the forces of freedom to victory in the Cold War. Meanwhile, what has Trevor Royle ever done?

MORE:
A light extinguished (Peter Roff, 6/5/2004, UPI)

In his own way, Reagan, as leader of the Republican Party, leader of the nation and leader of the free world, took his own cliffs, helped free several continents and helped end a war.

There were many who loved Reagan for what he was and what he represented and there were many who hated him for the same reasons. He always found a way to remind us that the United States' best days were yet to come, even when it seemed they were long past. Reagan represented the United States at its best, with an infectious optimism that let everyone know that things would turn out okay because American was a special place, full of remarkable people and founded on the ideal that all mankind is, simply by virtue of its creation, equal.

At a time when many counseled compromise with the Soviet Union as it marched down the road to world domination, Reagan said "No." To him, Communism was not just a different political system; it was an evil thing that needed to be stamped out if liberty and humanity were to endure.

At a time when there were many who, at home and abroad, believed the United States, because of its economic, military and cultural power was an force for ill, Reagan strode across the world stage, a colossal figure, a giant in a time of other giants, to set out the truth as he saw it and to unashamedly pursue that truth.

Historians writing in a future age will no doubt praise Reagan for all that he accomplished and all that he set in motion. No other figure, say perhaps Winston Churchill, did so much in the 20th century to shape the early stages of the 21st. Under his leadership, the United States restarted the engine of its prosperity, creating 20 million jobs, 7 million small businesses, checked inflation, sparked record growth in the U.S. economy and spawned a worldwide boom that carried forward well beyond his presidency.

Throughout Europe, throughout Central America and into South America, Asia and Africa, there are people who today live free because Reagan believed that freedom could triumph over tyranny and because he had the courage to carry the battle for liberty forward, unbowed if bloody by partisan critics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2004 3:51 PM