February 28, 2018
SEEING AMERICA:
What I Learned Watching 'Back to the Future' With Ronald Reagan (MARK WEINBERG, February 27, 2018, Politico)
As Marine One took off, the feeling set in that everything was back to normal. On the helicopter with the Reagans were the president's personal aide, Jim Kuhn, his army aide, a physician, two Secret Service agents--and me. After we landed at Camp David, we traveled in a mini-motorcade to Aspen Lodge, and just before the president entered, someone suggested that he might prefer a quiet evening off instead of inviting the rest of us over for the usual movie showing. None of us wanted to tempt fate or tax Reagan, who was already in his mid-70s, as he continued to recover his surgery.Nothing doing. "No, no," the president said. "I've been looking forward to this and want you all to come.""Yes sir," we said almost in unison, and that was that. Even though the "call time" for the movie was 8:00 p.m. as usual, we gathered at the front door of Aspen at 7:45. It was a typically warm, muggy July evening. As always, Reagan opened the door at 7:50.The lights dimmed, and the movie started.The Reagans were looking forward to seeing Back to the Future, maybe because its star, Michael J. Fox, was already well known for playing a precocious Republican teenager on one of their favorite television shows, "Family Ties," then entering its fourth season. Fox played Alex P. Keaton, the son of two aging hippie parents growing up with his two sisters--and in the final seasons, a brother--in suburban Ohio. Young Alex, to the bafflement of his liberal mother and father, had grown up into a staunch conservative, fond of quoting the economist Milton Friedman (a Reagan favorite), wearing tailored suits and carrying his schoolwork in a briefcase.
In the film, which had just been released three weeks earlier, Fox plays Marty McFly, a high school student from a loving but struggling family. Through his friendship with a local scientist, inventor and all-around eccentric, Doc Brown, Marty is transported from the present year of 1985 back to 1955 in a time machine made from a converted DMC DeLorean sports car. As he adjusts to the shock of living in his hometown of Hill Valley, California, 30 years in the past--and falls in with a younger but no less wacky Doc Brown--Marty's unexpected mission is to help the teenage incarnations of his parents meet each other and fall in love and then, as the title suggests, return successfully to the year 1985.
Both Reagans appeared engrossed in Back to the Future, often laughing heartily. The president got a kick out of the fact that when Marty first goes back to 1955 and walks past Hill Valley's movie theater, the marquee shows Cattle Queen of Montana, the 1954 film starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan. [...]Six months later, on February 4, 1986, President Reagan channeled Doc Brown in his State of the Union address, as he exhorted Americans to remember that the sky--not the street--was the limit."Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive," the president said, "a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film Back to the Future, 'Where we're going, we don't need roads.'"That was how Ronald Reagan saw America. It is how those of us who knew him and loved him see it still.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 28, 2018 3:24 AM