The Day Reagan Was Shot

While the drama of this movie was entertaining, the reality was that the only people who got their knickers in a twist about this at the time were the media. In fact, it was only later that the anti-nuclear crowd, the bow-tied Harvard elite used this as a political opportunity to question whose finger was really on the trigger, and was the constitution was being ignored!

For those that look at movies to perform some sort of academic gratification or for those who live for governmental conspiracy theories and anti nuclear messages then this is the stuff for you. While 12 DAYS IN MAY was fiction and JFK stuffed with so many wild theories and ludicrous speculation THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT was a factual event that Hollywood has distorted to suggest we were near a nuclear war or a constitutional meltdown. Non of this was true, sure international politics at the time were tense, but the fact of the matter was that as soon as the president is incapacitated the constitutional procedure follows that the vice president takes charge. Al Hague said that he was in charge of the White House that is irrelevant if he has not got access to the nuclear codes that the President and Vice president has.

Interestingly was has been overlooked was that between 1981-1984 the USSR had to replace it's doddering and bedridden premiers three times until they put in Mikhail Gorbachov. Nobody in Hollywood seemed too be worried whose fingers were on the Soviets trigger for all that time bearing in mind some of them were never seen in public for months and were in a comatose state for weeks!!

To history buffs, no matter what they say, Oliver Stone movies are a guilty pleasure. It's got to be fun knowing real history, and I mean the arcane stuff, then watch someone take it, distort certain aspects out of it, and package it up into pop culture. The Oliver Stone product is essentially the best allohistory out there. (Ok, Ian McKellan in "Richard III" (1995), placing the Shakespeare story in an fascist pre-war England is still the best, but there has to be something said for quantity. JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), Path To War (aka LBJ) (2002), and this gem add up to a lot of entertainment.)

Stone is only somewhat limited by the endpoint constraints of actual history (i.e., on the morning of March 30, 1981, Regan is shot, and by the evening, Vice President George H.W. Bush is back in Washington). But other than that, it's open season for counterfactuals. Yes, Haig was famous for his "Haig-isms", and was prone to make statements like the famous "I'm in charge here" gaff. He actually did take the lead in the control room. But I only wish he acted like the Dryefuss portrayal, which makes the attempted coup in the classic "Seven Days in May" (1964) look like an episode of "The West Wing". From the start, Dryefuss' Haig is clearly the villain, much more so than Hinkley, who appears relatively level-headed. Hinkley just wants to impress Jodie Foster. Haig wants to press the button.

Dryefuss barely uses any restraint in the character, and at times reminded me of his comic performance as Jay Trotter in "Let It Ride". Anyway, he goes screaming for the nuclear football, tries to invoke the 25th Amendment, in-fights with Cap Weinberger, negotiates with the Soviets over the hotline about an ICBM launch, while holding NORAD on the line. Meanwhile, I thought Richard Crenna did a great job of looking kind of like Reagan. (Actually, Dryefuss looks a lot like Haig himself.) And I thought Michael Murphy as Michael Deaver was brilliant casting. Also, I have no problem with their unflattering portrayal of Nancy Reagan. But, they went a little too far in the scene where they try to prop up Reagan in the hospital bed for a picture (note the blurred camera POV, and the where-am-I smile on Regan). That was comedy straight out of Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973) where Allen is just unfrozen after 200 years and they're trying to get him past the security agents.

It would have all been good fun, except then National Security Adviser Richard Allen made a tape of the whole affair, using a Sony recorder, and forgot about it for 20 years. It surfaced again just after the movie was filmed, but before it was released. The transcripts were published, and the cabinet secretaries had a reunion on the Larry King Show, to play back parts of the tape, and other media coverage of the day. Al Haig's behaviour that day was only a minor issue, and his old colleagues said nothing got out of control, and things went about as would be expected for that kind of crisis. Not exactly 13 days in October. Unless you're Oliver Stone.

This semi-docudrama is really two films in one. The first concerns the infamous 1981 shooting of President Ronald Reagan and the valiant efforts to save his life. The second relays the power struggle among White House staff while the most powerful man in the world lay under anesthesia.

Despite the fascinating subject matter, THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT often falls flat, playing like a cobbled together movie of the week. Writer-director Cyrus Nowrasteh spends far too much time on the ego trips of Secretary of State Alexander Haig (a semi-annoying Richard Dreyfuss), failing to fully explore the more human angles as a nation sat with bated breath. What should have been a subplot with Haig dominates the movie. It would have been nice to see more of the doctors handed this enormous task; more of Nancy Reagan, the beloved First Lady; and more of the behind-the-scenes details, such as the ailing president signing a dairy bill to prove he was still in charge. The dialog is unimaginative and some of the performances resemble those of actors fresh from acting school.

There is a great movie to be made about the chaos within government when its leader is sidelined. But with its dual personality, THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT isn't it.

One of the fundamental issues in social life is the difference between the real life we lead and the way we see ourselves behaving, the difference between substance and perception.

The crisis here involved maintaining the perception that all was hunky dory.

Well, there were clips of the shooting repeatedly shown on TV so the incident couldn't readily be denied outright. But Reagan was reported walking unaided into GWH and joking with the medical staff, so he was perfectly all right except maybe with an injured rib or something. Brady was clearly in bad shape but we heard much less about him, and even less about the other victims. Reagan was always in good shape, never in danger, and was seen waving from the hospital window with that marvelous grin, back at work in no time.

That was the perception we were handed by governmental spokesmen and a media happy to oblige. The substance was that Reagan was quite seriously injured, with a bullet lodged between his collapsed lung and his heart. A seventy-year-old man, he didn't respond readily to treatment and took months to recover. During part of that time of course he was narcotized and no longer in control of the government or anything else. The "football" which could start a nuclear war was taken by the FBI, who refused to turn it over to anyone except Vice President Bush, who was incommunicado, and then only when so authorized by the AG. Alexander Haigue, Secretary of State, seems to have promptly taken over the reins but was challenged by a number of other members of the cabinet. (As a result, nobody knew who, if anyone, was "minding the store.") The code card that activated the football had been left in a wallet in Reagan's pants, which had been thrown into a hospital laundry hamper. The reason the Vice President was incommunicado was that the phones didn't work. Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, raised the defcom level on his own, leading the USSR to believe that perhaps we blamed them for the shooting and were about to strike back. There is an illuminating exchange between Hague and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during these arguments. Hague: "Can the Soviet Union launch a first strike?" Chairman: "Yes, they can." Hague: "How do we stop it?" Chairman: "Launch a first strike." VP Bush wasn't much help in clarifying things, refusing to take over as Acting President partly because his doing so would look in the press as an admission that Reagan was incapacitated (which of course he was).

That was the substance. But sometimes, through perfectly ordinary mistakes, the perception that was prepared for the public ("Everything's just fine") was contradicted. Alexander Hague got his line of succession wrong on TV in public. It had been changed in the late 1960s and he gave the earlier version. That statement shook up the press a bit, but as an error it was strictly minor league compared to what was going on behind the scenes.

You don't really need to be a conspiracy theorist to see with what condescension the public is treated by powerful political figures and, with some exceptions, by the press. As things fall apart and the center is in danger of not holding, as the formal norms fail to be observed, as the substance becomes rent with disagreement and disbelief, a perception is gradually agreed upon that will be handed to the public. It doesn't have to be true (it doesn't even have to be compellingly believable) but it has to be as soothing as a dose of Pepto-Bismol otherwise the great unwashed, whose intelligence is far too low to manage the complexities involved in understanding the substance, will panic.

The movie is, as I say, pretty well done. Dreyfus is a much more commanding figure than Hague appeared to be in interviews, but he did miss one outstanding moment in this real-life drama. It had to do exclusively with perception, not substance. In trying to calm the TV audience by saying that everything is proceeding normally, and "I'm in charge now," the most dramatic impression wasn't so much that he'd gotten the line of succession wrong. (Hardly anybody in the audience recognized the mistake because they didn't know the line of succession themselves.) The most persistent memory of that announcement was that Hague was an absolute nervous wreck, sweaty, shaking, his voice quavering. It projected an image of anything BUT normality. Cap Weinberger comes across as a thoughtless and impulsive hawkishly-bent bureaucrat, which is pretty close to an accurate picture of the man. He hated "welfare" when he was at what was then called The Department of Health Education and "Welfare". (Now it's called The Department of Health and "Human Services". You see my point about substance and perception.)

Small point. The "devastator bullets" that Hinckley used would never explode during removal. There was no question of their being dangerous after having been fired. The point this movie makes is a much larger one, going beyond even the question of the succession to the presidency.

Great film in general, not just for a made for showtime movie. Dreyfuss is perfect as Haig. I'm 23, and I must admit, I know very little about the true history of the events or the characters, but if the movie is anywhere close to true, this movie was, in many way, very scary. If this is how the situation was truly handled, then it's clear that we have some true hacks running the government at any given time! As for the movie, it was entertaining, and tho I know Reagan lived and recovered and the country didn't go down the drain, I found myself on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen. As I said, Dreyfuss was good, and the other performances were at the same level. I'm glad the actor who played Reagan didn't try to imitate his voice. That was a nice touch. Not the most exciting material, but in the end- the subject was successfully turned into a nice 90 min film. Overall- 9/10