Reagan

To mark the 100th birthday of President Reagan HBO just recently showed a doc titled "Reagan" and I must say director Eugene Jarecki made the film rich and moving with footage from the entire life of Ronald both personal and political. The film chronicles from his 1911 birth till his 2004 death from Alzheimer's. Interesting is seeing behind the scenes footage from his early days as an actor, and plenty of important footage from his two terms as the 40th U.S. president is shown.

This doc is very educational as many may not know that Reagan as an actor was the SAG president and later a spokesperson for GE and this was a turning point for his politics from liberal democrat to conservative republican. As Ronald saw at GE how company profits worked making him pro business with trickled down economics and with Hollywood's liberal support of communism he broke away from that crowd becoming very anti communist and more of a war hawk.

After then you see how his good looks, and success of being a well known actor and speaking voice and charisma lead him to becoming California's governor he clearly was a man with the will power and spunk to accomplish he had all the makings of a strong leader. Which would later propel him into the presidency.

So in 1980 he crushed and beat Jimmy Carter by a landslide in the election it certainly was a new era in politics. Especially with the religious right shaping him, America, and the republican party with moral values. Clearly he was a man who cared about people.

During the doc you aside from the clips and footage you hear from historians, staff members, journalists, and biographers and family members who tell what an influence that second wife Nancy was on his presidency and life. And many point out Ronald's negatives like economists and international advisers mention Reagan's blunders of massive tax cuts which grew deficits during the 80's with high unemployment and telling was the Iran contra scandal which almost rocked his second term. So Ronnie wasn't a perfect man as he during his second term also ignored the AIDS crisis and fought hard against labor unions.

Love him or hate him Ronald Reagan will go down as a memorable icon both culturally and politically a leader who had a lasting impact. He was a man of many faces salesman,actor, politician, leader, religious man and controversial yet thru it all his legacy shines and last in the sunset sea to shining sea.

The first half of "Reagan" is fairly objective, to disguise the fact that this is simply another predictable hit-piece on Reagan, and on conservatism in general.

All of the seemingly positive narrators in the first half turn out to be very anti-Reagan in the second half.

If the program had ended as it began, with a positive characterization of Reagan, you could almost (but not quite) argue that it was fair. Instead, the second half is obviously there to tear down every positive image of Reagan that is slyly portrayed in the first half. The first half is only there to help tear down every positive image ("myth") about Reagan, in the second half.

Pick any Democratic president of the past 100 years--Obama, Clinton, Kennedy, Roosevelt, or even Carter, and you cannot imagine any media outlet producing a negative hit piece like this. But you expect it when the subject is a Republican president (so you should not be surprised or disappointed).

The best endorsement of Reagan's success, popularity, and achievements is the left's tireless and relentless effort, even after his death, to destroy him.

This documentary was shown with a leftist viewpoint. Since I was born in 1949 and lived through 12 presidents I have more knowledge gained through experience than those who read about things. The country almost went bust during Carter's administration due to his fiscal policies and lack of respect throughout the world. President Reagan brought back the United States with his tax policies and strong defense policy. The words that basically said it all was that if you tax the workers and give money to those who don't work, people won't work. That is exactly what we've created today with free health care, free housing and free food. Granted, the War On Drugs was a failure just as the War On Poverty was as is the War On Terror. All in all, Reagan was a great leader of the United States. He was at least as good as Eisenhower. The country flourished during their presidencies.

Ronald Reagan has become such a mythologised figure by the American right that it's hard for a documentary to present a balanced view. Moreover, Americans in general tend to treat their Presidents with a respect that is wholly absent from British politics; although Eugene Jarecki's documentary is actually not bad in challenging the myths (both that everything Reagan did was good, and also that he did everything that has been attributed to him), in it's tone, it can't help but add to them. In fact, it's pretty soft on his early years, and fails to mention that as Governor of California, his trick was really to talk like a conservative but to spend like only liberals were supposed to (although it concedes the same point with regard to his subsequent presidency). On the presidency itself, Jarecki's film delivers a harder verdict, as the critics are far more precise than the admirers, who can only defend Reagan through vague eulogy. It's a bit odd, however, that the final verdict on Reagan's years, and American society, is given by a former military officer who seems no more entitled to pass the definitive opinion than any of the rest of us. One interesting thing for me was to see that Reagan was, at his peak, a genuinely accomplished performer - dismissed as senile by his enemies perhaps before he truly was, he comes across as shrewder than popular perception allows, even if one can dispute the value of his legacy.

I watched this on Link TV, a liberal cable channel specializing in those such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, so I expected it to be scathing. It certainly stripped away many illusions, but while strongly critical the results of trickle down, and the limits of his grasp of complexity of issues; it defined his positions fairly.

He did evolve from a New Deal Democrat, leading his Actors Union against management, but also was viscerally opposed to global Marxism, and the social revolution of the 1960s.

The insights of Morris, his official biographer for almost a decade, along with Cannon who wrote several biographies including when he was Governor, provide special scholarly insight.

The current Republican conservatives forget that he pass what was an actual amnesty for illegal-undocumented immigrants, and actually increased both government spending and deficits.

It could be that his hawkish policies early on allowed him more latitude to connect with someone eager to wind down the cold war, Michel Gorbechev. History doesn't allow for controlled experiments so we can't re-run events with a different leader at the helm.

I commend this documentary for those who lived through the era, but events have become hazy.