Panique à la Maison Blanche

This made-for-TV movie, produced by the liberal's liberal, Oliver Stone is a compelling, exiting and watcheable portrayal of events which were pretty forgettable in real time. One wonders if the White House was this dysfunctional at the time....everbody behaves badly. One might expect tight-lipped shrillness (an oxymoron) from Nancy Reagan, but poor Sarah Brady, wife of wounded press secretary James Brady fares not much better as she wails "what have THEY (who?) done to you!?!?". After relentless mean spirited badgering of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger by Secretary of State Alexander Haig, someone finally says "show some tact, Al." I think the deck gets stacked against this Republican Administration most especially in the wimpy portrayal of Bush'41, who is both clueless and deferential to a fault throuout the movie. The Gipper fares not much better. Still, its great storytelling.

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.

Cinemagraphically, this movie is absolutely dreadful. I've seen better sets and make-up in junior high productions. Particularly laughable is the national TV news anchor who appears to be reporting from a secretary's desk in the basement of the CBS building. The acting is marginal at best, with some good performances in places but overall simply average, and marred further by the fact that almost none of the actors bear any physical resemblance to the people they are playing.

Despite the fact that he lent his name to this (as "Executive Producer"), the film bears no Oliver Stone trademarks. Say what you will about Stone's political / social agenda, he knows how to make movies. I'm surprised he would allow himself to be associated with such an amateurish TV movie that bears none of his imprint (slick editing; flashbacks; tight plot).

Apart from accuracy (which I'll get to in a minute), the film is also marred by pointless dialogue and scenes. No self-respecting doctor would beg off emergency surgery simply because of political differences; anyone who even entertained that thought should lose his license. Likewise, there's no way they would have allowed such blatant contamination in the operating room (the secret service agent with the *machine gun* in the OR had me in stitches -- what's he going to DO with the gun, anyway? -- never mind the constant traffic in and out by government agents and officials).

I was 11 when Reagan was shot and I remember it vividly. I even have the TIME magazine from that week, not to mention a number of books on Reagan. So I'm fairly well qualified to speak to the film's accuracy. Funnily enough, allowing for some dramatic license, it's actually not that far-fetched. We don't know what went on behind the scenes at the White House or at the Hospital. It's doubtful that Haig was as aggressive as depicted, and the missile attack is entirely overwrought. The press was not as belligerent as depicted, and nobody insisted on taking a minicam up to the recovery room to verify that the president was still alive; nor did Nancy force him to sign anything or Deaver insist on taking pictures. What we do know is this:

• There was a great deal of chaos and confusion within the government, including retrieving the VP from his trip in Texas.

• Haig did appear on national TV and try to convince the world (not all that successfully) that he was "in control" at the White House pending the VP's return.

• There was confusing information coming out of the Hospital, including Brady's reported death and other items not even mentioned in the movie (Lyn Nofziger reported that Reagan was having "open-heart surgery" as opposed to "open-chest surgery" -- a big difference!)

• Jack Paar (the secret service chief who pushed Reagan into the car) did, in fact, save Reagan's life by taking him to the Hospital; and Reagan was a lot closer to death than people (outside the Hospital) realized at the time, due to many of the factors mentioned in the movie.

• The opening scenes that depict Reagan meeting with his staff are also fairly accurate (although the cartoonish depiction of William Casey is rather offensive; his debilitating strokes did not occur until later in the administration). Reagan, as he (Crenna) says, was not interested in the details. This is, IMHO, to his credit as a leader and as a president, although others would differ. It was, if nothing else, a sharp contrast to the Carter years, a reference Reagan makes in the movie.

To my knowledge, there's never been any assertion of "conspiracy" in the Reagan shooting as there is with JFK. It's pretty obvious what happened, and that Hinckley acted alone. Lacking such a premise, the filmakers can only compensate by ratcheting up the drama, in which they stretch the truth, but not to the breaking point. Thus, it's an interesting movie to watch if you accept all this, but hardly something for the historical record.

Finally, I wonder if Ronald Reagan and Richard Crenna knew each other when they were together in Hollywood in the 1960's. I'd be interested to know the answer to this. Sadly, I can't ask either of them, but maybe Nancy knows...