The new film “Reagan,” based on Paul Kenger's book “Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,” charts the life of the 40th President of the United States with an overarching theme of his decades-long desire to see the Soviet Union collapse.
Dennis Quaid delivers a fine performance in the title role and would likely be an Oscar nominee, if Hollywood hadn't fallen into the hands of people sympathetic to Communism.
The film begins with an assassination attempt on President Reagan shortly after his inauguration and then moves to Russia a few years later. Jon Voight plays a fictional KGB analyst (Viktor Petrovich) who explains to a young Russian how Reagan led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, despite the title of the book the film is based on, communism still exists in many parts of the world and has its supporters today, including in the United States.
The film then flashes back to when Reagan was a young boy, reading a novel called The Printer of Udell by Harold Bell Wright, given to him by his devout Christian mother, Nell (Jennifer O'Neill). The 1902 novel tells the story of a small-town boy who becomes a Christian and seeks to reform his community. As a young man, Reagan insists that he follow his mother's Christian faith and be baptized by the pastor of her church. Later, a man who fled the Soviet Union speaks at Reagan's church, painting a nightmarish picture of communism that has a profound impact on the teenage Reagan.
Reagan's opposition to Communism intensified after he became president of the Screen Actors Guild and thwarted a Communist takeover of the film industry union, which was funded by the KGB. To emphasize Reagan's importance in thwarting the Communist plans, the film features a former Communist testifying before Congress that there was one man who did thwart the Communist plans: Ronald Reagan.
However, this “crusade” not only damaged Reagan's acting career, but also his marriage to his first wife, Jane Wyman. Wyman did not like Reagan's involvement in politics and demanded that he put more effort into winning an Oscar. After Wyman and Reagan divorced, Reagan met actress Nancy Davis, played by Penelope Ann Miller. Since Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Davis asked him for help in removing her name from Hollywood's list of suspected communists. Apparently, there was another Nancy Davis in the film industry who was a communist. In the film, she is clearly depicted as having romantic feelings for Reagan.
The encounter led to a courtship and marriage, and in the film Nancy is portrayed as a wife totally devoted to her husband. She supports his political career, but he sees it as part of God's plan for his life – a message he received as a child from his mother that God had a plan for his life.
As his acting career waned, Reagan supported himself and his family by making commercials, eventually becoming national spokesman for General Electric. This led Reagan, an avid reader of political philosophy such as that of Frederic Bastiat, to develop a canned speech with anti-big government and anti-Communist themes. When members of Senator Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign asked him to give a television address in October 1964, his “A Time to Choose” speech was actually just a revised version of one he had been giving around the country for several years.
This prompted California business leaders to invite him to run for Governor of California in 1966. After two terms in Sacramento, Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. After his narrow loss to Ford, Reagan's political career seemed over, and he said it seemed like becoming president was not God's plan.
However, after the disastrous presidency of Jimmy Carter (who defeated Ford), Reagan decided to run for president again in 1980, and was elected.
The rest of the film focuses on Reagan's campaign to overthrow the Communist government of the Soviet Union, including a dramatic scene in which Reagan comes face to face with death during an assassination attempt in 1981.
In one scene, Reagan convinces British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Lesley-Anne Down) to stop buying gas from the Soviet Union in order to weaken the Soviet economy. When Reagan begins building a space defense system to protect against nuclear missiles, protesters call him “Hitler.” According to Voight, a former KGB analyst, this Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was commonly referred to as “Star Wars,” and it greatly unsettled the Soviet leadership.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet general secretary during the Reagan administration, desperately tried to persuade Reagan to abandon SDI during their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, but Reagan said, “No.”
Reagan instructed his speechwriters to improve the quality of the speech, but encountered opposition from within his administration, including from Secretary of State George Shultz, who pleaded with Reagan not to provoke Gorbachev over the June 1987 Berlin Wall attack. Shultz was particularly alarmed that Reagan intended to ask Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall, a symbol of the divisions that Soviet Communism had brought to Europe, dividing the German capital into Communist and non-Communist parts of the country.
The film then moves to two years later, when people on both sides of the Berlin Wall begin to take up sledgehammers and chisels to tear down the infamous wall, while Reagan has retired to his California ranch and is soon suffering from dementia and stepping down from public office.
The film ends with President Reagan's farewell letter to the American people, in which he reveals that he is one of many Americans who suffer from Alzheimer's disease, and concludes with the words, “Until the Lord calls me back to heaven.”
For those who lived through the Reagan era, this film is truly a trip down memory lane. Unfortunately, the current political climate and the strength of the American left show that communism is alive and well in the world. As William Cullen Bryant said in the 19th century, “Liberty, do not close your eyelids yet, for thine enemy never sleeps.”
