What “Reagan” Doesn’t Tell You About Ronald Reagan

The Gipper’s biopic is now streaming, and it’s even worse than you’ve heard. Much worse.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

El Salvador, 1981. The town of El Mozote lay deep within the territory where the fighting was taking place. The right-wing Salvadoran military, a recipient of generous amounts of American support, and the Farbundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a leftist insurgency determined to topple decades of oligarchic rule, were engaged in a protracted guerilla war.

As the Salvadoran forces made their way into El Mozote, they came upon hundreds of men, women, and children. These civilians had relocated to El Mozote on the advice of a Salvadoran officer, who had promised them earlier that anyone found there would be spared during the upcoming military operation. The Salvadoran troops apparently had no intention of keeping that promise. On arrival, they began separating the men from the women. Some of the men were brought to the local church, where they were systematically decapitated. Others were taken out into the nearby jungle, where they were bound and shot in the head. Next, the soldiers separated daughters – some as young as ten years old – from their mothers, and proceeded to rape them. The distraught mothers, after hearing their daughters’ screams, were then shot as well.

By the next day, only the youngest children remained. At first, the Salvadoran soldiers were reluctant to murder them as well. Seeking to inspire his men, their Major, like any good officer, led by example. He picked up a young boy, flung him into the air, and speared him with his bayonet as he fell. It didn’t take long for his troops to get the idea. They proceeded to systematically murder the remaining children. By the end, over 800 civilians were slaughtered in the span of two days.

The elite counterinsurgency unit that carried out these brutal acts was known as the Atlactl Battalion. Like the rest of the Salvadoran military, they were armed and financed by the government of Ronald Reagan. The unit was trained at the infamous US-run “School of the Americas” in Georgia, and the M-16s used to carry out the El Mozote massacre were standard-issue American rifles. This major atrocity was merely one of many that occurred as a direct result of Ronald Reagan’s policies toward Latin America. As Micah Uetricht and Branko Marcetic note, El Mozote was “unique in the sheer number of innocent lives lost, and perhaps for the wanton brutality exhibited during it,” but “it should also be remembered because it was not unique.” Yet the massacre is among the many aspects of Ronald Reagan’s presidency which the new biopic Reagan pointedly chooses not to remember.

Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid in the title role, feels oddly dated for a piece of right-wing agitprop. In an age where leading conservatives claim to be moving away from free-market dogma and rampant militarism, along comes a film that unconditionally celebrates the standard bearer of both. It goes so far as to have Quaid’s Gipper patiently explain the magic of trickle-down economics, in the crudest possible terms, to a group of skeptical journalists. Of course, this is the filmmakers talking to their audience; who they seem to fear might have gotten crazy ideas like “tax the rich” from all the “right-wing populist” discourse that emerged in the Trump era. Of course, all things considered, they probably needn’t have worried. Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment was a massive tax cut for the wealthy (which his admirers seemed not to have noticed), and his second term will clearly be more of the same.

Furthermore, the framing device of the movie – a bitter ex-KGB communist (Jon Voight) narrating the tale of how the “genius” Reagan destroyed the Soviet empire – is totally discordant with the contemporary American right-wing, which mostly views the Russian Federation favorably.¹ Indeed, the overall theme of Reagan is best summed up as “American president TOTALLY OWNS the Russians” - a sentiment the filmmakers seem unaware is more in vogue among lizard-brain MSNBC liberals right now than MAGA conservatives. If anything, Reagan’s embrace of the lunatic anticommunism of yesteryear makes it feel as if it was scripted in the 1950s.

Of course, in other ways, Reagan remains firmly in-line with contemporary conservatism. Inspired by The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism by hardline anticommunist and Catholic fundamentalist Paul Kengor, the film promotes Christian nationalism so fervently that it might even make the producers of the God’s Not Dead franchise blush. Or maybe not: conservative Christian icon and God’s Not Dead star Kevin Sorbo puts in an obligatory cameo, playing a minister who literally baptizes young Ronnie – a fitting metaphor for the forces which birthed this film. Christian nationalism aside, however, Reagan is wildly out-of-step with the (supposed) economic nationalism and anti-interventionism of Trump-era conservatism.

More important than this, though, is how much Reagan butchers the history it depicts. The standard retort that “it’s just a movie, it’s not supposed to be accurate” doesn’t even remotely apply here. This is a film which purports to explain what actually happened in the past. Any film claiming to do this must be examined critically, especially if the past in question is the Cold War.

Far too many Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, continue to uncritically repeat the Cold War propaganda instilled from their youth by a deficient education system, a complacent media, and ignorant boomer parents. Americans continue to reflexively see Russia/Iran/China (or whoever the “enemy du jour” is) as inherently evil, dangerous, and expansionist. They see communism (or rather, “Communism”) as some kind of monolithic, amorphous conspiracy out to get them. They see NATO as a “defensive alliance” and a “security architecture.” Reagan not only perpetuates these and a thousand other unsustainable ideas, but it doesn’t even bother contextualizing any of the historical events it depicts. One worries what someone with little knowledge of this period would take away from a film like this, especially someone from a right-wing background.

In a nation of historical illiterates, any film which sets out to “educate” its audience about “what really happened back then” must be ruthlessly picked apart. To that end, here’s a list of things that Reagan doesn’t tell you about Ronald Reagan’s political career.

1.      He was a vicious racist

As far back as FDR and the New Deal, the American South reliably voted for the Democratic Party, in part because Southern Democrats (“Dixiecrats”) appealed to the deep-seated racism in the region, even as the party on the whole gravitated toward (limited) pro-worker policies. But thanks to Texan president Lyndon Johnson’s “betrayal” of the South (e.g., his tepid support for Civil Rights legislation), the Republicans saw an opening to win over the votes of Southern whites by stoking racial resentment. This campaign was called the “Southern Strategy” (though it appealed to plenty of Northern whites as well), and was first pioneered by Richard Nixon’s team. Running for president in the 1960s, Nixon deployed rhetoric around racial code-words, or “dog whistles,” designed to aggravate anti-black racial paranoia among whites while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability. Thus, older racially-coded terms like “states’ rights” (originally a defense of the “right” of southern states to own humans as property) were revived, alongside newer ones like “law and order” (a thinly-veiled reference to the “lawbreakers” of the Civil Rights Movement) and “busing” (which whipped up white resentment over integration). While Nixon developed this strategy, it was Reagan who turned it into an art form.

Reagan’s racism had been overt long before he ascended to the presidency. As governor of California, he eliminated the state’s fair housing laws, publicly stating, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house it is his right to do so.” He opposed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, the latter on the grounds that it would be “humiliating to the South.” He claimed California city streets were akin to “jungle paths after dark.” In his private conversations with Nixon, he compared UN diplomats from African countries to “monkeys” who were “still uncomfortable wearing shoes.” Reagan was thus the perfect candidate to take the Southern Strategy to new heights. As Ian Haney Lopez puts it in Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, “For Reagan, conservatism and racial resentment were inextricably fused.”

Signaling these abhorrent racial politics early-on, Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for president in Neshoba County Mississippi, which at the time was “notorious in the national imagination for the Klan lynching of civil rights volunteers” just sixteen years prior. This was done deliberately: “Reagan selected the location on the advice of a local official, who had written to the Republican National Committee assuring them that the Neshoba County Fair was an ideal place for winning ‘George Wallace inclined voters,’” which should require no comment. Reagan cheerfully assured “a raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000 whites” that “I believe in states’ rights.” During his 1984 re-election campaign, Reagan returned to the same spot “to endorse the neo-Confederate slogan ‘the South shall rise again.’”

Throughout his campaigns and his presidency, Reagan deployed these kinds of racial dog whistles, which were often so loud that they sounded more like foghorns. He told tall tales about “welfare queens” with “eighty names, thirty addresses, [and] twelve Social Security cards…collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.” He claimed one such “welfare queen” “got Medicaid, [is] getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free income is over $150,000.” Before crowds of outraged whites, he conjured up images of “a strapping young buck” who used food stamps to buy T-bone steak, and who cut ahead of them while they “were waiting in line to buy hamburger.” The word “buck,” of course, had “long been used to conjure the threatening image of a physically powerful black man, often one who defies white authority and who lusts for white women.” This may be why the campaign staff had him tone things down, replacing the “young buck” with “some young fellow” in later speeches.

It goes without saying that the impact of all this was to demonize both African Americans and welfare programs, plus other important social programs (note the negative references to Social Security and Medicaid). By revitalizing centuries-old imagery (which originated with the slave trade) of lazy, undeserving Blacks and associating it with “welfare,” Reagan was able to demonize both in the minds of many whites. This why the terms “welfare” and “welfare state” have negative connotations in the United States (everywhere else, they’re associated with commonsense social democratic policies) to this day – because they’ve been highly racialized, and thus stigmatized, in the public imagination. As Martin Gilens lays out in his exhaustive study Why Americans Hate Welfare, Americans, especially white Americans, continue to have wildly exaggerated ideas about what “welfare” is, who benefits from it, and who deserves it.

This was all a subset of the Reagan administration’s larger project of destroying the legacy of New Deal and Great Society programs (continued by all subsequent presidents right up to today). Thus, like all racial politics in the United States, there was a class project behind it. But that’s not to downplay just how much racial resentment this rhetoric stoked. At times, one can only marvel at how openly all this was done – Reagan’s strategists admitted it outright at the time. For instance, his campaign manager Lee Atwater candidly explained the thinking behind the coded racist language just after Reagan’s first presidential win:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”— that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, “forced busing,” “states’ rights,” and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Atwater would go on to develop the infamously racist Willie Horton ad campaign during George H.W. Bush’s presidential run, ensuring that the Republican party’s embrace of barely-concealed racism would continue well after Reagan.

Prior to Reagan’s election, Coretta Scott King worried that “if Ronald Reagan gets into office, we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party.” Given Reagan’s rhetoric and policies, she wasn’t that far off. Reagan also reversed the Carter administration’s sanctions against apartheid South Africa, and had the State Department put Nelson Mandela and the ANC on a terrorist watchlist. He also defended South Africa as “a good country” and publicly lied that it had eliminated segregation. When Congress finally enacted sanctions against the white supremacist regime, they had to override Reagan’s veto. Reagan also vociferously opposed the creation of a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr., arguing that “we could have an awful lot of holidays if we start down that road” (more time off from work – the horror!). Reagan only came around when he realized that MLK Day could be used to create a mythical, sanitized image of King – one who made the “I have a dream” speech but whose “critiques of capitalism, the war in Vietnam, nuclear weapons, or white supremacy” are conveniently forgotten.

It goes without saying that Reagan mentions absolutely none of this history.

2.      He was a moron

It was Ronald Reagan who initiated the tradition of Republican presidents being ignorant simpletons. While the film depicts him as reading voraciously in order to understand the supposed menace of international Soviet communism, anyone familiar with Reagan’s actual relationship to the printed word will find this laughable. Reagan was so unwilling to read anything that the CIA, accustomed to providing presidents with lengthy daily briefs, had to splice together film reels for him instead, since they simply could not get him to read anything. According to journalist Will Bunch, “key administration officials such as budget chief David Stockman and defense secretary Caspar Weinberger had learned by 1983 to craft visual presentations for the president on complicated issues, finding such a simple narrative the best way to win Reagan’s support.” At one point Reagan even “told chief aide James Baker that he didn’t read his briefing book before a key summit because, ‘Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night.’”

Another indicator of Reagan’s less-than-stellar intellect was his belief in astrology, something which remained mostly unknown until after his presidency. This aspect of his career was significantly influenced by his wife Nancy, who employed multiple astrologers to help “Ronnie” make policy decisions. Reagan ignores this, as well as the major role that Nancy Reagan played in her husbands’ presidency generally, opting instead to depict her as the dutiful, supportive housewife – in keeping with conservative sensibilities.²

Even Christopher Hitchens, long after he’d descended into apologetics for the Bush II administration’s neoconservatism, recalled that when he encountered Reagan up close, he was looking at “a cruel and stupid lizard” who was “dumb as a stump.” This trend would continue with George W. Bush, who took to carrying around a biography of Dean Acheson on the campaign trail solely to convince a skeptical press that he was actually capable of reading (he convinced no one). Trump’s legendary incoherence and anti-intellectualism are merely the latest in a long tradition of Republican presidents embracing stupidity – partly because this is compelling to considerable portions of their voter base, but also because these particular men were genuinely dimwitted.

3.      He was a shameless liar

Reagan told whoppers so blatant that even Trump might have balked at them. For instance, Reagan certainly knew that the Nicaraguan contras he was supporting (more on that below) were bloodthirsty terrorists, but this didn’t stop him from publicly praising them as the “moral equal of our founding fathers.” Like all presidents Reagan told these kinds of foreign policy lies. But he was fairly unique when it came to his deceptions regarding his military record (though George W. Bush would later echo him on this as well).

Now, Cut the Cord is on record as not caring about military “service” one way or another. But the target audience of this film cares about such things very much, so it’s important to note that the real Ronald Reagan told absurd lies about his military career. For context: during World War II, Reagan never left the United States. As an actor, he filmed propaganda reels for the military and helped sell war bonds. This was always an easily-verifiable matter of public record. Yet throughout his presidency, Reagan told a series of utterly bizarre lies about this part of his life. He would at times refer to “the four years that I was gone during the war,” and would, with cameras rolling, say things like “I came back from the service, after four years in World War II.” Comments like these³ clearly implied that he’d served overseas in some capacity.⁴ Most incredibly, while president, Reagan asserted that he had personally witnessed the liberation of Nazi death camps, a claim he told to the Israeli Prime Minister. Right-wing libertarian Murray Rothbard, of all people, has written a hilarious analysis of this breathtaking claim.

Some have explained these gaffes away as evidence of a “confused” mind. That might make sense if they had been uttered by, say, Joe Biden, who has indeed been demented throughout his presidency. But Reagan was not diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease until long after he’d left office. Thus, there’s no reason not to call these statements what they clearly were: lies.

4.      He helped create the Taliban and Al Qaeda

Interestingly for a film so enamored of politically-engaged Christian fundamentalism, Reagan ignores one of the most prominent instances of Ronald Reagan actually pursuing that project – though this may have been a wise omission, given how uncomfortable it would make Christian conservatives today.

One of the many policies inherited from Carter which Reagan actually escalated was CIA support to the Afghanistan Mujahedeen, a project that originated as the brainchild of Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Reagan drastically increased US support for the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Carter had merely provided financial support; Reagan sent heavy weaponry, including Stinger Missiles, and provided the full logistical support of the CIA, in coordination with the Pakistani and Saudi intelligence services.

That the forces Reagan was supporting in Afghanistan were unabashed fanatics (who would later become known for things like 9/11 and throwing acid in the faces of girls attempting to go to school) was not unknown – rather, it was precisely the point. Reagan was a sincere Christian, as was his CIA Director William Casey, who ardently believed that his Catholic fundamentalism made Afghanistan’s most repressive elements his natural allies. As Steve Coll, author of the seminal text Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, explained, Casey “was a Catholic Knight of Malta, educated by Jesuits,” who “attended mass daily and urged Christian faith upon anyone who asked his advice.” His “religiosity seemed to bind him closer to his proselytizing Islamic partners in the Afghan jihad,” seeing their struggle the same way they did – “as an important front in a worldwide struggle between communist atheism and God’s community of believers.” This hugely influential Reagan cabinet official “saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the ‘realistic counter-strategy’ of covert action he was forging at the CIA towards Soviet imperialism.” [emphasis added] “Secular-minded royalist Afghans…had long warned both the Americans and the Saudis” in those years that, “as one put it, ‘For God’s sake, you’re financing your own assassins.’” But this did not deter the Reagan administration; “the Americans had been convinced by Pakistani intelligence…that only the most radical Islamists could fight with determination.” [emphasis added]

Thus we are confronted with the awkward fact (for defenders of Reagan, anyway) that prior to 9/11, the US liked Islamic extremists. Indeed, in places like Syria, it still does. Hell, right up to September 10^th, 2001, the US was “engaged in an informal diplomatic rapprochement with the Taliban government,” which had emerged as the dominant power, and which had been well-known to US planners for its “repellent human rights record” and for harboring Osama Bin Laden, as journalist Jane Mayer reported in The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. It was only after 9/11 that the American propaganda apparatus shifted gears and instructed the public that Islamic extremism was now “the enemy.”

Reagan meets with his beloved jihadists in the White House’s oval office.

Even more awkwardly (for Christian conservatives), when it came to people like Reagan and his right-hand man Casey, this admiration for Islamic fundamentalism was a natural extension of their Christian faith. As Coll explained, the attitude of the administration was that “militant Islam and militant Christianity should cooperate in a common cause” against the Godless Soviet Communists. And this was no mere alliance of convenience - Casey was highly emotionally invested in his religious crusade. He even insisted on personally visiting Pakistan to witness one of the training camps for the mujahedin volunteers. On arrival, he was brought to a makeshift camp and shown “a small crew of Afghans training on 14.5-millimeter and 20.7-millimeter antiaircraft guns,” which brought “tears of joy” to the Catholic crusader’s eyes.

Importantly, Godless Soviet Communism, whatever its other sins, did in fact bring secular, public education to Afghanistan, as well as banish gender discrimination there. Reagan’s administration did more than anything to destroy that project, plunging Afghanistan into a misery from which it has never recovered, while helping create both the Taliban and al Qaeda along the way. Thus it was a smart move for the producers of Reagan not to include this history.

5.      He destroyed Latin America

Under the Reagan administration, the Cold War turned hot for the people of Latin America. Ever the anti-communist hardliner, Reagan viewed the revolutions that rocked Central America in the 1980s not as the “inevitable” results of centuries of colonial policies and imperialist aggression against the region – as Cornel University’s Walter LaFeber famously argued – but as part of the global war against Soviet expansionism in the aftermath of détente. Under this framework, any challenge to U.S. hegemony merited a swift – and by necessity, brutal – response. Soon after Reagan took the Oath of Office in January 1981, his administration readied themselves to stand firm against what they perceived as Soviet-inspired revolution in the hemisphere. El Salvador would be the place where they would “draw the line.”

When El Salvador appears in the news today, it’s often in the context of a larger story of inter-American migration or the crackdown on MS-13 carried out by Nayib Bukele. However, forty years ago, El Salvador dominated US headlines for a different reason. During Reagan’s first term, Central America’s smallest nation became a thorn in the administration’s side as the leftist guerilla organization the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) effectively fought against the US-bankrolled Salvadoran military. As US support for the Salvadoran forces and government grew exponentially (throughout the 1980-1992 Salvadoran civil war US generosity tallied up to $6 billion), little was done to stop their gruesome human rights violations. The US effectively financed fanatical death squads in order to stop a democratic revolution by all means necessary. The massacre at El Mozote described above was just one example of what American arming, training, and supporting the Salvadoran military meant for the people of El Salvador.

To be clear, Reagan’s support for extrajudicial killings and human rights atrocities in the region were not new – like the jihad in Afghanistan, they were continuations and escalations of policies adopted by his predecessor. In March of 1980, while giving mass, Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador was shot dead on orders from death squad leader and founder of the far-right ARENA Party Roberto D’Aubuisson. In December, four U.S. nuns were raped and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard as they traveled home from the airport late at night. In January 1981, just days before Reagan was inaugurated, two American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) workers were fatally gunned down in the coffee shop of the Sheraton Hotel in downtown San Salvador. None of this deterred Reagan from committing the full might of the US government to support for the Salvadoran military once he took office.

As news spread in the U.S. of what the American government was supporting – thanks in large part to the brave Salvadoran refugees that migrated to the U.S. and related their harrowing stories to American audiences – a protest movement against the administration’s policies began to grow. Thousands took to the streets and argued, plausibly, that the U.S. was on track to fight “another Vietnam” – this time a lot closer to home. This galvanized the American public into opposing the administration’s policy in El Salvador. A White House poll conducted in 1983 found that 75% of Americans believed that “the type of help” the U.S. was giving to El Salvador would get the country in “another Vietnam”. Congress also pushed back against the administration. If Reagan and his advisors wanted to send the millions of dollars in aid to its Salvadoran allies, Congress required that it certify every six months that El Salvador was improving its human rights record. Up until 1984, the drama of U.S. involvement in El Salvador dominated headlines and was the subject of countless Congressional hearings, internal White House meetings, and local town hall sessions.

Reagan depicts absolutely none of this, mentioning “El Salvador” exactly zero times. It’s not hard to understand why. Reagan’s policies there prolonged the war and resulted in the deaths of 70,000 Salvadorans and the displacement of 1.2 million more. Just as anti-Vietnam War protestors claimed that the Vietnam War was “Johnson’s War,” and how anti-genocide protestors today label Gaza “Biden’s genocide,” activists of the Reagan era referred to the Central American wars as “Reagan’s Wars.”

In contrast to this complete omission of El Salvador, Reagan does briefly allude to Nicaragua when it discusses the infamous Iran-Contra scandal – but in a confusing way designed to mislead unfamiliar viewers into thinking the scandal was merely a contrived means for liberal Democrats to unfairly take down the Reagan presidency. In actuality, Iran-Contra was one of the worst cover-ups undertaken by a sitting president in American history – which is saying something.

In 1979, Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) toppled the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. Not wanting to allow “another Cuba” in the hemisphere, the Reagan administration carried out a systematic terror campaign against the new leftist government. It imposed crippling economic sanctions, mined Nicaraguan harbors (an act of war), and trained and financed a counterrevolutionary force – the notoriously brutal contra terrorist army – to topple the new government. Congress, wary that the President was waging an undeclared war without their approval, passed the Boland Amendments to cut off American support to the contras. In response, Reagan began secret negotiations with Iran, the same country his State Department labeled a “terrorist state.” Reagan authorized a covert operation wherein the US sold weapons to Iran, then used the proceeds to finance the contras, completely bypassing Congressional approval (or knowledge) and demonstrating the quintessential conservative Republican reverence for Constitutional checks and balances.

All of this came to light in 1986 when a plane carrying weapons and other supplies for the contras was shot down over Nicaragua. The sole survivor of the crash, Eugene Hasenfas, was captured by Sandinista forces, causing an uproar in the US. A Congressional investigation commenced and for the next few years, Iran-Contra captured the public’s attention as Americans learned what had transpired. Reagan denied knowledge even as this became more and more implausible, and talks of impeachment grew. Ultimately Reagan fessed up – sort of – by telling the nation that “though my heart tells me I’m innocent, the facts tell me otherwise.” Only a trained actor could have sold bullshit like that.

Completely ignoring Ronald Reagan’s role in Latin America was entirely necessary in order to sustain Reagan’s a priori commitment to portraying its titular figure as an all-American boy who stuck firm to his Christian, anti-Communist principles and could do no wrong. Upholding the Reagan myth means that younger generations must not learn about many of the defining actions of his presidency – support for vicious death squads committing mass murder against civilians in El Salvador and Nicaragua, selling arms to Iran in order to evade Congressional limits, and then lying about it all until the very end.

6.      He supported nuclear de-escalation, but for bad reasons

From the start of his presidency, Reagan advocated a “peace through strength” policy, which in practice meant risking Armageddon through a continued nuclear arms buildup, continuing a policy which had brought the world perilously close to human extinction multiple times already. A growing nuclear freeze movement directly challenged the president’s policies, eventually amassing over a million people in Manhattan’s Central Park in 1982 to demand complete nuclear disarmament.

Shortly thereafter, a major television film, Will Bunch recounts, changed Reagan’s approach to his nuclear policies. The Day After, which aired on ABC in 1983, realistically portrayed a nuclear war breaking out between the US and the Soviets. Its opening sequence, which remains terrifying to this day, chillingly depicted multiple nuclear strikes on the United States, with the rest of the film showcasing the misery endured by survivors.

As Bunch argues in his important book Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, it was the release of The Day After which “permanently altered the course of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy – and thus world history.” It was not, as the film Reagan constantly suggests, “the president’s calling the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire,’ or when he asked Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, or his ability to persuade Congress to spend billions more on defense.”

Reagan, who as noted above was very susceptible to Hollywood films, saw The Day After in advance of its television premiere. He became gloomy after his private screening, confiding to his diary, “It’s very effective and left me greatly depressed.” More than this, it apparently spurred him to action. “My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war,” the same diary entry reads. Shortly after Reagan viewed the film, “a massive ten day NATO training exercise in Western Europe called Able Archer so terrified the Soviets – who thought it could be a prelude to an actual attack – that the U.S.S.R. went to its highest level of alert.” This nearly triggered an actual nuclear war, the latest in a long history of nuclear near-misses that the human race has survived through sheer luck. Taken together, these two events prompted Reagan to negotiate with the equally, if not more, disarmament-minded Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reagan does depict Ronald Reagan’s fears of nuclear holocaust, and his negotiations with Gorbachev. But the influence of the anti-nuclear movement, the influence of The Day After, and the fact that NATO nearly destroyed the human race as the result of an exercise, are all ignored. Furthermore, Gorbachev is portrayed more as a bully rather than a willing partner, which is grossly unfair (Gorbachev spent his final years begging the Trump administration not to tear up his and Reagan’s antinuclear agreements, which Trump did anyway). Indeed, the climax of Reagan comes when tough guy Ronnie demands that Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” which is depicted as a major victory against the Soviets rather than the cheap applause line that it was. (The film similarly hypes up Reagan’s famous “evil empire” remark, which in reality Reagan openly regretted shortly after uttering it.)

Moreover, it was Reagan’s stubborn refusal to give up on the idiotic Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka the “Star Wars” missile defense system) that ultimately prevented he and Gorbachev from achieving complete nuclear disarmament. Again, the film does depict this, but presents it as Gorbachev being unreasonable and Reagan sticking to his guns. In reality, every credible scientist told Reagan that SDI would never work, which he disregarded. Furthermore, he couldn’t comprehend the reasoning behind the Soviet Union’s fear of such a system – if the US could destroy incoming Soviet missiles, but the Soviets couldn’t do the same for American missiles, then what was to stop the US from preemptively attacking them? Had Reagan been willing to give up on SDI, as Gorbachev told him repeatedly, the pair would have been able to reduce the amount of nuclear weapons in the world far more than they did.

When all is said and done, the one positive thing about the Reagan presidency is that it did lead to a considerable reduction in US and Russian nuclear stockpiles. Reagan certainly deserves some of the credit for that. Unfortunately, Reagan has no interest in depicting this history with the required nuance, instead choosing to frame it as it does everything else – a simplistic morality tale wherein the virtuous Christian cowboy triumphs over the dastardly commies.

7.      He prevented the release of American hostages in Iran

Reagan praises its titular hero for his toughness, in part by showing how revolutionary Iran released the American hostages it had taken during the Iran Hostage Crisis on the first day of his presidency. In the conservative imagination, the reason for this was that the Iranians knew Reagan would not be a “wimp” like Jimmy Carter, and that if they did not surrender the hostages to Reagan, they’d have to deal with his wrath. This fanciful tale is the version the film presents - which is pretty audacious given what we’ve learned since those events transpired.

The real reason the release of the hostages occurred so precisely was because Reagan’s presidential campaign secretly met with Iranian envoys during the race, and through them persuaded the Iranian government not to release the hostages until after the election. Their reasoning was that if the hostages were released before voters went to the polls, this might have given Carter a last-minute boost. While the well-documented story of Reagan’s scheming with the Iranians has been disparaged in some quarters as a “conspiracy theory,” countless figures with insider knowledge, on the American and Iranian sides, have attested to its validity. Indeed, a recent bombshell New York Times story all but ended the debate over this issue. It is now a certainty that Reagan prolonged the captivity of the American hostages in Iran in order to win the election against Carter. For the film to imply that Reagan got the hostages released is peak dishonesty.

***

This is merely a sampling of what Reagan whitewashes about Ronald Reagan. We could just as easily have mentioned:

·         his early years as a propagandist for General Electric and against universal health care

·         his heartlessly cruel (non) response to the AIDs crisis

·         his major contributions to the destruction of the New Deal regulatory state

·         his significant role in the creation of the student loan crisis

·         his willingness to have the National Guard murder anti-Vietnam war protesters (“if it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with”)

We skipped these things for the sake of brevity; Reagan skips them for the sake of ideology.

Taken together, the omissions, distortions, and outright lies of Reagan situate it comfortably within a larger project of establishing Ronald Reagan’s status as a deity in the American state religion. During and immediately after his presidency, Reagan was not particularly popular, according to the polls. But a massive PR blitz emanating from right-wing foundations successfully remade him into a Lincoln-like figure in the conservative mind (and beyond; Barack Obama among many others have claimed to admire the Gipper). This PR reached a fever pitch with the over-the-top media coverage of Reagan’s death and funeral in 2004, and has continued long afterwards. A representative example: Martin and Annelise Anderson, “scholars” at the Koch Brothers-funded Hoover Institution think tank, reassure their readers that, though he has departed this life, “Reagan’s spirit seems to stride over the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.” Noam Chomsky quipped that such ludicrous state worship was of the kind “rarely heard outside of Pyongyang.”

It is this fictional Reagan that Reagan depicts, not the Reagan who actually walked the earth, and whose policies led to death, destruction, and impoverishment for God knows how many people. While the film has been appropriately panned by critics (18% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing), it has been enthusiastically received by its target audience. That is a scathing indictment of conservative America – as if we needed another one. The films’ reception amongst conservatives shows that, whatever their claims to have “seen the light” on the folly of free-market economics and endless war, this is entirely for show.

It is also one more reminder that the main drivers undergirding the conservative mindset are completely worthless. In an interview ostensibly about promoting the film, Kevin Sorbo immediately began ranting about Democrats and their support for abortion – or as he put it, “we want to keep killing human babies!” Putting aside the sheer idiocy of equating a blastocyst with a “human baby,” as we’ve seen, Ronald Reagan’s presidential career was to a very considerable extent defined by the mass murder of countless people, including actual, out-of-the-womb babies, some impaled on bayonets, as we saw above. It’s doubtful that Sorbo or the people he speaks for are capable of perceiving the sickening irony of that.

It is very telling that conservative Christian culture holds up imbeciles like Sorbo (and Reagan) as icons, and that it wastes so much time trying to breathlessly convince itself that abortion is tantamount to “murdering babies,” while simultaneously revering presidents who proudly murdered actual babies. That such people consistently busy themselves with screaming about abortion and all sorts of irrelevant “culture war issues” while ignoring, or more often supporting, a national security state that is responsible for a massive amount of death and suffering abroad (not to mention impoverishment at home), puts the lie to virtually every claim right-wingers make about themselves. They’re complete and utter hypocrites – every last one of them.

If nothing else, we can be grateful to Reagan for reminding us about that.

1. Not so much because they’re about peace and coexistence, but because they’ve discovered that Russian conservatives also enjoy whining about affronts to civilization like the existence of gay people.

2. In reality of course, Nancy Reagan was a major figure in her husbands’ presidency; Lesley Stahl has gone so far as to claim that she was the most powerful person behind Reagan and that others were afraid of her. Of course, this is not to suggest that her influence was a positive thing, or that she was an admirable figure. Far from it – Nancy Reagan was a stuck-up dingbat who entirely deserved her consistently low reputation among the public. But the omission of her influence is nonetheless a telling indicator of where the film’s priorities lay.

3. These remarks are explored in the first episode of the excellent Showtime documentary series The Reagans.

4. Reagan actually perpetuates this muddying of the waters, via a scene where Kevin Dillon’s Jack Warner laments to Quaid’s Reagan that “this war has taken your best years.”