'They created a false image': how the

Reagans fooled America

A new docuseries studies the damaging reign of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and
the insidious myth making that still surrounds their legacy

Charles Bramesco
Thu 12 Nov 2020 12.09 EST

E
ver since Richard Nixon’s sweaty upper lip during a debate with
John F Kennedy cost him the election in 1960, television has been
the most crucial proving ground for any presidential hopeful.
Granting the gift of sight to the general public changed the game, as
campaigners and office-holders have been forced to school
themselves in careful image management and conscious branding. In
American politics, a well-crafted position on foreign policy won’t get a person
nearly as far as the easy telegenic charm that makes voters feel comfortable
grabbing a pint, a dissonance that’s allowed some dubious characters access to
the highest stations of authority.

The Reagans, a new four-part documentary airing on Showtime, pinpoints

this flair for PR as the genesis of Ronald Reagan’s swift rise in government and
the secret to his administration’s sweeping popularity within the Republican
party. The 40th commander-in-chief and his first lady, Nancy Reagan,
exercised a then-unprecedented degree of control over how they were seen,
and for it, they were anointed as the new saviors of the rightwing way of life
during their stint in the White House during the ‘80s. “More than any modern
president, the myth-making around Ronald and Nancy Reagan has been
extensive and effective,” series director Matt Tyrnauer tells the Guardian from
his home in Los Angeles. “They created a false image that doesn’t conform
with reality, one that is only now being fully examined.”

As a longtime Vanity Fair correspondent turned documentarian, Tyrnauer has

inspected the corridors of influence for the better part of his working life, and
there’s no case study more revealing than Reagan’s. He first delved into the
complicated persona while editing essays for Gore Vidal, a professional role
model and eventual friend. “Gore wrote a pretty powerful essay called Ronnie
and Nancy: A Life in Pictures,” Tyrnauer says. “That was, in many ways, my
departure point. That stripped the bark off of the Reagan myth for me. My
other key figure was Gary Wills, who wrote what I consider the best book
about Reagan, called Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. It’s by no means a
scorched-earth biography, but it’s the most clear-eyed assessment of who this
man was, what he was up to, and the levels of self-delusion and magical
thinking that shaped his worldview and methods of governing.”

The overarching project of Tyrnauer’s new documentary is to trace the line

connecting Reagan’s background in Hollywood to his second act in
Washington, where his lessons learned from showbiz would be put into
practice. As a novice politico in California, he rose fast due to a well-honed
charm that could seemingly sell any bill or talking point, no matter how “hard
rightwing kook”, as Tyrnauer puts it. Ads placed him on horseback in a
cowboy hat, a vital rough-riding rebuke to namby-pamby liberalism.

“Media, and how the Reagans manipulated it, forms the central part of this
story,” Tyrnauer explains. “As the academic Jason Johnson says in the series,
Reagan gave the press the televised presidency they had been waiting for.
That’s irrefutably true, and there are other aspects of the Reagan legacy more
attuned to the American psyche. Voters vote on perception and feeling, which
the Reagans knew how to tap into.”

The Reagan administration’s insistence on documenting its every move

supplied Tyrnauer with a treasure trove of archival footage, some of it rather
damning. In one scene, we hear Reagan, then a sitting governor on a private
call with Nixon, refer to African UN delegates as “monkeys”. As he conducted
his research, the director was surprised by how open the uglier sides of
Reagan’s personality were permitted to be. “It was very informative about
how the press covered Reagan that all the archival materials – even the
unflattering ones – were on the record and quite available,” Tyrnauer says. “It
shows you how selectively he’s been cemented in the public’s memory, that
what he said on hot microphones would be shocking today.”

The documentary gains a more intimately exposing vantage point on Reagan

through commentary from his son, Ronald Jr, who sat for an eight-hour
interview in which he paints a picture of his mother as the power behind the
throne. When the cameras stopped rolling, she advised her husband on the
nonexistent response to the Aids crisis, a punitive “war on drugs”, and the
deregulatory bonanza known as Reaganomics. A brazen West Wing
redecorator at steep taxpayer cost, she supported her husband’s
preoccupation with appearance over all else. “I really do think Nancy had a
greater sway than keepers of the flame would like us to think,” Tyrnauer says.
“It’s also interesting to look back at her through a post-Hillary Clinton lens,
which hasn’t really been done. They both wielded enormous influence as first
lady, but Nancy was determined to hide that.”

Photograph: Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan

Presidential Library
A dutiful cataloguing of the harm the two Reagans did in the black and
LGBTQ+ communities segues into an illustration of how the damage he did
has trickled down into present-day politics. Though no one utters the name of
Donald Trump in any of the four parts, his presence looms over the Reagans’
speeches and rallies, the separate generations joined by their shared Make
America Great Again catchphrase. “Reagan opened the door for Trump,”
Tyrnauer says. “He used dogwhistle racism to gain political power.”

Tyrnauer continues: “Trump and Reagan do a lot of the same things, only
with different performance styles. Reagan is playing a president. He gives his
version of a president, no different from Michael Douglas or Kevin Kline or
Martin Sheen. This isn’t to take away from Reagan being a diligent student of
political philosophy, even if he used those ideas in an uninformed way. But
he’s performing.”

Both presidents created their own insular ideological universe and promised
fabulous rewards to all those willing to join them there. The most lasting,
deleterious lesson of the Reagan tenure was that it doesn’t matter if
something is true or not, so long as enough people believe that it is. As daily
life continued to worsen for every American not lucky enough to be on Wall
Street or run a business, Reagan’s own words assured his constituency that
they were actually enjoying the greatest surge in prosperity that the nation
had ever seen. In conversation, Tyrnauer speaks more candidly about
Reagan’s failures than the professional decorum of his work can allow.

Photograph: Courtesy of Photofest/Photofest

“He knew what he knew,” Tyrnauer says. “He wasn’t intellectually curious. He
wasn’t a deep thinker. He was, at heart, a reactionary. He was given the
nuclear codes and the Oval Office and the greatest bully pulpit in the world,
and what did he do with it? He tried to short-circuit the federal government in
really detrimental ways. He implemented policies that hurt African Americans
and economically disadvantaged minorities. He believed things that weren’t
true and repeated them publicly. He was into science denial, he was a seeming
believer in creation theory over evolution, he ignored and denied the Aids
pandemic. He said trees cause pollution, which reminds us now of Trump
saying wind turbines cause pollution.”

The actor who became the most powerful man on earth remains a potent
Republican fable, in part for how it suggests that a lack of experience can be a
strength rather than a weakness. The inexplicable ascendancy of Trump re-
established that a total absence of political bona fides will pose no
impediment to success, instead plowing through criticisms and obstacles a
more knowledgeable candidate would be expected to address. A noisy,
ultraconservative, often racist razzle dazzle proves more than sufficient to get
the job (of hoarding and exploiting clout, not safeguarding American citizens)
done.

“As Reagan himself admitted near the end of his last term, he said,
‘Sometimes, I wonder how you could do this job if you hadn’t been an actor,’”
Tyrnauer says. “I don’t think this is a bad thing, necessarily, Franklin
Roosevelt, who I consider our greatest president, mastered the prevailing
medium of his time, which was radio. Presentation and the ability to work
through the media is an important part of being a capable leader. It gets more
problematic and interesting when we think of him in the role of presenter and
frontman, which Reagan was throughout his acting career, often playing a
master of ceremonies part in movies. He was a radio emcee and a hybrid
corporate shill-slash-TV host in his job with General Electric. He came by this
role so naturally because he’d been type cast into it for three decades. It was
easy to cast him again.”

The Reagans begins on Showtime on 15 November with a UK date to be

announced
Topics
Documentary
Ronald Reagan
Factual TV
Television
features