What’s next? Saint Ronald? Everybody, including Mikhail Gorbachev this
morning, is recalling just how wonderful the 40th U.S. president was.
“I think he understood that it is the peacemakers, above all, who earn a place in history,”
Gorbachev writes, in a bow not to the Great Communicator so much as the Friendly
Persuader.
In the Sunday
obituary-cum-eulogy announcing Reagan’s death that began on the
front page of The New York Times and covered two full pages inside, Marilyn Berger wrote: “He
managed to project the optimism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the faith in small-town America of
Dwight D. Eisenhower and the vigor of John F. Kennedy.”
As a small corrective, it’s worth remembering during what appears to be Reagan’s secular
canonization that in his Red-baiting years in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors
Guild he cheerfully helped ruin many lives and that at the heart of the greatest achievement
of his presidency lies a deeply sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Consider this small anecdote about Reagan, Gorbachev and the movie “Friendly Persuasion,” which starred Gary
Cooper as a pacifist during the Civil War and his moral quandary when confronted by violence. In
1957 the movie won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. As I wrote in “A Talent for Trouble,” “at the request of the Soviet
Union, and with the approval of the U.S. State Department,” William Wyler, who directed the
movie, “took it to Moscow in 1960, where he showed it as a symbolic antidote to the Cold War,”
which was then at its height. In the 1980s, with the beginning of glasnost,
President Ronald Reagan — whose conservative politics Wyler loathed — took
a videocassette of “Friendly Persuasion” to Moscow. During a state dinner, he presented it as a
personal gift to Soviet premier Gorbachev, devoting a large portion of his toast to the meaning of
the film and why he had chosen it.
“The film has sweep and majesty and pathos,” the president said. “It shows not just the
tragedy of war, but the problems of pacifism, the nobility of patriotism, as well as the love of
peace.”
When The New York Times printed the text of Reagan’s remarks, it occasioned a ripple of
remembrance from Michael Wilson’s supporters. [Wilson had done an early draft of the screen
adaptation and was later blacklisted after taking the 5th in Congressional testimony as to whether
he’d been a member of the Communist Party.] Letters to the Times pointed out the irony that a
movie written by a so-called “Commie” was now embraced by a saber-rattling right-wing
president who had made a career of demonizing people like Wilson.
In the thousands upon thousands of words of the Marilyn Berger obituary-cum-eulogy that
appeared Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times, there is no mention — not even a
hint — of that less-than-honorable part of Reagan’s history. And you won’t find it in the
Times’s Ronald W. Reagan: An
Archive either. But for the fact that it does appear in
the online version of Berger’s obituary-cum-eulogy, it’s as if the newspaper of record chose to
airbrush that disturbing element of the Reagan image.
Here’s the relevant passage of what Berger actually wrote, which was not included in print
(until this morning in a different, shorter version of the Sunday obit):
When he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in
1947 to testify about Communist influence in the movie industry, Mr. Reagan refused to name
names before the committee. But the historian Garry Wills said the Federal Bureau of
Investigation file on Mr. Reagan that was later released disclosed that he had named people in
secret.
In those years Mr. Reagan was a Democrat and, as he later put it in his autobiography, “a
near-hopeless hemophiliac liberal.” In 1950 he actively supported Helen Gahagan Douglas, the
liberal Democrat who was defeated by Richard M. Nixon in a California senatorial campaign that
became a portent of an era of Red-baiting.
But behind the scenes, as president of the guild, he worked closely with the Motion Picture
Industry Council to weed out Communist influence in Hollywood.
Duplicity, thy name is Saint Ronald.
Postscript: This morning’s edition of Democracy Now!
offers a different take on Reagan’s presidency from most of the mainstream media’s. (Click on the
link above and then click on “Watch 256k stream” to watch or listen.)
Joining Amy Goodman, the host of the program, are the dissident author M.I.T professor
Noam Chomsky and the anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott, president of the Nuclear Policy
Research Institute and founder of Physicians For Social Responsibility. (She met with Reagan
during the 1980s and called him “the pied piper of Armageddon,” but nonetheless credits
him for curbing the nuclear arms race.)
Goodman also speaks with Robert Parry, an investigative journalist whose reporting led to
the exposure of what is now known as the “Iran-Contra” scandal. On his Consortium News Website, Parry has a written
assessment, “Rating Reagan: A Bogus
Legacy,” which begins: “The U.S. news media’s reaction to
Ronald Reagan’s death is putting on display what has happened to American public debate in the
years since Reagan’s political rise in the late 1970s: a near-total collapse of serious analytical
thinking at the national level.”
