The Magnificent Myth of Ronald Reagan

Pivoting back to the piece that prompted the thread ...

If you're an Amazon Prime member, take some time and watch some of the old "Firing Line" episodes with Reagan as a guest. He was on several, some before his first serious run at the White House. Perhaps it was masterful prompting/editing, but the guy sure as hell didn't come across as a dummy. I'm a pretty sharp cookie -- I'm no Starman, but then again who is? -- but I'd come across as a babbling loon if you put me in front of William F. Buckley and a live studio audience and asked me to expound on how, say, push and the pull production systems differ from one another.

It's also educational, independent of the Reagan angle, just to watch a few of those and see how little there is, politically, that's new under the sun.

 

I'm waiting for Starman to tell us how Buckley bayoneted puppies with Hitler on the deck of his yacht.

 

And now for something completely different: RepubliCATS!

 

President Obama is not a liberal hero.

 

You should watch "Best of Enemies" on the 1968 debates between Buckley and Gore Vidal ABC aired during/instead of the Republican and Democratic conventions.

Both men are really smart, filled with hubris (and possibly both gay if one of them would admit it), but Vidal gets under Buckley's skin and causes him to go on a rant that bothered him for the next 30 years.

 

Reagan was the Great Communicator. He communicated really well. He connected with people. As an actor, he didn't have to understand what he was saying; just had to hit his lines and smile.

 

Brilliant strategy by the RNC if you think about it: Get a guy who can play the leading role of President. Will Smith isn't a doctor either, but he did a helluva' job playing one in "Concussion."

 

Paul Volcker, a Carter appointee, made Reagan look a whole lot better than he was.

He basically told Carter he could stop inflation, but it would cost him the election. Carter appointed him anyway. That's what a good president does. It's also what nobody would do today.

 

I've seen it. That's a really interesting doc. I was too young to have seen those debates until this came out. They truly detested each other, and both were so articulate that the verbal sword fights were amazing.

The one I'd really like to see that I have not yet is "The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs", which features interviews with all twelve living ex-directors of the CIA. It will be interesting to hear what gets said, and what questions get ignored. I know that Leon Panetta talks about how difficult it was to order a drone strike on an AQ higher up when they got the intel that he had gone home and was in a house with his wife and children. He went to the White House about it and was told that it was his call, and he did choose to pull the trigger - and say the Hail Marys afterward. This was newsworthy because to this day the CIA has never acknowledged that it has a drone program. Indeed, when it was mentioned to one of the others he gave the interviewer the side eye and said "Leon talked about that?".

It's a Showtime doc but I think it is up on Netflix.

 

You should watch some of them. This wasn't a guy just trotting out lines that had been prepared for him. If it were that easy, we'd have had far more in the way of "theatrical" Presidents than we have. After all, although he was reasonably successful at it, he wasn't that good an actor.

 

Sounds a lot like President Teleprompter. Or at least Candidate Teleprompter.

 

I don't think Reagan was dumb, but he may not have been all that interested in details -- letting others handle that.

I do think his Alzheimer's/dementia started affecting him while in the White House.