What’s next? Saint Ronald? Everybody, including Mikhail Gorbachev this In the Sunday As a small corrective, it’s worth remembering during what appears to be Reagan’s secular Consider this small anecdote about Reagan, Gorbachev and the movie <\/P> “The film has sweep and majesty and pathos,” the president said. “It shows not just the When The New York Times printed the text of Reagan’s remarks, it occasioned a ripple of <\/P> <\/P> In the thousands upon thousands of words of the Marilyn Berger obituary-cum-eulogy that Here’s the relevant passage of what Berger actually wrote, which was not included in print In those years Mr. Reagan was a Democrat and, as he later put it in his autobiography, “a But behind the scenes, as president of the guild, he worked closely with the Motion Picture <\/P> Duplicity, thy name is Saint Ronald.<\/P> Postscript:<\/B> This morning’s edition of Democracy Now!<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> Joining Amy Goodman, the host of the program, are the dissident author M.I.T professor Goodman also speaks with Robert Parry, an investigative journalist whose reporting led to 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-729","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-bL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nmorning<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>, is recalling just how wonderful the 40th U.S. president was.
\n“I think he understood that it is the peacemakers, above all, who earn a place in history,”
\nGorbachev writes, in a bow not to the Great Communicator so much as the Friendly
\nPersuader.<\/P>
\n
\nobituary-cum-eulogy<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> announcing Reagan’s death that began on the
\nfront page of The New York Times and covered two full pages inside, Marilyn Berger wrote: “He
\nmanaged to project the optimism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the faith in small-town America of
\nDwight D. Eisenhower and the vigor of John F. Kennedy.”<\/P>
\n
\ncanonization that in his Red-baiting years in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors
\nGuild he cheerfully helped ruin many lives and that at the heart of the greatest achievement
\nof his presidency lies a deeply sanctimonious hypocrisy. <\/P>
\n
\nCooper as a pacifist during the Civil War and his moral quandary when confronted by violence. In
\n1957 the movie won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. As I wrote in
\nUnion, and with the approval of the U.S. State Department,” William Wyler, who directed the
\nmovie, “took it to Moscow in 1960, where he showed it as a symbolic antidote to the Cold War,”
\nwhich was then at its height. In the 1980s, with the beginning of glasnost<\/I>, <\/P>
\n
\nPresident Ronald Reagan — whose conservative politics Wyler loathed — took
\na videocassette of “Friendly Persuasion” to Moscow. During a state dinner, he presented it as a
\npersonal gift to Soviet premier Gorbachev, devoting a large portion of his toast to the meaning of
\nthe film and why he had chosen it.
\n
\n
\ntragedy of war, but the problems of pacifism, the nobility of patriotism, as well as the love of
\npeace.”<\/P>
\n
\nremembrance from Michael Wilson’s supporters. [Wilson had done an early draft of the screen
\nadaptation and was later blacklisted after taking the 5th in Congressional testimony as to whether
\nhe’d been a member of the Communist Party.] Letters to the Times pointed out the irony that a
\nmovie written by a so-called “Commie” was now embraced by a saber-rattling right-wing
\npresident who had made a career of demonizing people like Wilson.<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\n
\n
\nappeared Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times, there is no mention — not even a
\nhint — of that less-than-honorable part of Reagan’s history. And you won’t find it in the
\nTimes’s Ronald W. Reagan: An
\nArchive<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> either. But for the fact that it does<\/I> appear in
\nthe online version of Berger’s obituary-cum-eulogy, it’s as if the newspaper of record chose to
\nairbrush that disturbing element of the Reagan image.<\/P>
\n
\n(until this morning in a different, shorter version of the Sunday obit): <\/P>
\nWhen he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in
\n1947 to testify about Communist influence in the movie industry, Mr. Reagan refused to name
\nnames before the committee. But the historian Garry Wills said the Federal Bureau of
\nInvestigation file on Mr. Reagan that was later released disclosed that he had named people in
\nsecret.
\n
\nnear-hopeless hemophiliac liberal.” In 1950 he actively supported Helen Gahagan Douglas, the
\nliberal Democrat who was defeated by Richard M. Nixon in a California senatorial campaign that
\nbecame a portent of an era of Red-baiting. <\/P>
\n
\nIndustry Council to weed out Communist influence in Hollywood.<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\n
\n
\noffers a different take on Reagan’s presidency from most of the mainstream media’s. (Click on the
\nlink above and then click on “Watch 256k stream” to watch or listen.)<\/P>
\n
\nNoam Chomsky and the anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott, president of the Nuclear Policy
\nResearch Institute and founder of Physicians For Social Responsibility. (She met with Reagan
\nduring the 1980s and called him “the pied piper of Armageddon,” but nonetheless credits
\nhim for curbing the nuclear arms race.)<\/P>
\n
\nthe exposure of what is now known as the “Iran-Contra” scandal. On his
\nassessment, “Rating Reagan: A Bogus
\nLegacy,”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> which begins: “The U.S. news media’s reaction to
\nRonald Reagan’s death is putting on display what has happened to American public debate in the
\nyears since Reagan’s political rise in the late 1970s: a near-total collapse of serious analytical
\nthinking at the national level.”<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"