Tyrnauer continues: “Trump and Reagan do a lot of the same things, only with different performance styles. “He used dogwhistle racism to gain political power.” “Reagan opened the door for Trump,” Tyrnauer says. 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. Photograph: Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential LibraryĪ 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. They both wielded enormous influence as first lady, but Nancy was determined to hide that.” “It’s also interesting to look back at her through a post-Hillary Clinton lens, which hasn’t really been done. “I really do think Nancy had a greater sway than keepers of the flame would like us to think,” Tyrnauer says. A brazen West Wing redecorator at steep taxpayer cost, she supported her husband’s preoccupation with appearance over all else. 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. 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. “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.” “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. As he conducted his research, the director was surprised by how open the uglier sides of Reagan’s personality were permitted to be. In one scene, we hear Reagan, then a sitting governor on a private call with Nixon, refer to African UN delegates as “monkeys”. The Reagan administration’s insistence on documenting its every move supplied Tyrnauer with a treasure trove of archival footage, some of it rather damning.
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Voters vote on perception and feeling, which the Reagans knew how to tap into.” That’s irrefutably true, and there are other aspects of the Reagan legacy more attuned to the American psyche. “As the academic Jason Johnson says in the series, Reagan gave the press the televised presidency they had been waiting for. “Media, and how the Reagans manipulated it, forms the central part of this story,” Tyrnauer explains. Ads placed him on horseback in a cowboy hat, a vital rough-riding rebuke to namby-pamby liberalism. 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. 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. 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.” My other key figure was Gary Wills, who wrote what I consider the best book about Reagan, called Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home.
That stripped the bark off of the Reagan myth for me. “That was, in many ways, my departure point. “Gore wrote a pretty powerful essay called Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures,” Tyrnauer says.
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He first delved into the complicated persona while editing essays for Gore Vidal, a professional role model and eventual friend. “They created a false image that doesn’t conform with reality, one that is only now being fully examined.”Īs 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.
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“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. 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. 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.
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