Reagan: A Tribute to the Great American Orator
By Emma Foley
Ronald Reagan shaped much of my upbringing. In 1944 my great-grandmother, a first-generation Italian American who settled in West Philadelphia long before
the Fresh Prince, named her firstborn son “Ronald” after the all-American actor. Growing up, the evening valediction around the house was, almost exclusively, “Bedtime for Bonzo,” (pluralized to “Bonzos” if my brothers were nearby).
Imprinted in my mind from years in parochial school is imagery of the great Western triumvirate: the President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister. America’s Reagan, Rome’s John Paul II, and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher served homologously as faces of the Cold War and forces against evil in my social studies lessons.
Aside from Sunday Mass over Labor Day weekend, my rarely-reunited family’s one scheduled activity was a matinee showing of Sean McNamara’s Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid. Despite my standard familiarity of and profound positive bias for the biopic’s subject, I approached the film with one obvious impediment: I was the only audience member who did not live during the Reagan administration, the principal focus of the film.
Listening to the “Reagan wall speech” on YouTube or pulling up Google Image results of the 1984 electoral map could not equate to the nostalgia of the 1980s’ Reagan Revolution. For full disclosure, I was not yet in pre-K when Reagan was laid to rest in June of 2004.
The biopic needed to cover a lot of ground. There was Dutch, the child Ronald Reagan with an upbringing in a troublesome household. There was the actor Reagan who eventually ascended to SAG-AFRA president. There was the husband Reagan, first to Jane Wyman and then to Nancy Davis. There was the California governor Reagan. There was Reagan the activist, the outdoorsman, even the lifeguard at his local lake. Critics, pundits, the Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomatometer,” and my dad left realizing how much of Reagan’s life was left out.
We had not crossed the strip mall parking lot when my dad voiced his regret. “They didn’t show his Convention speech of ’88. His passing-of-the-torch, in a way, to H. W. — it was done just-right!”
A Reagan flick that would have satisfied my father, however, would have been four hours in duration. Ronald Reagan lived a full life; there were many moments the director could not include, and such an overview was almost bound to suffer in either completeness or complexity. Many argued it lacked both.
The reality is, Dennis Quaid is not Ronald Reagan. Neither is David Henrie, the ex-Disney, trad-Catholic millennial who cameos as the aforementioned Lifeguard Reagan. For those with nostalgia for the icon, the fact that Reagan-the-negotiator with Gorbachev or a horseback montage would be, I can imagine, utterly disappointing.
For those who believed Reagan to be a bad actor— in the cinematic or political
sense— this film was perfect fodder for a “zero stars” rating. (Yes, the Boston Globe really did that.) Hence, the motion picture received reviews from okayish to a-waste-of-film. But my youth and inexperience, as Reagan himself would call it, did allow me one advantage over both sorry camps.
I could immerse myself in this “starter pack” history of Reagan’s life without
expectations generated by election night memories from my teenage years. (Ask me again when a Trump biopic debuts circa 2060.) For me, the movie was more documentary than eulogy, a visual textbook with, I’ll admit, plenty of rose-colored pages.
I left the theater enlightened on the chronology of the Cold War and with
a fire to read more about the life of the great leader. In education and stimulation for the younger generations, then, the movie was a success. Admittedly, I found myself Googling names in the hours afterwards belonging not to a First Family or foreign enemy. What piqued my interest most from the film was the great orator Reagan, supported by talented speechwriters who are featured throughout the plotline.
If the movie missed the mark for hardcore Reaganites, it was made to inspire the writer. In the shadow of the rise of the fortieth president is a parallel story of Dana Rohrabacher whose character serves as an amalgamation of the White House speech team during Reagan’s tenure. The scrappy Rohrabacher’s first appearance is when he camps out in the Reagan family’s front
yard in order to score just a few minutes with the then-governor. Reagan hires Rohrabacher, a total California hippie by appearance, to help him win the
presidential nomination and, when successful in 1980, the election. Rohrabacher follows the elected Reagan to the White House with barely enough to afford proper professional attire. As tensions rose domestically and abroad, Dana and the speech-writing team masterfully equipped the president with just the right words for just the right moments. Scenes show the young men pleased with themselves when a line hits an audience just as they imagined behind their typewriters.
Reagan was not a mere vessel for the words of Rohrabacher or those the film did not mention: Tony Dolan, Peter Robinson, Ken Khachigian, Peggy Noonan. That’s what made the team great at their craft— every point was interwoven with a real sentiment held by the statesman. At one point in the film, Reagan and Rohrabacher are left by themselves in the Oval Office to discuss the upcoming negotiations in Iceland and Reagan’s eventual visit to Berlin. I need you to help me win a war, the president invites his junior, “without firing a single shot.”
Of course, the scenes to follow were drawn up for the big screen. A staffer did not really make a mad dash to Air Force One to throw into POTUS hands a pile of paper he whipped up in the wee morning hours. The first time Reagan read “Tear down this wall” was not really on his way to Europe. As a matter of fact, Rohrabacher was not the one who wrote the Berlin Wall speech. It was Peter Robinson who took the speech through many twists and tweaks in consultation with the rest of the speechwriting team and the president himself before it was, as they say, ready for air.
But oh! The effect that words can have on a person, a nation, a movement. Reagan catches that quite potently in the scenes that follow. With German citizens and Gorbachev and Nancy, McNamara includes quick cuts to the White House speechwriters watching their boss intently on a television set.
“Will he say it? Will he say it?”
Of course, 37 years later, the world knows he did. And a war indeed was won through words carefully selected and conscientiously delivered by one of the greatest American orators. ShowBiz Direct’s Reagan likely won’t be the final attempt at a Ronald Reagan docudrama that wows audiences and critics through piercing character development or “deep track” speeches.
What Reagan missed in the story of the man, however, it made up through proving that, at one point in American history, the typewriter was mightier than the atomic bomb.
Emma Foley is a Content Manager at National Review in New York City. After growing up in Pennsylvania, Emma earned a degree in Marketing and Theology from Boston College. You can follow her on X and Instagram @emmafoleymedia.
