`Reagans' Furor Reflects Larger Battle
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:49 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) -- In protesting ``The Reagans,'' the miniseries that CBS decided to pull this week, supporters of the former president were defending not just a man, or a politician, but his principles.
``This was a left-wing smear of one of the nation's most beloved presidents and CBS got caught,'' says Brent Bozell, founder of the conservative Media Research Center, which had asked advertisers to consider boycotting the film.
All modern presidents have their advocates, but Ronald Reagan's legacy is guarded with an intensity not seen among supporters of Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford. For many, Reagan personifies the conservative movement, and attacks against him are regarded as attacks on what he stands for -- low taxes, a large military, traditional social values.
``You see this sort of cultural war that began in the '60s being carried out two generations later with Reagan ... becoming the symbol of what is good or what is not good,'' says biographer Lou Cannon, whose new book, ``Governor Reagan,'' covers Reagan's two terms as governor of California.
CBS said Tuesday it will not air ``The Reagans,'' handing it off to the Showtime cable network, which is owned -- like CBS -- by Viacom. Conservatives, including a son of the former president, had charged that the miniseries depicted Reagan as uncaring about AIDS and passive about his job. Few have seen the completed program.
While CBS said it was not responding to political pressure, critics said that was exactly the case, and worried about pre-emptive strikes on future work. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said CBS' decision ``smells of intimidation to me.''
Reagan was once his own best defender, the ``Great Communicator'' who so effectively presented his views to a mass audience. But since announcing in 1994 that he had Alzheimer's disease, he has rarely appeared in public.
Instead, others speak on his behalf. He is revered among contemporary Republicans, and a wave of sympathetic books has come out over the past few years, including Dinesh D'Souza's ``Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader'' and Peggy Noonan's ``When Character Was King,'' the title a dig at President Clinton.
Reagan's own words have been featured in ``I Love You, Ronnie,'' consisting of letters to his wife, Nancy, and in ``Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America.''
``There's a very real campaign going on, and some of these books are designed to address issues about his image,'' says Richard Reeves, who has written biographies of Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy and is now working on a Reagan book.
``For instance, one of the criticisms of Reagan has been about his intelligence, that he wasn't the fastest on the draw. So the book of his speeches is a response to that.''
Every president's reputation has changed over time and legacies are often debated. Recent books have defended William McKinley, Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes, none of whom is regarded as a major president. Even Warren G. Harding, often at the bottom of historians' polls, will be the subject of a sympathetic biography coming out next year, written by former Nixon aide John W. Dean.
Contemporary politics dictate the urgency of the debate over a president's standing. While David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams greatly helped the image of the second president, it had little effect on current affairs. But with a conservative president, George Bush, in office, anything said about Reagan could reflect on Bush.
``If your philosophy is to have tax cuts on a huge scale, as Bush's is, then you're going be concerned that the tax cutting approach isn't discredited. And that's tied in with perceptions of Reagan,'' says historian Kevin Phillips, whose books include ``The Emerging Republican Majority'' and ``The Politics of Rich and Poor.''
``I think all of this debate reflects what's going in the United States right now. We're at a stage when an awful lot is hanging in the balance and nothing is working out very well. So you end up fighting over history, over who did what.'' |
