Washington — Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of
Winston Churchill, is in Washington, lecturing and writing. Tapped
after the death of Churchill’s son, Randolph, to write the
authorized biography of this colossal figure, Gilbert produced
eight volumes (not counting three volumes of documents), and he has
written other books on Churchill, Napoleon, the Holocaust and other
matters. He is among the most illustrious scholars of the day; and
the British historian, Paul Johnson, calls him the most
“industrious” and exact of historians.
A few days back, over dinner, the question came up of
Churchill’s actual life as opposed to the legends that people,
often revisionist writers, tack onto his life. In the train of a
great figure such as Churchill, there will always follow fabulists
and ignoramuses creating legends about him, believing absurdities
about him, building up a debris of myths around the monument’s
feet. Even after Gilbert has devoted decades to chronicling with
the utmost precision the life of Churchill, the biographer’s work
with Churchill is not finished. Over dinner someone observed that
Gilbert will naturally have to continue for the rest of his life to
assess the accuracy of new interpretations of Churchill, paying
always close attention to the evidence.
Ah, yes, the evidence of a historic life or, for that matter, a
historic event — that is to say the relevant documents, the
established facts, interviews, diaries, other historical writing —
these are the materials with which history establishes an accurate
image of historic figures large and small.
I thought about “the evidence” this week when I read that CBS is
about to broadcast a two-part “mini-series,” “The Reagans.” It
depicts happenings and conversations in Ronald Reagan’s life that
never took place. The producers of “The Reagans” do not deny that.
They present one of the great presidents of the Twentieth Century
as a dope and not always a very nice dope. One of the complaints
already raised against “The Reagans” is that it is the creation of
liberal Hollywood. Oh, the Hollywood artistes involved in
creating this mini-series deny that their politics matter. Whether
or not they do, despite historians’ rising esteem for the fortieth
president and despite the evidence that Reagan reversed
America’s economic decline to trigger its longest period of
economic recovery simultaneous with winning the Cold War,
Hollywood’s recollection of Reagan as a dunce endures. He still
awaits his Sir Martin Gilbert.
Reagan’s momentous eight-year presidency covering a near-death
assassination attempt, his enormous arms build-up, his diplomatic
demarche with Moscow, his reformation of economic policy, his
reelection, two off-year elections, and attending to guerrilla wars
and terrorism worldwide, all pale in the mind of the Hollywood
dramatist in comparison with these gigantic matters: Reagan was
inattentive to his staff, had a bossy wife, and was supposedly
hard-hearted and neglectful of the inchoate AIDS epidemic. These
are major themes in “The Reagans.”
Interestingly President Franklin Roosevelt suffered the same
slurs and still does, though pro-Roosevelt historians have put a
sunny face on the first two. The famed disorganization of the New
Deal staff was a stroke of genius by Roosevelt. His impetuous wife
was a liberal exemplar. As for Roosevelt’s neglect of certain
contemporary problems — dealing with Hitler’s Final Solution is
the one most frequently mentioned nowadays — even the
pro-Roosevelt historians are critical, sounding like those now
criticizing Reagan’s neglect of AIDS. I would defend both Roosevelt
and Reagan with the same response. They had their hands full with
war and the economy.
To dramatize Reagan’s alleged neglect of AIDS “The Reagans”
depict the president making a moralistic statement about AIDS
victims that he never made. Even the scriptwriter admits the
statement was a fiction. An even more contemptible slur included in
this mini-series about a man who at the age when most are in
retirement ran the largest corporation on earth is the stress the
Hollywoodians put on Reagan’s supposed forgetfulness. This is high
drama for a Hollywood scriptwriter; for, you see, Reagan now ekes
out his daily life through the fog of Alzheimer’s disease.
Actually, whenever I was around Reagan his forgetfulness was no
greater than that of most busy adults. A bestselling book of his
lifetime correspondence, Reagan: A Life in Letters, shows
a sharp mind at work right up to retirement.
Yet the 92-year-old former president does have Alzheimer’s
disease. His wife, family, and friends live with great sadness, and
for Mrs. Reagan grave burdens. So what can we say in the end of
CBS’s broadcast just now of this anti-historical life of a great
man? We can say (a) the child-like mind of the Hollywood
artistes ignored “the evidence,” and (b) CBS and the
producers of “The Reagans” have publicly committed an act of
remarkable cruelty. It is on a par with claiming Roosevelt’s
paralysis somehow impaired his performance in office. Don’t wince.
In point of fact there were primitives who made this claim about
Roosevelt, and it is not surprising that the creators of “The
Reagans” should come off as so many Roosevelt haters. They are
philistines and ignoramuses, and haters of the first rank.
