It may be the ultimate political irony in American history that much of Ronald Reagan’s success as a President was acting as if everything was going along just fine, and that the only thing in the world Americans had to fear was communist aggression. It wasn’t true, of course; in fact, many Americans had to fear more from Reagan’s economic policies than anything the Soviet Union ever did. The irony, of course, is that as an actual Hollywood movie star, Ronald Reagan never was considered a particularly great talent.
Looking back on the Reagan Presidency one senses how everything was orchestrated for effect, as though Reagan were playing the part of a President rather than actually being the leader of the free world. Today, of course, none of that ceremonial and symbolic and, ultimately, shallow window dressing seems new; every President since Reagan has become a little more George Clooney and a little less George Washington. Americans today are for the most part savvy enough to realize that every word that comes out of Pres. Bush’s mouth and every image around which those words are framed has been cleverly calculated for effect rather than substance. But when Ronald Reagan took office, there was still enough respect for the Presidency that most Americans never dreamed the White House would be run like a movie production with their leader as its star.
It is a commonplace to attribute Ronald Reagan’s success as President to his acting abilities, but to do so also faces an inconvenient truth: Ronald Reagan was not a terribly good actor. That fact does present an intriguing problem: how could a bad actor convince so many people he was telling the truth about such unlikely possibilities as voodoo economics making their lives better and the communist threat making their lives precarious? The answer is simple, of course. Ronald Reagan may not have been fully capable of making audiences believe that Gen. George Custer was a goofball as he was called upon to do in Santa Fe Trail, but he was certainly believable as Notre Dame football player George Gipp, telling Knute Rockne to inspire the team virtue of infamous-and apocryphal-quote “Win one for the Gipper.” What accounts for the difference?
Ronald Reagan was an inveterate teller of anecdotes. He loved to tell people stories both about himself and others. The problem is that so many of these stories weren’t just filled with inconsistencies, many of them were outright lies. As a perfect example, consider the story that was particularly fond of telling in his later years about being part of the film crew present at the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Now, this isn’t simply a case of mixing up facts, thinking he was one place when in reality he was at another nearby. Ronald Reagan never left the shores of America during the entirety of World War II!
Yet few people apparently ever had trouble believing his creative memory. It can only be assumed that Ronald Reagan himself must at some subconscious level have believed in the lies; if you believe them, it isn’t lying. (Can you say George Constanza?) And that is the difference between Reagan’s acting abilities as a movie star and politician He couldn’t make a goofball George Custer believable because he probably didn’t accept the idea that the hero (or villain, depending upon your point of view) of Little Big Horn could possibly have been a goofball, but he was better as George Gipp because he believed that myth.
Ronald Reagan’s discomfort at playing a bad guy in King’s Row is further evidence that he essentially lost whatever acting talent he possessed when asked to play a role he didn’t believe in. Reagan’s mastery of acting is tied to his ideological outlook. If nothing else, it can certainly be accepted that Reagan was a cheerleader for the American way. He fully bought into the American dream. And why not? Contrary to all the rumors and investigations of liberalism gone amok in Hollywood, few businesses are as committed to maintaining the capitalist ideal as the business. And by business I, of course, mean the industry. Every other consideration-awards, messages, good intentions-falls down dead in the path of the one truly important thing in life in Hollywood: making a profit. Ronald Reagan was not just a movie actor; he was a movie fan, soaking up all the ideological messages pouring forth from Hollywood: hard work equals success, in America everyone is equal, and any little boy here can grow up to become President.
Ronald Reagan didn’t just believe his own lies, he believed all the lies that Hollywood was reinforcing. And what made him so much better an actor as a politician was that he only had to play one role. A role he could absolutely believe in one-hundred percent and a role he could role to such perfection that millions of Americans came to believe in it one-hundred percent. No longer forced to say lines he didn’t believe in, or play characters he didn’t like, Ronald Reagan finally played himself.
