Reagan on DVD

By Jim Bray

If you’d like to find out about as much about Ronald Reagan as you can get through the PBS filter of liberalism, this is a good place to start.

Ronald Reagan is revered by conservatives and hated by liberals. Which made me think that this PBS effort would be an outright hatchet job.

Part of PBS’ The American Experience, Reagan is a remarkably balanced (for PBS) look at the man whose vision helped end the Cold War and bring down communism nearly everywhere, though of course PBS’ ideology does manage to slip through in places.

The election of Ronald Reagan was the beginning of my political and social maturing, kind of a "wake up call" to life. His election, even his mere campaigning for US president, unleashed hordes of “the usual suspects” (liberals/lefties, the media, etc.) telling us the world would end if Reagan were elected.

I was scared. From my safe perch in Canada, and much as I thought Jimmy Carter was a well-meaning but weakling US president, I believed what these supposed voices of tolerance, reason, truth and moderation said.

Yet those darn Americans elected Reagan anyway.

And, as history has proven, the world didn’t end. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The world as a whole got safer. The Soviet empire fell, the Berlin wall came down, and millions of people who had spent decades as slaves of the left wing ideology were freed. Sure, they had a rough time of it - and undoubtedly still are to a certain extent - but few could honestly say those people aren’t better off now than they were when crushed under the yoke of Totalitarianism.

Yet the Left still doesn't see, or choose not to see, that.

And the chances of nuclear apocalypse, under which my generation grew up,eased. I remember listening for air raid sirens during the 1960’s - sirens so far away that you had to strain to hear them even when you knew the drills were coming, making them ridiculously irrelevant if a real attack were to happen. It made us feel safe, but looking back on it now it was pointless and irrelevant - but it kept us from thinking and kept us comfortable.

We still face such attacks from rogue states and terrorist organizations, but no longer do we live under the shadow of “mutually assured destruction” that would end civilization as we know it.

Thank God, and Ronald Reagan and the so-called “Right”.

It was Reagan, and my own maturing, that turned me from the mainstream media where I worked and guided my footsteps onto the "right" path. Since then everything I have seen has convinced me of the "rightness" of that "course correction."

Anyway, this four hour-plus documentary (in two parts, on opposite sides of the DVD), looks at “The Great Communicator” from birth to his withdrawal from public life as he announced in a handwritten letter that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease - a letter read at the end of this production and whose simple eloquence will bring tears to the eyes of caring people of all stripes.

Reagan was just what the US, indeed the world, needed - the right person at the right time. After liberals prevented Vietnam from being won, and used that as a platform for the hand wringing they still do today (notice it was Democrats who got the US involved in Vietnam and hamstrung their own military thereby condeming the war to failure, while it was Republicans who got the US out of the unpopular war), Jimmy Carter took over. He seems to have meant well, but was so far out of his league and so left wing that his tenure was disastrous. Under his watch, American saw gas lines, high inflation, a black age for the greatest nation on earth.

Something had to be done.

Enter Reagan. Love him or hate him, you knew where he stood - unlike the typical liberal, who says whatever it takes to gain power and then does whatever it takes to stay there.

Remember Clinton? how about Gray Davis?

Anyway, enough preaching. This is, after all, a DVD review.

As mentioned, Reagan is probably as balanced a view of the man and his life as you could expect from PBS. They use interviews with people from both sides, though of course the left and those who look upon Reagan with disdain are featured more prominently. It seems as if there’s never a mention of the Reagan philosophy or agenda without the word “conservative” preceding it - which is fine if we can expect the label “liberal” to proceed the same mentions in their looks at such presidents as LBJ, Carter, and Clinton.

I shan’t hold my breath.

We do get insight from many Reagan confidants and advisors, and family members (though fairly conservative Michael isn’t there, while liberal daughter Patty Davis and son Ron Jr. manage to be on screen a lot). And conservative pundits like George Will are there, too, though in clips where they sound almost like Reagan critics - while the opposite side as personified by such characters as Chris Matthews (who worked for Democrat Tip O’Neill before joining the mainstream media where like so many others he now pretends to be an unbiased journalist) is given at least as much prominence.

Still, I must admire PBS’ restraint. They've come up with what's probably as balanced a report as they could produce given their left wing ideology.

In the end, you get a decent, if filtered, view of Reagan, his life and his politics. I learned a lot about the man. We end up seeing Reagan as a man of vision, of character and of principle, and of self-deprecating humor even at the most desperate of times. When he got shot shortly after assuming office, for example, his comment was that “he’d forgotten to duck.”

Now that’s character. No blaming others, no “what’s the meaning of ‘is’”, just Reagan being himself.

And perhaps, like me, you’ll discover that the left (those liberals and/or socialists who hide behind such labels as “progressive” while pushing their socialist big government agenda, because they know if they were honest about themselves they'd lose) doesn’t have all the answers and that more often than not they exacerbate the problems in their incessant quest for control, for power, at all costs.

The DVD is presented in the traditional full screen, 4x3, aspect ratio and so owners of 16x9 widescreen TV’s will have to stretch and/or zoom the picture to fill their screens without risking burn in. Audio is Dolby Surround Stereo and, taken as it is from sources all over the map (literally!) the quality is spotty, and we never actually heard any surround on which we could put our fingers. But this is fine in a documentary. The overall presentation is very good.

One thing we could have done without, though which we understand, is the interminable “Major funding provide by….” ads that precede each part. We don't mind sitting through these on "free" TV, but on a disc for which you've paid?

This is why DVD players have fast forward buttons…

There are no extras, but after sitting through this thing for some four and a half hours you’ll undoubtedly be glad!

Reagan, from Warner Home Video
263 min. full frame video (1.33:1, not 16x9 TV compatible) Dolby Digital surround stereo
Part One: Lifeguard, written and produced by Adriana Bosch
Part Two: An American Crusade, written and produced by Austin Hoyt

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