LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer.
Happy birthday, Mr. President. Today is the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. There have been all sorts of celebrations of our 40th president around his birthday, and another one takes place tomorrow, an HBO documentary called simply "Reagan."
It's a collection of clips and recordings and lots of wonderful pictures of Ronald Reagan, also interviews with historians and friends, people who worked in the Reagan White House, admirers of the president and critics of the president attempting to sort out what he meant to this country.
The documentary begins by going over familiar ground, a good-looking kid from Dixon, Illinois, and the famous picture of a very young Ron Reagan in a swimsuit.
(Soundbite of film, "Reagan")
Mr. RON REAGAN: As a young man, my father was a lifeguard at Lowell Park on the Rock River in Dixon, Illinois. Over the course of seven years, my father pulled 77 people out of that river. He grew up seeing himself as somebody who saved people's lives. I think that carried through into his later years as well.
WERTHEIMER: That's President Reagan's younger son, also Ron Reagan, talking about his father. His is one of the voices that is threaded through the film, offering a loving but I think clear-eyed assessment of his father.
Eugene Jarecki made the film "Reagan," and he joins us from our studios in New York.
Welcome.
EUGENE JARECKI (Director, "Reagan"): Thanks for having me.
WERTHEIMER: Let me ask you first who you think of as your audience for this documentary? Ronald Reagan was president through most of the '80s. But after he left office, we didn't see much of him. He died in 2004. Lots of people have come of age hearing about him without really knowing him. Did you think of this as introducing Ronald Reagan to a fairly large chunk of the population?
Mr. JARECKI: Yeah. I think for younger people who didn't really experience Reagan's lifetime or his career, it'll be an absolutely brand new experience to learn who the real Reagan might have been. But the interesting thing is, I think people who thought they knew him come away completely enlightened, I think, because there are a lot of surprises in the film about him that, frankly, I didn't know when I started researching him.
WERTHEIMER: Hmm. Like what?
Mr. JARECKI: Oh, my goodness. It goes on and on. I mean, one of the most interesting things that I learned was that, of course, he was a Hollywood actor who became president of the Screen Actors Guild, the union of actors in Hollywood. And in that position, of course, he was there when McCarthy was doing his famous communist witch hunts.
Reagan publicly resisted the witch hunts and would not name names, as it were. But one of the first discoveries we made, and I think this will come as a shock to a lot of people, is that behind the scenes, Reagan actually functioned as an informant for the FBI.
That was one of the first surprises that I came across that started to speak to a man who was far more textured than the kind of iconic simple figure I'd understood before.
WERTHEIMER: Now, in your movie, you show the former president's transformation from a self-described liberal Democrat, union leader and so forth, to a conservative Republican.
Mr. JARECKI: Yeah.
WERTHEIMER: And this happened during his time as a spokesperson for General Electric. Did you think that that was a key moment to try to understand Ronald Reagan, that transformation?
Mr. JARECKI: It sure is. Because, you know, what do we hear about Reagan most of all these days? We hear that he's sort of, you knew what you got, you got what you heard. He was a straight shooter, never changing, unwavering.
And yet, as it turns out, Ronald Reagan underwent an enormous journey in his life. Yes, starting out as a liberal Democrat, a huge fan of Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, he remained a fan of Franklin Roosevelt in many ways his whole life. His family had been very much rescued by the New Deal.
And yet, over time, what you see is tremendous changes happening in Ronald Reagan that this supposedly unwavering figure is actually a figure of tremendous evolution, tremendous change.
WERTHEIMER: Now, Reagan has become an iconic, almost mythic political figure, especially for the latest iteration of the conservative movement in this country. He was part of the last campaign. What do you think about that?
Mr. JARECKI: I think there's an industry, a political industry that relies on creating myths about Reagan, and we're given so many. We're told that he teaches us that deficits don't matter. That's what Dick Cheney said. Well, actually, Reagan deeply regretted his deficit, said so in his farewell address.
He's held up as an example that we shouldn't negotiate with our enemies. Of course, Reagan prided himself on the friendship he built with Mikhail Gorbachev.
He is held up as an example of very tough policies on illegal immigration. Well, the reality is Ronald Reagan supported amnesty and gave amnesty to 2.6 million illegal immigrants.
Area after area that I researched, where I thought I would find the Reagan that is the stuff of this propaganda, I never found that Reagan. Instead, I found a complex, textured man.
The man who never raised taxes, he raised taxes six of the eight years he was in office. One of those was the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history.
So we've got to shatter these myths because they are disfiguring the way we see the past, and of course, therefore poisoning the way we need to address the future. It's giving us wrong ideas.
WERTHEIMER: Now, in your film, you certainly deal with Ronald Reagan's failings as president. You do spend time on the illegal sales of arms to Iran and the shipment of arms to the Contras in Nicaragua and the scandal that followed.
Let's listen to some of that section. This starts with Ron Reagan again, the president's younger son, on what his dad knew about the Iran-Contra affair.
(Soundbite of film, "Reagan")
Mr. REAGAN: His responsibility. I mean, whether he knew or didn't know, or whether he was gullible or naive or maligned, it's still his responsibility.
Former President RONALD REAGAN: Now, what should happen when you make a mistake is this: You take your knocks, you learn your lessons, and then you move on. That's the healthiest way to deal with a problem.
WERTHEIMER: Do you think that you were able, finally, to tell the whole story of Ronald Reagan?
Mr. JARECKI: Well, the whole story of Ronald Reagan is very much a story about America in the 20th century. Ronald Reagan came out of the kind of roots, the kind of Frank Capra-looking roots that we all idealize about small-town America, Reader's Digest America.
And yet, he himself, I would argue, ultimately came in many ways to betray that very America. His policies, Reaganomics, choices that he made as president, hurt the very America that I know he identified with, I know in his heart he cared about.
And so it's a great contradiction about him. But haven't we, as a country, come to turn our back on those values? And I'd like us to find a way to stop putting all of the hope or blame in our leaders. I think Reagan is overly lionized just as much as I would say he would be overly vilified if it were turned the other way.
The same is true of Barack Obama. I think the public has to ask of our leaders that which we want the country to be. And I think what happens instead is that we leave it to the leader, and we take ourselves out of the equation by saying, they're either all of our hopes, or they're all that's wrong.
Ronald Reagan wasn't that. Barack Obama won't be that. And it actually won't change until we ourselves demand a different way of being the country we sort of were taught to expect as children.
WERTHEIMER: Eugene Jarecki's film, "Reagan," airs tomorrow night on HBO. Thank you very much for coming in.
Mr. JARECKI: Oh, thank you, Linda. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.