Reagan Movie, a Win for the Gipper

By John Kass

September 15, 2024

A number of years ago I wrote a column making fun of guys crying at movies. And I put together a list of cry movies, like “Brian’s Song” and “Rocky” and “Old Yeller” and “Where the Red Fern Grows.” Guys cry especially if the dog dies.

There was another genre that I considered to be guys-poke-your-eyes-out-with-a-spork-movie. And the absolute worst was a fantasy film for those morosely awful angry white chicks who loved “Sex and the City.”

“I don’t think SATC is just for girls,” I quoted one British Newcastle FC fan as saying. “I am a reasonably well-adjusted bloke and I am looking forward to seeing the film with my girlfriend. I am then looking forward to poking my eyes out with red-hot pokers, burning my skin off, and rolling around in salt for a while.” — Phil Mann, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Ouch.

Since my brain injury (and that’s what a stroke is, a brain injury) I’ve lost some of my emotional filter. The weak kind of filter that would make Spok blush. But I muddle on, turn my head away and bite my lips as best I can. Happily, at the last movie Betty and I went to see, she had tissues. I needed them.

It was the Reagan movie, made about our great President Ronald Reagan, about the Gipper who stood up to communists in Hollywood, and who defeated the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union. I loved the movie. The love story of the Reagans, her fighting spirit, his absolute courage and grace under pressure, cracking jokes with doctors after he was shot, saying he hoped that in the operating room they would all be Republicans.

Naturally, the media critics hated it, because, well, he fought the communist takeover of the Screen Actors Guild, and the hard left that dictates our metaphors is vengeful.

But the American people who watched it loved it—receiving 98 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes popcorn meter—and all the people seated around us loved it. Yet the film critics of the “mainstream media” didn’t care for it, because anything in popular culture that dares to applaud the conservative point of view is considered a threat to be stamped out and stomped on.

But I cared for it. And I hope you go to the theater and watch it. Is it a perfect movie? No.

“I’m glad I had some Kleenex,” said an old guy sitting near me.

Me, too.

As some of you know who’ve listened to the Palikari Project at johnkassnews, I was raised an anti-communist by a man who fought the communists. It was a fight to the death. Our entire family clan fought them. So, it is personal with me. And so, I was susceptible to President Reagan’s viewpoint.

Yes I loved President Reagan. And my entire family loved him. Why? He had the guts to stand tall against the Evil Empire while so many were telling him to back down.  There are many such quislings in American politics. But Reagan stood tall.

There are some of us still alive who remember the fear of the Soviets, their godless culture, their hatred of the West, their Iron Curtain, the KGB, Soviet style censorship (ironically practiced by the American hard left as they cry for ‘democracy’ and most  fearful of all:

The Soviet nuclear arsenal.

I remember we were trained to cover our heads at school from the Cuban Missile Crisis on, as if covering our heads in the hall at Kolmar School in Oak Lawn would actually do something. At least it gave us something to do as we waited to be fried to a crisp.

I’m not going to go into why the reviews are worthless, although Dennis Quaid is really good in this one. He’s becoming one of our great character actors. And he was superb. So was Penelope Ann Miller playing Nancy Reagan, but a softer personality who truly loved her husband, not the steely shrew as portrayed in caricature by the New York Times.

And when he stands at the Berlin Wall and publicly demands of Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” if you don’t feel goosebumps, you have no heart.

But what isn’t in the Reagan Movie is also critically important, the backstory of a dangerous spy war fought in the shadows between the KGB, and Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain and Reagan’s CIA.

Oh, and an American traitor ordering the deaths of American agents as he pushed the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust:

Aldrich Ames

The Soviets and the U.S. had already built nuclear arsenals that could destroy the world many times over. Soviet leadership kept dying and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was replaced by the increasingly paranoid Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov.

Andropov was head of the KGB. After Brezhnev suffered a stroke  in 1975, it was Andropov who took a greater leadership role in Moscow. He was convinced that the U.S. would use the pretext of NATO military exercises to launch a nuclear attack. And he was ill, and ready to push the button.

The U.S.S.R. was fighting a proxy war in our hemisphere, and Democrats in the U.S. Congress, led by U.S. Rep. Stephen Solarz, Democrat of Brooklyn, were helping them against the Reagan administration, meaning the progressive left was helping the Soviets against us. And the media was decidedly anti-Reagan.

Yet there are heroes in this backstory.

The high-ranking KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky had become an anti-Soviet double agent in the United Kingdom. not working for Western pay but for peace, trying to tamp down the ever growing paranoia among Soviet leaders itching for war. And the CIA’s Aldrich Ames, who was not a hero but a traitor who had been flipped by the KGB. Ames had access to all CIA plans and operations against the KGB and the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. Ames formally began spying for the U.S.S.R. His KGB handlers wanted Ames to tell them about this mysterious Western agent giving Thatcher’s government key info. Ames was trying to discover Gordievsky’s identity and then betray him to his KGB handlers.

And the mole hunters at CIA were in a desperate race to find the KGB mole (Ames) in their midst.

The great game of counterintelligence is perhaps too dry for modern audiences. Explosions and gun battles are rare.

It is a landscape of feral frightened creatures and diligent thinkers and puzzle solvers. Based on Ames betrayals, the KGB rounded up American agents. Ames was finally caught in 1994 after the Cold War ended and is serving a life sentence at the federal prison in Terra Haute, Ind.