The Reagans mini-series is the latest in a long line of cheesy TV productions mangling the lives of the presidents, though no one has chosen to politicise these tabloid productions until now. This time, a Republican mole filched a copy of the script, and the Republican party chairman, Ed Gillespie, assumed the pose of historian. The script put words into the mouth of Reagan - like these about Aids sufferers: "They that live in sin shall die in sin" (what he actually said was: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague", because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments"). Gillespie called on CBS to pull the series or flash a warning on screen every 10 minutes that it was make-believe. CBS promptly crumpled, pulling the show from the network schedule. Leslie Moonves, the CBS president, abased himself with abject apologies.
The Reagans, judging from leaked excerpts of the script, features a distracted Ronnie and harridan Nancy, a melding of 1950s situation comedy and Mommy Dearest. Policy and politics are not its centrepieces. Certain crucial events in the rise of Reagan are noticeably missing. The actual words on race and civil rights, essential to his political success, are absent, though the Republicans haven't complained.
Some true-life scenes: Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan travelled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights".
As president, Reagan aligned his justice department on the side of segregation, supporting the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in its case seeking federal funds for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. In 1983, when the supreme court decided against Bob Jones, Reagan, under fire from his right in the aftermath, gutted the Civil Rights Commission.
Reagan consolidated the Southern strategy that Nixon formulated in response to the civil rights movement. It is this Republican party that has created the radically conservative Southern presidency of Bush. When Bush's candidacy was threatened in the Republican primaries of 2000, he rescued himself by appearing at Bob Jones University and wrapping himself in support of the preservation of the Confederate emblem on the South Carolina state flag.
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