Recognizing the truth in 'Reagan'

Hollywood can’t always be trusted to accurately portray reality or history, to say the least.

But I fully enjoyed watching the facts go by in the premier of “Reagan,” which I saw this week at the famous Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

“Reagan,” which stars Dennis Quaid as my father and opened around the country Friday, covers my father’s career from Illinois lifeguard to the American president who set out to bankrupt the Soviet Union — and did it.

It took an international team of freedom fighters like Maggie Thatcher and Pope John Paul II to bring down the USSR and end the Cold War.

But as the movie shows, it was my father’s rhetoric, his America-wins foreign policy, his Christian moral principles and his stubborn negotiating skills that led the way to the West’s victory over the Evil Empire.

“Reagan” is not a political movie. It’s not a rah-rah campaign ad for him or Republicans.

It’s a warts-and-all rendition of my father’s successes and failures in life and politics as told through the eyes of an old KGB agent (Jon Voight).

It includes his fight against the communists who were trying to take over the actors union in the late 1940s and the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s.

It shows how he became a Christian, how he stood up for his conservative beliefs and how as California governor he fought with the heads of state universities over campus protests in the 1960s.

“Reagan” shows that as president many of my father’s toughest fights were with his own advisors.

He ignored their advice when he issued his famous challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev in Berlin “to tear down this Wall” and he resisted their stiff pressure to sign away the Star Wars anti-ballistic missile system at his summit meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik.

One of the best scenes depicts something that could never happen in today’s partisan, hate-filled politics.

It shows how my father’s chief political nemesis — and great friend — Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill was one of the first people to visit him in the hospital after he was shot.

O’Neill, who was carrying a rosary, kneeled next to the hospital bed and they prayed together — which is equally unlikely to ever occur again in our irreligious age.

A snotty review of “Reagan” in the Hollywood Reporter dismissed the movie as an “over-reverential” tribute.

The critic said it was too long and insufficiently “incisive” when addressing my father’s warts — proving that Tinsel Town’s knee-jerk bias against my father and his politics is alive and well.

That kind of negative review will no doubt please the wealthy liberal actors who still treat Ronald Reagan like a Republican ogre from the past.

But I bet few of them know that when he was president of their union, he was the one who led the fight to get them their first health care benefits and the residuals they enjoy today.

The critics’ opinions of “Reagan” don’t matter. It’s an excellent, 2½-hour history lesson that is wonderfully and respectfully done.

Quaid is great as my father. My mother Jane Wyman and Nancy Reagan are perfect. The music is great, too, including Bob Dylan’s rendition of “Don’t Fence Me in,” which he sings over the credits.

And make sure to stay until the end of the credits. They include photos depicting various moments in the movie, but the highlight is a letter written to my father by a child from Reykjavik who lived in the Hofdi House where the 1986 summit with Gorbachev took place.

I don’t appear in the movie or the credits, though I was interviewed about 15 years ago by the moviemakers who used some of the stories and quotes I told them.

I recognized many big moments in the movie because I was there when they happened. And it makes me proud that not only was I a witness to history, I lived part of it.