A fitting tribute to Ronald Reagan

First, they oppose you and condescend to you. Then, they reluctantly conclude that you had more on the ball than they thought. After that, they concede your achievements. And finally, they make a glowing feature-length movie about you.

This has been the trajectory of Ronald Reagan and his reputation, although the new film, "Reagan," wasn’t made by his erstwhile detractors.

"Reagan" covers all the greatest hits of the Republican’s life and career, with no famous line or episode left out. Based on the Grove City College academic Paul Kengor’s book, "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism," the framework of the movie is an old, former KGB agent explaining to an up-and-coming Russian politician how Reagan won the Cold War.

The cinematic choice of covering Reagan’s entire life in standard-issue biopic style won’t be to everyone’s taste, nor will the movie’s frank celebration of its subject. If the film is adulatory, though, it is also true and deserved. Reagan was one of the country’s great statesmen who prevailed in a titanic struggle between totalitarianism and freedom. It’s hard to exag-gerate his political talents or successes.

How did he do it? Reagan had a good grasp of economics and history, owing to a solid, if not elite, American education for his time. This was supplemented by a lifetime of reading and working out what he thought. The movie has Reagan at one point reading a book late at night, and his wife Nancy asking him — after peeking at the cover — if he’d rather spend time with Whittaker Chambers or her.

Reagan was an actor by trade, lending him a whole suite of skills at projecting an image and communicating that are necessary to politics, especially at the highest level. "There have been times in this office," Reagan said as president, "when I wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor."

It was always a mistake to believe that Reagan was just reading someone else’s lines. One reason his reputation began to rise in the years after he left office is it began to be acknowledged how much of his own material he had written, both prior to taking office and while president. His world view was unquestionably his.

Reagan, as we know, also had an endless store of jokes and stories and a knack for one-liners that allowed him to illustrate points in a winning way, defuse opposition and take the edge off his positions who were perceived as hard-line.

When it came to the Cold War, he profoundly understood the nature of Soviet communism. He viewed the conflict as a Manichean struggle between good and evil and had an adamantine insistence that we had to win, and ultimately would. Yet, in confronting the Soviets, Reagan knew when to push and when to relent, when to sit tight and when to talk. He combined his tough-minded views with a deep-felt hatred for war and nuclear weapons. This idiosyncratic mix was deployed to great effect during a high-stakes geo-political showdown between a Eurasian empire and the United States.

On top of all of this, Reagan was a profoundly humane man, with an abiding faith in America and its people. Perhaps all you need to know about him is that after getting shot and nearly killed in 1981, he almost instantaneously forgave his would-be assassin and sought to meet with him. In a less weighty matter, the movie depicts Reagan as insisting on writing a note to a boy after the kid’s goldfish — briefly under the president’s care — expired.

Since this quality of Reagan shines through, the movie is still inspiring, even if the content is familiar to anyone who knows about the era. It takes a heart of stone, for instance, not to be moved by Reagan’s 1987 "tear down this wall" in Berlin every time you hear it.

Like Lincoln or Truman, Reagan belongs to all of us now, and "Reagan" shows why.