In our latter years The Scrapbook has become rather a sucker for books about Ronald Reagan. We own a couple of shelves of them and admit to enjoying even the mediocre ones, so highly do we esteem the modern era’s greatest president.
One of these volumes, published earlier this year by Simon & Schuster, gave us particular delight: Mark Weinberg’s Movie Nights with the Reagans: A Memoir. Weinberg was a deputy press secretary in the Reagan White House, and it fell to him to represent the press office in the president’s entourage when Reagan traveled to Camp David on weekends. There, at precisely 8:00 p.m. in the Aspen Lodge screening room, the president and the first lady would welcome guests—his personal aide, his physician, a military aide, a Secret Service agent, Marine One’s pilot, and so on—and watch the week’s selection. Afterward the group would assemble and discuss the movie, special attention being given to whatever the president might say.
Weinberg saw hundreds of films with the Reagans this way. In the book he recalls 17 of them, including Ghostbusters, The Untouchables, Chariots of Fire, 9 to 5, and Top Gun. He recalls what the president said about each one and suggests ways in which each may have shaped his thoughts about the challenges facing his administration.
Among the book’s best chapters is the one about what is, in our view, Steven Spielberg’s best film: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. That screening happened at the White House, not at Camp David, and Spielberg himself was there. So were Neil Armstrong and the newly confirmed Sandra Day O’Connor, as well as other guests and their children.
After the movie ended, the president stood up and thanked Spielberg, then said: “And there are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true.” That led a number of hacks in the press and elsewhere to speculate that Reagan believed in aliens, but Weinberg gets at the truth when he writes that E.T. was “fundamentally Reaganesque in tone and approach. Its wholesome depiction of Middle America, its impish sense of humor, and its subtle placement of the protagonist in opposition to the government aligned with his identity.”
Weinberg’s memoir captures Reagan at his best—witty, kind, keenly intelligent. It also reminds us of the great man’s robust capacity to see the world not just through politics and policies but also, perhaps especially, through the imagination.
