Reagan Era: On The Trail Of A Tale

The 1980s did not completely lack detectives willing to take a close look at Reagan's unsourced anecdotes.

Political scientist Michael Paul Rogin, for one. His book Ronald Reagan: The Movie examines political mythologies and their use in demonizing the "other" throughout US history. His analysis of how Reagan transformed movie scripts into personal myth, and their use in his political career forms one chapter.

Rogin's 1985 appearance on 60 Minutes—to popular non-acclaim—was at least an effort at truth-telling.

And at least one real journalist, Lars-Erik Nelson, went after the source of a treasured Reagan tale; recounted by Paul Slansky in The Clothes Have No Emperor—

12/12 [1983] "A B-17 coming back across the channel from a raid over Europe, badly shot up by aircraft...The young ball-turret gunner was wounded, and they couldn't get him out of the turret there while flying.

"But over the channel, the plane began to lose altitude, and the commander had to order his men to bail out. As the men started to leave the plane, the last one to leave—the boy, understandably, knowing he was being left behind to go down with the plane, cried out in terror—the last man to leave the plane saw the commander sit down on the floor. He took the boy's hand and said, 'Never mind, son, we'll ride it down together.' Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously awarded."
—President Reagan addressing the Congressional Medal of Honor Society

By 12/16, says Slansky,

Columnist Lars-Erik Nelson, after examining the citations of all 434 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during World War II—reveals that not one of them matches the story President Reagan told the other day. "It's not true," writes Nelson. "It didn't happen. It's a Reagan story....The President of the United States went before an audience of 300 real Congressional Medal of Honor winners and told them about a make-believe Congressional Medal of Honor winner."

Responds Larry Speakes, "If you tell the same story five times, it's true."

And Nelson stayed with the story—

12/28 Lars-Erik Nelson reports that a reader saw a scene very similar to President Reagan's Medal of Honor story in the 1944 movie Wing and a Prayer. "Adding to the confusion," writes Nelson, "Dana Andrews at one point reprimands a glory-seeking young pilot with the words, 'This isn't Hollywood.' ...You could understand that some in the audience might confuse reality with fiction.

And on to 1984—

1/11 ...Nelson suggests another source for the Medal of Honor story: an apochrypal item in the April 1944 issue of Reader's Digest, a magazine known to be a life-long Reagan favorite. "The bomber had been almost ripped apart by German cannon," it read. "The ball turret gunner was badly wounded and stuck in the blister on the underside of the fuselage. Crewmen worked frantically to extricate the youngster, but there was nothing they could do. They began to jump. The terror-stricken lad screamed in fear as he saw what was happening. The last man to jump heard the remaining crewman, a gunner, say, 'Take it easy, kid. We'll take this ride together.'"

But Nelson was an honest-to-god journalist; from the New York Observer's November 2000 Nelson obit—

A friend of his noted that a rare foray into television - an appearance on Meet the Press in 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, along with Steven Brill, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post - left Mr. Nelson so infuriated by the grandstanding of Tim Russert that he took to calling the show "Me the Press."

"He did not have any appetite for those yelling shows, or what he called the 'theater criticism' mode of analyzing politics," Mr. Dwyer said. "I don't know why people called him old-school, because the old school is the only school-everything else is fake."

Simply put, Mr. Dwyer said, "he was a no-bullshit guy."

Nelson died of a stoke on November 20— after weeks of monitoring the Florida recount shenanigans, post-presidential election. I can't remember who said it—and can't find a citation—but sometime after 2000 some writer or other called Lars-Erik Nelson "the first casualty of the Bush Administration."