Cinematic Presidencies

Ronald Reagan, it is said, has run America's first cinematic presidency, often taking his ideological cues and policy prescriptions from his familiar world of the silver screen. In this, as in all else, gentleman-in-waiting George Bush has sought to emulate his mentor.

Bush's campaign was dominated by a tough-guy pose apparently derived from the careful study of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series. In his "gentler America" speech at the Republican Convention, Bush tried to vary the repertory with an out-of-character stab at a Henry Fonda impression.

But for one unseasonably chilly week in September, the Bush campaign was looking like a long-mislaid final scene from They Froze Hitler's Brain, as Nazi-sympathizers and other anti-Semites were emerging from the closets of his campaign organization. Hitler's Brain was one of a rash of 1950s horror movies based on the premise that Hitler wasn't really dead and that somewhere out there a well-placed Nazi cabal was quietly plotting his eventual return to power.

Novelist Robert Stone, writing in Harper's magazine, recently noted that fiction often serves the same function for a culture that dreams perform for the individual psyche. He described it as a process of cleansing the subconscious by airing out those cobwebbed comers that are too threatening for the conscious mind.

That is precisely what happened in American movie theaters in the superficially cheerful years after World War II. That war loosed two terrifying new realities upon the human race. One was the Nazis' coldly calculated technocratic genocide of the Jews. The other was America's unleashing of atomic power which raised the possibility of a new, instantaneous, and even accidental holocaust.

Each of these new historical realities was apparently too immense and horrible to be faced rationally. American politics in the late '40s and early '50s proceeded mostly as if neither the Holocaust nor Hiroshima had ever happened. So the specter of mass annihilation became the stuff of dreams, and nightmares. As a result we had a spate of monster movies in which commonplace insects or reptiles were transformed by atomic radiation into invincible and omnivorous giants.

This movie genre, with Godzilla as the prototype, originated in Japan where, understandably, nightmares of mass destruction were closer to the surface. But they quickly spread to America and spawned dozens of home-grown versions of the new radioactive mythology.

The Nazis-in-the-closet genre had its foundation in the fact that Hitler's remains were never discovered. That alone was bound to launch scores of "What if...?" scenarios. Then there was the fact that the horrors of Nazism were largely discovered, by the U.S. general public anyhow, only after the fact. If that could go on out of view, then what other time bombs might be ticking away in the shadows of some political underworld? And, the Nuremberg trials aside, postwar politics never supplied a satisfactory denouement to the Nazi saga. Mussolini hung from a Roman lamp post. But Hitler simply faded into the rubble.

ONE WOULD HAVE thought that America's Nazi demons had been laid to rest by the time that Hogan's Heroes gave us the ultimate ahistorical atrocity of Nazis as basically likeable bumblers. But they kept cropping up in movies such as The Marathon Man (Michael Dukakis' regrettable choice for a cinematic moniker) and The Boys From Brazil.

Over the decades we have, little by little, discovered that the Nazis won't go away because they're still here--Klaus Barbie and Kurt Waldheim being only among the more prominent examples. In the postwar era, Nazi operatives, such as Barbie, were recruited into the covert Cold War service of U.S. intelligence agencies. Others, such as Waldheim, were easily allowed to launder their immediate pasts and continue their careers unquestioned.

Meanwhile fascist ideology lived on in Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal, both close allies of the anti-communist Pax Americana, gained ground in the "national security states" of Latin America and infiltrated the margins of the legitimate Far Right in the Western democracies, ours included. In the Reagan era, the farthest reaches of the Far Right have, as the Bush campaign disclosures indicate, moved ever closer to the center of the Republican Party.

Bush says he's personally untainted by bigotry. And that seems true enough. Beneath his ill-fitting election-year cowboy suit, Gentleman George is still, at heart, what he's always been-a well-bred establishment centrist. But he, and others like him, have in recent years hitched their fortunes (political and otherwise) to some distinctly unsavory characters around the world.

The same report (from Political Research Associates of Cambridge, Massachusetts) that pulled the Bush campaign's Nazis out of the closet also detailed the Reagan administration's history of prominent involvement, directly and through the affiliated American Security Council, with the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) which, despite the no doubt well-intentioned participation of some legitimate conservatives, has become something akin to a Neo-Fascist International.

It's funded largely by Sun Myung Moon and harbors among it affiliates death squad chieftains from Argentina to El Salvador. The chair of WACL, retired Army Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub was, as is now well-known, the point man for the Reagan administration's illegal contra aid operation, and George Bush cannot claim to be untainted by that association.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.