Lately I have found myself listening for a voice like that of the late political scientist Michael Rogin, who succinctly skewered the assumptions that made Ronald Reagan seem benevolent. Through his investigation of psychoanalytic tropes in the ghostwritten autobiography Where's the Rest of Me?, Rogin proposed that Reagan drew inspiration as a politician from the time that he played a role in a movie where his character awakens to discover that his legs have been amputated. The character's bewildered question became the title for the book that told Reagan's story, and Rogin makes much of the detail that Reagan's father was a shoe salesman. For Reagan, according to Rogin, film roles incorporated such an absence into the political scenarios of his presidency, with speeches that mixed factual items with those drawn from the plots of his movies.
Rogin's book Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And Other Essays in Political...
