be distributed in target-rich environments like high schools and colleges. Pilots signed up by the droves. Reagan’s future vice president enlisted right out of high school, against his own father’s advice. But when the Air Corps fell short of the enlistment quota for its most notoriously dangerous assignment, rear gunner, Arnold turned to Jack Warner and Fum-Poo to help him invest that job with “some romantic appeal.”
The result was a twenty-six-minute short film,
Rear Gunner
, starring Burgess Meredith as milquetoast Kansas farm boy Pee Wee Williams and Ronald Reagan as an eagle-eye lieutenant who thought Private Pee Wee might have bigger things in store for him than aircraft maintenance. “Pee Wee,” Reagan asks, “how’d you like to go to gunnery school?” In short order, Pee Wee would be molded into an ice-veined, steel-eyed warrior—“one of aviation’s mightiest little men … a Galahad of gunnery”—and then shipped off to the Pacific to serve on the flight crew headed by that same eagle-eyed lieutenant. By the time the film ended,Pee Wee had won the Distinguished Service Medal, and potential recruits had been reminded that “the fire from your guns is the fire of freedom.”
Rear Gunner
worked on a variety of levels. American audiences knew nothing of Reagan’s trepidation about actual flying, but they’d seen his previous turns as a hero pilot in movies such as
Secret Service of the Air, International Squadron
, and
Desperate Journey
. And publicity for
Rear Gunner
noted that both Meredith and Reagan were active-duty lieutenants: “Perhaps they were more than acting their parts in the film—perhaps they were living them.”
Reagan really never did more than act the part of a combat soldier. He spent his entire war at that Culver City back lot, with Hollywood’s once and future stars, directors, and producers, helping the 1,200-man-strong motion-picture unit churn out more than four hundred training, recruiting, or booster films. He never busted out to fly combat missions like Clark Gable or Jimmy Stewart; he never got a chance to fight the Japs like his actor friend Eddie Albert did. But Reagan took pride in the fact that he’d done what was asked of him, and he’d taken to heart one of Fum-Poo’s central missions: to keep reminding the folks at home (the ones who could buy the war bonds, for instance) that the United States and its military power was all that stood between our freedoms and the maniacal world-enslaving designs of Adolf Hitler and his Japanese allies. Nearly forty years later, he’d hauled himself into the White House by reminding the folks at home that US military might was all that stood between our freedoms and the maniacal world-enslaving designs of the Soviets and their energetic and ruthless agent in the Western Hemisphere, Fidel Castro.
By the time Reagan became president he’d long since come to understand that good enemies (even welfare queens and tinhorndictators) make good politics. The two previous Oval Office inhabitants had made plenty of hay with war metaphors, but they never really set up suitably threatening or concrete antagonists. Gerald Ford had declared war on the high cost of living (“Whip Inflation Now!”) … and lost the presidency. His successor, Jimmy Carter, had declared war on our national dependence on foreign oil. Carter’s renowned 1979 “malaise speech”—the one in which he never uttered the word “malaise”—is little remembered as what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation’s dire energy future. “Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977—never,” President Carter said in his nationally televised address to the nation. “The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by
The result was a twenty-six-minute short film,
Rear Gunner
, starring Burgess Meredith as milquetoast Kansas farm boy Pee Wee Williams and Ronald Reagan as an eagle-eye lieutenant who thought Private Pee Wee might have bigger things in store for him than aircraft maintenance. “Pee Wee,” Reagan asks, “how’d you like to go to gunnery school?” In short order, Pee Wee would be molded into an ice-veined, steel-eyed warrior—“one of aviation’s mightiest little men … a Galahad of gunnery”—and then shipped off to the Pacific to serve on the flight crew headed by that same eagle-eyed lieutenant. By the time the film ended,Pee Wee had won the Distinguished Service Medal, and potential recruits had been reminded that “the fire from your guns is the fire of freedom.”
Rear Gunner
worked on a variety of levels. American audiences knew nothing of Reagan’s trepidation about actual flying, but they’d seen his previous turns as a hero pilot in movies such as
Secret Service of the Air, International Squadron
, and
Desperate Journey
. And publicity for
Rear Gunner
noted that both Meredith and Reagan were active-duty lieutenants: “Perhaps they were more than acting their parts in the film—perhaps they were living them.”
Reagan really never did more than act the part of a combat soldier. He spent his entire war at that Culver City back lot, with Hollywood’s once and future stars, directors, and producers, helping the 1,200-man-strong motion-picture unit churn out more than four hundred training, recruiting, or booster films. He never busted out to fly combat missions like Clark Gable or Jimmy Stewart; he never got a chance to fight the Japs like his actor friend Eddie Albert did. But Reagan took pride in the fact that he’d done what was asked of him, and he’d taken to heart one of Fum-Poo’s central missions: to keep reminding the folks at home (the ones who could buy the war bonds, for instance) that the United States and its military power was all that stood between our freedoms and the maniacal world-enslaving designs of Adolf Hitler and his Japanese allies. Nearly forty years later, he’d hauled himself into the White House by reminding the folks at home that US military might was all that stood between our freedoms and the maniacal world-enslaving designs of the Soviets and their energetic and ruthless agent in the Western Hemisphere, Fidel Castro.
By the time Reagan became president he’d long since come to understand that good enemies (even welfare queens and tinhorndictators) make good politics. The two previous Oval Office inhabitants had made plenty of hay with war metaphors, but they never really set up suitably threatening or concrete antagonists. Gerald Ford had declared war on the high cost of living (“Whip Inflation Now!”) … and lost the presidency. His successor, Jimmy Carter, had declared war on our national dependence on foreign oil. Carter’s renowned 1979 “malaise speech”—the one in which he never uttered the word “malaise”—is little remembered as what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation’s dire energy future. “Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977—never,” President Carter said in his nationally televised address to the nation. “The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by
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