Movie Nights with the Reagans by Mark Weinberg

Author:Mark Weinberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

11

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Starring:

Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd

Directed by:

Robert Zemeckis

Viewed by the Reagans:

July 26, 1985

The Film That Left Us Speechless

At 11:28 a.m. on Saturday, July 13, 1985, Ronald Reagan ceased, for the second time, to be president of the United States. At that moment, he was placed under anesthesia for nearly three hours of surgery to remove a two-inch cancerous growth from his colon. A letter he had signed earlier that morning transferred power temporarily to Vice President Bush.

Just minutes before, the president had been transported on a gurney down the gleaming white corridors of Bethesda Naval Hospital toward the operating room as the First Lady kept pace alongside, holding her husband’s hand. The growth in his large intestine had been discovered only the day before during a colonoscopy exam. The decision had been made to perform the surgery right away. At the door to the operating room, the president and First Lady exchanged a final “I love you” and squeezed each other’s hands once more. Then the medical team took over.

Reagan’s wit shone through just before he underwent anesthesia. He told the surgeons that after his colonoscopy the day before, “this ought to be a breeze.”

And, as colon cancer surgeries go, that’s what it was. President Reagan emerged two hours and fifty-three minutes later after a complication-free procedure, minus all traces of the problematic growth—along with two feet of his large intestine. In another few hours, once the anesthesia and pain medication had worn off, he resumed his presidential duties after an absence of less than eight hours altogether.

The summer of 1985 was a happy time for the Reagan presidency. He had just been inaugurated for the second time, having carried every state but one in the November 1984 election. The economy was improving impressively. The sky-high rates of unemployment, interest, and inflation that President Reagan had inherited when he took office were quickly being replaced by record prosperity. On the international front, there was also cause for optimism. In Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan found a Soviet leader with whom he could work; a worthy partner in the games of statecraft that would characterize the last stages of the Cold War.

In the summer of ’85, the momentum was all Ronald Reagan’s. “Morning in America” was turning into a brilliant high noon. “Morning in America” was the opening line in a television commercial used in Reagan’s campaign for reelection. It was designed to highlight how much progress had been made during the first Reagan term—that the country went from darkness to light. When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, coverage of funeral arrangements was sometimes referred to as “Mourning in America.”

The surgery was only a minor hiccup. Everything had been taken care of so quickly and easily, with no complications, that it seemed nothing was going to slow down the Reagan revolution—not a would-be assassin’s bullet and not a little bit of cancer. Reagan himself was fond of saying, “I did not have cancer. I had something that had cancer in it, and it was removed.

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