President Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old this Sunday. His centennial will be celebrated by a year-long series of events, beginning at the Reagan Library in California. The occasion will also be marked by a new documentary, called “Reagan,” which will debut on HBO Monday night, February 7. Its director is Eugene Jarecki, who also directed the documentary “Why We Fight,” and is the author of “The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril.”
“I think Reagan is many things,” Jarecki tells Jon Meacham. “And the thing you can never say about Reagan is, ‘Well, this is what he was.’ ‘Cause as soon as you say that, it’s like whack-a-mole. He’s over here, and he turns out to be something totally different. So people who want to say that Reagan is a puppet of anyone absolutely would miss the boat on how incredibly smart, driven and really how much he was the engineer of his extraordinary life.”
