Reagan’s critics say that he made up a fake story from the war, but they are the ones who can’t back up their account with evidence.
Reagan’s critics say that he made up a fake story from the war, but they are the ones who can’t back up their account with evidence.
O n the 112th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, we commemorate his many monumental accomplishments as the greatest president of the past century. But it is also a good occasion for correcting the record regarding the persistent, never-ending efforts to obscure those accomplishments with misleading smears. One attack on Reagan that has grown in the telling over the years is the claim that he invented a wartime story about having been present at the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The problem: The actual evidence of Reagan saying this is vague, thirdhand, and contradicted on the record by people who were there. It is also inconsistent with Reagan’s own public accounts of how he first came to see the reality of the Holocaust on film.
The death-camps story is of fresh interest again because we now live in a golden age of fabulists in American politics, driven by the George Santos drama. Of course, there are all different types of falsehoods politicians tell, ranging from white lies dictated by convention, to invented histories, concealment of fact, and tall tales for the sheer mischievous thrill of putting on an audience. The most egregious and long-running fabulist of his own biography in American political history is Joe Biden. Unlike Reagan, however, when Biden has invented stories, it is almost always in public, leaving unambiguous evidence of what he said. Typically, the only factual disputes are about whether some fig leaf of support can be conjured for the stories he tells; nobody disputes that he told them. He tends to do this on camera — in front of crowds on the campaign trail, or in televised debates, interviews, or Senate hearings. It has happened so regularly in full public view that one need not scrape for examples from disputed private conversations. The opportunity to persuade voters his way is most often the catnip that lures Biden into Walter Mitty–land, but so is any threat to his ego; in a confessional moment reflecting on his 1987 meltdown, he conceded that, “I exaggerate when I’m angry.”
Reagan’s War
Reagan was 30 years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He was old for a soldier and had a wife and daughter, but he was physically fit, and many men in their 30s served in the war. Reagan was three years younger than Jimmy Stewart, who won a Best Actor Oscar in 1940 and was flying bombing missions over Germany by 1944. In a time when men were shamed for not serving, Reagan always gave off an air of regret that he was left at home.
Reagan had, by the outbreak of war, been in the Army Reserve for four years in an outdated Iowa cavalry unit, but his eyesight was so bad that he began wearing contact lenses shortly after their commercial introduction in 1936. At the time, contacts were a new, uncomfortable technology, but he was in the movies. On those occasions when he wore eyeglasses in public, you can see the Coke-bottle lenses. Army doctors concluded that his 7/200 vision meant that he needed to be within seven feet of an enemy tank to determine if it was one of ours or not. He was classified as unfit for overseas service.
Assigned a dead-end job in the port of San Francisco, Reagan got a transfer to the Army Air Force in 1942, which put his background in the movies to work, first in public relations and then in the First Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, Calif. The FMPU was in the Signal Corps of the Army Air Force, serving under General Hap Arnold. The Culver City complex became known as “Fort Roach” because it had been taken over from the studios of filmmaker Hal Roach. In addition to the general designation of his job as an intelligence officer, Reagan’s service records reflect that he became Fort Roach’s base personnel officer and, during absences of its commander, its base executive officer. A big part of his job was recruiting other show-business people (especially those with behind-the-camera technical skills) into the FMPU. All of this would prove a good springboard for his post-war role leading the Screen Actors Guild.
The FMPU made training and recruitment films and wartime propaganda — it did everything from glamorizing combat pilots to making instructional films on surviving enemy interrogation — but it also did grittier work, such as using aerial-surveillance footage to construct scale models of Japanese and German bombing targets to be filmed and delivered to overseas bombing crews. Reagan narrated a number of these bombing briefings. The footage they used came from the FMPU’s combat camera crews, which were sent wherever Americans were fighting.
As Smithsonian Magazine recounted in 2012, the FMPU’s film crews brought Reagan face to face with early film of the Holocaust — in Culver City:
When the Germans surrendered in May 1945, General Arnold gave [FMPU filmmaker Owen] Crump one last task: to travel throughout Europe shooting color film of the impact Arnold’s air force had had. Crump and his crew traveled from city to city, including Berlin, filming the damage done by years of bombing. They recorded the interrogations of top Nazi officials captured after V-E Day. They shot footage of the Nazi concentration camps Ohrdruf and Buchenwald as Allied forces liberated the camps.
Back in California, Ronald Reagan and Technical Sergeant Malvin Wald, a scriptwriter, were among the few people to see the developed film of the camps. “Even though it was a summer day, Reagan came out shivering — we all did,” Wald recalled in a 2002 interview. “We’d never seen anything like that.” Arnold was ultimately unable to procure enough funding from Congress to create a documentary using Crump’s footage, and the unused raw film was interred in archives.
Reagan talked about the impact of watching this footage in April 1981, speaking at the White House — a month after he was shot — at the First Annual Commemoration of the Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust:
I’m horrified today when I know and hear that there are actually people now trying to say that the Holocaust was invented, that it never happened, that there weren’t 6 million people whose lives were taken cruelly and needlessly in that event, that all of this is propaganda. Well, the old cliche that a picture’s worth a thousand words — in World War II, not only do we have the survivors today to tell us at first hand, but in World War II, I was in the military and assigned to a post where every week, we obtained from every branch of the service all over the world the combat film that was taken by every branch. And we edited this into a secret report for the general staff. We, of course, had access to and saw that secret report.
And I remember April ’45. I remember seeing the first film that came in when the war was still on, but our troops had come upon the first camps and had entered those camps. And you saw, unretouched — no way that it could have ever been rehearsed — what they saw, the horror they saw. I felt the pride when, in one of those camps, there was a nearby town, and the people were ordered to come and look at what had been going on, and to see them. And the reaction of horror on their faces was the greatest proof that they had not been conscious of what was happening so near to them. And that film still, I know, must exist in the military, and there it is, living motion pictures, for anyone to see, and I won’t go into the horrible scenes that we saw.
Reagan also recounted the story of watching the films in a 1985 letter included in the volume Reagan: A Life in Letters, in which he wrote, “While I will be making my first visit to a camp — Bergen-Belsen — I had early exposure to the horror of those places” when “we received the first film taken by combat crews when our forces overran a number of the camps.” He told it again in his 1990 post-presidential autobiography, Ronald Reagan: An American Life:
At Fort Roach, I became one of the first Americans to discover the full truth about the horrors of Nazism. One of our jobs was to prepare classified films . . . to be shown to members of the general staff in Washington. As a result, we handled a lot of classified footage taken by combat cameramen around the world that was never seen by the public.
During the final months of the war, we began receiving secret Signal Corps films showing the liberation of Hitler’s death camps and they engraved images on my mind that will be there forever.
In his memoir, after describing the footage in more graphic detail than he was willing to inflict on his audience in 1981, Reagan added, “When the war ended . . . I decided to keep a print of one of the films because I remembered that after World War I, there’d been a lot of talk about how Americans had been duped by false propaganda about the enemy.” As he told the story in 1990: “Some years later, a producer and his wife came over for dinner” and began doubting “all that stuff we’re hearing about the Germans,” so Reagan showed them the film on his 16-millimeter projector, and “the producer and his wife just sat there in silence with tears in their eyes.”
The Cannon Shot
The claim that Reagan had painted himself as present at the death camps entered the American media in 1984 through Lou Cannon, then the senior White House correspondent for the Washington Post. Cannon would become a largely sympathetic Reagan biographer, but he also built his entire biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, around the theme of Reagan’s presidency as an acting job.
In a column that ran on March 5, 1984, Cannon had Reagan telling two versions of the story. The first was in a state meeting with the prime minister of Israel in November 1983:
When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir visited the White House last Nov. 29, he was impressed by a previously undisclosed remembrance of President Reagan about the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. Repeating it to his Israeli Cabinet five days later, Shamir said Reagan had told him that he had served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps.
Shamir said Reagan also informed him that he had saved a copy of the film because he believed that, in time, people would question what had happened. Many years later, as Shamir recalled being told, Reagan was asked by a member of his family whether the Holocaust occurred. “That moment I thought,” Shamir quoted Reagan as saying, “this is the time for which I saved the film, and I showed it to a group of people who couldn’t believe their eyes. From then on, I was concerned for the Jewish people.”
The diplomatic stakes of this meeting can be gleaned from a few lines in Reagan’s diary. November 28, 1983: “Spent most of afternoon signing letters of condolence to next of kin of the 239 Marines” killed in the Hezbollah bombing in Beirut. November 29, the day of his meeting with Shamir: “I think things are well on track & a lot of suspicion etc. has been washed away on both sides.” November 30, reporting feedback from Shamir from Secretary of State George Shultz, who had been in the meeting: “The P.M. doesn’t think our defense people are very cordial to Israel but believes I am a trustworthy friend.”
The second example cited by Cannon was in a meeting with post-war Nazi-hunters in February 1984 to discuss the Justice Department’s cooperation in that endeavor:
On Feb. 15, famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal met with Reagan in the White House and heard a similar story. Wiesenthal told Washington Post reporter Joanne Omang that he and Reagan had held “a very nice meeting,” during which the president related “some of his personal remarks from the end of the war.” Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, also was present. He told Omang that Reagan said he was “a member of the Signal Corps taking pictures of the camps” and that he had saved a copy of the film and shown it a year later to a person who thought the reports were exaggerated. “He said he was shocked that there would be a need to do that only one year after the war,” Hier said.
Elaborating in his own book, Cannon noted that he had originally come across the Shamir story in an American newsletter based on an article in Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper, while he had heard the Wiesenthal story from his Post colleague Omang:
I remained journalistically cautious, perhaps overly cautious, even though it seemed unlikely that Shamir and Wiesenthal had reached identical misunderstandings at their separate meetings with Reagan. But all I knew about the Reagan-Shamir conversation had come from a secondhand account of a report in an Israeli newspaper. I let the story sit until Ed Walsh, then The Washington Post correspondent in Jerusalem, was able to confirm the accuracy of the Ma’ariv report with Dan Meridor, the Israeli cabinet secretary. Shamir had accepted Reagan’s moving story at face value and had related it to the cabinet as evidence of the president’s support of Israel. . . .
How could Shamir and Wiesenthal, fluent in English and known for their grasp of detail, have misunderstood so completely what Reagan said to them in two different meetings more than two months apart?
The Reagan White House immediately told Cannon, on the record for inclusion in his article, that Reagan had never served out of the country. White House chief of staff James Baker called Cannon to say that he had the president’s word that he had never told anybody otherwise. Cannon professed to be startled by the uncharacteristically aggressive reaction by Reagan’s team to the inquiry. Reagan even later wrote Cannon a letter denying the story.
Shultz was one of the attendees at the meeting with Shamir, along with Vice President George H. W. Bush, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Middle East envoy Don Rumsfeld, and Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens. Shultz insisted in his own memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, that the account that reached Cannon was “garbled” by multiple intermediaries:
During the latter part of World War II, Reagan’s job involved viewing film shot by military cameramen and war correspondent photographers. He assembled the selected shots into briefing films for senior officers. When he saw the first footage of the horror inside the concentration camps, filmed at the time the death camps were liberated, he was immensely shocked. Against regulations, he kept copies of the films because, he said, the scenes were so appalling that some people would later deny that it could have been so bad—or that it had taken place at all. Four years after the war, Reagan recounted, a guest at his house for dinner said he found the stories impossible to believe—it couldn’t have happened that way. So Ronald Reagan got out the can of film and ran it for his skeptical guest.
When Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir made his first visit to Washington during the Reagan administration, the president told this story to Shamir, who was deeply moved by it. Upon his return to Israel, Shamir told the story to Israeli journalists, who reported it in the Hebrew language press. English translations were picked up by American reporters. As the story emerged in American newspapers, it had become garbled, maintaining Ronald Reagan had said that he was present at the liberation of the camps as part of a U.S. army film crew. The president had said no such thing. But the critics then cited it as an example of Reagan’s inability to distinguish fact from fantasy or real life from an actor’s role that he had played or wished he had played. But I had heard the true version. I knew that the president back then had, in his own way, created his own Holocaust memorial.
Much of the dispute really centers on the precise wording of how Reagan described watching the liberation of the camps. If he said he was part of the unit that shot the films, that was literally true: The FMPU and the Signal Corps film crews that captured the liberation of Ohrdruf and Buchenwald were operating as a team under a single common chain of command to General Arnold. Reagan plainly regarded them as part of his own team.
Maybe Reagan was not all that careful in how he described his role; it is difficult to judge without hearing exactly what he said, and nobody recorded his exact words. Cannon quoted Hier’s phrase — “a member of the Signal Corps taking pictures of the camps” — which seems ambiguous. Cannon contends that Reagan probably “became so emotionally engrossed in the story that he told it from the point of view of the photographer witnessing the scene.” Reagan was a famously mesmerizing raconteur, and there would hardly be more compelling subject matter, especially to men such as Shamir and Wiesenthal, than the scenes of the liberation of the extermination camps. Hearing the most powerful man in the world describe the impression those scenes made upon him at the time, they may simply have focused on his point and the impression it made, and may not have parsed his words about his relationship to the film crews very carefully — especially given that the thrust of the story was to underline Reagan’s present-day commitments in 1983–84 to Israel and to hunting down Nazis and commemorating the Holocaust. The account then grew in the retelling.
Deputy White House chief of staff Michael Deaver left the Reagan White House on fairly bad terms, but in his own 1987 memoir Behind the Scenes, he thought it likely that Reagan might have simply been too vague in his description for the sake of the story:
Reagan is a romantic, not an imposter. When he talked about seeing the bodies of the Holocaust victims piled like firewood, he may or may not have explained that he had been viewing the footage shipped home by the Signal Corps. (He saw this nightmare on film, not in person. That did not mean he saw it less.)
By contrast, Edmund Morris — the Reagan biographer who found himself so stymied by his subject that he wrote himself as a fictional character into the biography — argued that “in the spring of 1945, Capt. Reagan, as the FMPU’s intelligence officer, spent weeks processing raw color footage from the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. The images so burned into his brain that later in life — quite understandably — he imagined he had been there at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald.” But if Reagan had convinced himself of this, he would not have told the true story in public in 1981.
As befits accounts of events decades after the fact, there are subsidiary factual disputes. Cannon’s book argues that the footage Reagan watched wasn’t classified for long, given that Dwight Eisenhower ordered that the footage of the liberation of the death camps be released immediately to the public, to whom it was shown in newsreels in theaters soon after. (Eisenhower had his own concerns about post-war efforts to whitewash German atrocities, given how Nazism itself had arisen from German myths about the end of the previous war.) But that is not necessarily inconsistent with there having been raw footage that didn’t make it into the newsreels and remained in government archives.
What about Reagan’s stories of showing the films to doubters? Cannon wrote that “Reagan had told Baker that ‘a Jewish friend’ had questioned him about the accuracy of the death camp reports a year or two later. Reagan had shown him a copy of the film. . . . What Jew would doubt the existence of the Holocaust?” In his memoir, Reagan doesn’t say whether his producer friend was Jewish, but Cannon underestimates the insidious nature of Holocaust denial. Not everyone who doubts the full horror of the Holocaust shares the malicious or antisemitic motives of its chief proponents; as with many of humanity’s atrocities, some people are just unable to process evil on a certain scale, at least not unless it is really vividly driven home to them. Morris, who interviewed Reagan’s family at length, also notes that Reagan “kept one of those Army reels to show to each of his children in early adolescence, so that they could learn about man’s inhumanity to man. Ask Patti. Ask Ron.”
Whether or not Reagan was careless on a few occasions in how precisely he described his relationship with the film crews that witnessed the liberation of the camps, however, it is silly to compare this controversy to the fake life of George Santos or the many public fabulisms of Joe Biden. Reagan got his facts straight every time he told the story in public, and the occasions on which he was claimed to have misled his audience were in settings where nobody recorded his actual words. He wasn’t trying to puff up his credentials or win votes; at most, he was trying to close the sale on a stronger U.S. alliance with Israel and on our national commemorations of the Holocaust. The latter goal ultimately led to the construction of the national museum in Washington, for which Reagan laid the cornerstone in 1988. He was making a plea against the falsification of memory.