Ronald Reagan is in the news again.
This week was the 45th anniversary of his signing the famous Kemp–Roth tax cut at his beloved Rancho del Cielo outside Santa Barbara, Calif. A movie about his famous 1986 summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland premiered this month.
And John Hinckley Jr., the would-be assassin of Reagan, made news by revealing that he would have voted for Reagan for president in 1984 because his motivation for shooting at Reagan in 1981 was to impress actress Jodie Foster rather than any animus toward Reagan.
Hinckley was released from a mental hospital in 2022, and this week he told Mark Joseph, the producer of the 2024 film Reagan, in an interview, “The Cold War might still have been going on” if he had succeeded in killing Reagan.
Joseph says Hinckley’s statements make it all the more clear just what a pivot point in history the failed Reagan assassination attempt might have been. Reagan is returning to theaters in a special director’s cut release to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America. The film will be rereleased to 600 theaters on September 25, with an extra ten minutes of new footage, including scenes from Oval Office meetings and Reagan’s childhood.
