Reagan’s son Accuses The Butler of Falsely Portraying Father as ‘Racist’

In a Tuesday column for NewsMax, Michael Reagan accused Lee Daniels’ The Butler of falsely portraying his father, President Ronald Reagan, as a “racist”, Mediaite.com reported,

“There you go again, Hollywood,” Reagan began. “You’ve taken a great story about a real person and real events and twisted it into a bunch of lies.” Not only does Reagan believe the movie inaccurately portrayed his father, he believes it also took too many creative liberties with the life of White House butler Eugene Allen, citing many of the inaccuracies already pointed out byThe Daily Beast.


“It’s appalling to me that someone is trying to imply my father was a racist,” wrote Michael, the adopted son of Pres. Reagan and his first wife, Jane Wyman. “He and Nancy and the rest of the Reagan family treated Allen with the utmost respect. It was Nancy Reagan who invited the butler to dinner – not to work but as guest. And it was my father who promoted Allen to maître d’hôtel.”


Michael asserted that it was “simplistic and dishonest” for the film to suggestion that Ronald Reagan was “racist” because of his support for ending economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa. The facts of Ronald Reagan’s life, Michael argued, show otherwise:


Ultimately, Michael wrote, the movie’s depiction of the president is “simply Hollywood liberals wanting to believe something about my father that was never there.”


He concluded: “Despite what Hollywood’s liberal hacks believe, my father didn’t see people in colors. He saw them as individual Americans. If the liberals in Hollywood — and Washington — ever start looking at people the way he did, the country will be a lot better off.”