Posted on 06/12/2004 3:19:36 PM PDT by Pokey78
Deep into the bleak winter of 1949, Ronald Reagan was on location in London filming a picture called The Hasty Heart. Recently divorced by his Academy Award-winning wife, Jane Wyman, Reagan was feeling frustrated, lonely and depressed. A Warner Bros executive who saw Reagan on the set wired the studio in California: "Reagan does not look well." The constant rain and fog mirrored his mood. He was still able to speak to English journalists with animated passion about the state of affairs in Hollywood where, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he had been on the front lines in the war against Communism in the film industry.
"Ronnie Reagan last night did just about the finest public relations job in years for the American film industry," said one who attended his presentation. "We figured Ronnie would talk for 20 minutes. Instead, the time was doubled, then we had a no-holds-barred session in which he was to answer any question they put to him. He did it in such grand shape that the BBC used 70 minutes for national broadcast. This morning they have asked us for permission to use it throughout the world."
It was a telling incident, unmentioned in the days since the former president's death. Yet stories such as this are windows into solving the mystery of Ronald Reagan. They help explain what drove him to the heights of power, questions that historians and biographers have been grappling with for years.
To understand Reagan and how he could suddenly cut through the depression that gripped him, one has to imagine him not as the Republican governor or grandfatherly president. Instead, picture Ronald Reagan in the prime of life, living in the red-hot centre of a town that inspired the fiction of Raymond Chandler and films such as Chinatown and LA Confidential. Reagan lived in a world of glamour and political intrigue, and it was that mould that shaped his life and political philosophy.
Conservatives, long contemptuous of Hollywood, have never wanted to admit that their hero's crucible was the entertainment industry. They prefer scenarios of a Ronald Reagan under the tutelage of National Review and Whittaker Chambers' Witness. Reagan, however, had a more demanding education.
After the Second World War, Reagan took a particular interest in the plight of blue collar workers and other liberal causes. He was a board member of the Guild, and argued in favor of national health and education programs, federal enforcement of civil rights, and the minimum wage. He was vociferous in his opposition to racially discriminatory laws and the atom bomb. For 1945, that was a daring agenda.
Equally bold for the period was his decision to join a campaign sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to reveal the Ku Klux Klan's increasing prominence in California. Reagan wanted to expose violence for which the radical group was allegedly responsible. Reagan was featured on a special radio broadcast in the fall of 1945 called Operation Terror where he dramatised the threat posed by the Klan. "Are these just isolated cases of mob hysteria?" he asked rhetorically. "Not on your life," he answered. "There is a plan behind all this, a capably organised systematic campaign of fascist violence and intimidation and horror . . . the mobs are being stirred up - hopped up by racial hatred." Reagan described Klan members as "the kind of crackpots that became Reich Fuhrer, the kind of crackpots that became Il Duce, the kind of crackpots who know that 'divide' comes before 'conquer'." His coda was surely as dramatic as any line he had delivered in the movies: "I have to stand and speak - to lift my face and shout that this must end, to fill my lungs to bursting with clean air, and so cry out, 'Stop the flogging! Stop the terror! Stop the murder!' "
Another cause that Reagan began to champion was the plight of the Hollywood working man. He watched the heated Hollywood labour strikes of 1945 with genuine concern and eventually feared that the labour disputes were Communist-driven and represented what the Communist Party aimed to achieve with American labour on a national scale. Reagan protested what he saw as the party's exploitation of innocent, hard-working men and women who were vulnerable targets for its mission. He became active in keeping Communist influence from his two passions: Hollywood and the Democrat Party.
Reagan's hero, Franklin Roosevelt, had inspired a country and led it through war; Reagan believed he could use a similar style to lead Hollywood out of its wilderness. "Ronnie really idolised FDR," remembered Jack Dales, the executive secretary of the Guild. "He thought Roosevelt was a true saviour."
In Reagan's eyes, liberal interest groups were the most vulnerable targets for manipulation. "The Communists seek to infiltrate those organisations just to smear and discredit them, because the Reds know that if we can make America a decent living place for all our people their cause is lost here," he once told the columnist Hedda Hopper. "If you don't believe this, name me one conservative organisation that is Communist-infiltrated. Then look at the others. I've already pulled out of one organisation that I joined in good faith. One day I woke up, looked about, and found it was Commie-dominated."
For Reagan, such betrayals were an education. "He's the only president whose early years included a course in how dirty the Commies can get, how clever and resourceful they can be, and the guts it takes to handle them in direct, personal conflict," said the screenwriter Art Arthur, who worked with Reagan in Hollywood labour causes during the 1940s and 1950s. "No other president had ever met the Communists early on toe-to-toe in that fashion and learned the hard way."
So when Reagan assumed the presidency of the Actors Guild in 1947, he had the platform for his political beliefs. Privately, Reagan had started helping to rehabilitate the reputations of artists who were deemed unemployable because of their often innocent political connections with Communism. He would guide them through a process that would restore their professional viability. Those who were Communists and wanted to break from the party were urged to publicly rebuke Communism and to identify others who were party members. These actions were against party discipline, and they proved the ties had been severed. Reagan actually agreed with the solution put forth by the director Elia Kazan, who had been a party member during the 1930s but later denounced Communism: break the back of the so-called blacklist by everyone testifying before Congress about everything. That would exonerate the whole industry.
Curiously, Reagan took on a role in a picture called Storm Warning. He played a crusading prosecutor in the Deep South who becomes a saviour to those victimised by another subversive group - the Klan. Had the Communist Party been substituted for Southern white supremacists, Storm Warning would have been a farily accurate representation of what Reagan was doing in real life.
Reagan's role in one of the most important dramas of the 20th century has yet to be acknowledged, even by his strongest supporters. Beyond being intensely devoted to a cause greater than himself, there's this amazing fact that the same man who fought Communism in Hollywood would 40 years later play the decisive role in ending the Cold War. In many influential Hollywood circles people don't get that. No wonder he remained haunted by those days of the 1940s and 1950s, even after he became president and retired to Bel Air.
The Communist party operatives who manipulated the movies for their own narrow agendas are to this day being hailed as "idealists aglow with noble intent". Reagan was closer to the truth when he said that the "only true Hollywood blacklist was one that had quietly worked in our freelance business to deny work to those who took anti-Communist positions and to give those jobs to the Communist types or their dupes who could be suckered into supporting the cause".
Apparently, the blacklist that Reagan described some 30 years ago is still in vogue. In the wake of his death, it was reported that there is no representation of him at the Guild headquarters in Los Angeles. Nothing on the movie star who helped bring down the regime responsible for the murder of some forty million? The power of the narrative wasn't lost on Sterling Hayden, the actor and a former member of the Communist party, even in 1981. "He is such a brilliant and articulate man," said Hayden. "We saw this back in Hollywood. But whoever would have dreamed that there would be such a script, that a second or third-rate actor could make such a transition? No novelist would dare make such a story."
I don't get the title. I would have titled this. "Reagans conservative crusade had its beginnings in Hollywood".
It's called an 'agenda'.
He's left because he opposed the Klan in California? Most conservatives would oppose the Klan also. I know I would.
By the way, I agree: your headline would have been much more fitting.
Maybe he was just opposing it because Robert Byrd was a member.....
Exactly.
But they would love to perpetuate the myth that conservatives are a bunch of racists.
In fact, it is the Left who are the racists. The examples abound.
National health care is an abomination to me because I worked up in Canada for 4 years and got a good look at it, it sucks. Being without health insurance does NOT mean you go without health care in this country.
She divorced him because she didn't agree with his move away from the left. However later in life President Reagan would state that he didn't leave the democrat party, the democrat party left him
He's so wonderful that everyone wants to claim him. The lefties will spin it however they must in order to lay claim.
btttt
Here's a point to ponder - Reagan accepted tax increases forced on him by the liberals in 1983 (and I believe 1984). How would we as Conservatives react if he were in the White House today and he accepted them? Would we give Bush a free pass if he also were to accept tax increases pushed on him by Congress?
If you can't destroy his character, claim him.
Sounds a bit like Zel Miller.
Me thinks not, for Ronald Reagan was a Conservative at heart, not a Liberal, thus what shaped his heart was God, an understanding of right and wrong, and an ambition to to maintain a walk in life for what he deemed as right.
What kind of journalistic outfit are you?
The news that Reagan was an FDR democrat and a union president is almost 50 years old.
I'm glad that you've finally caught up with the rest of us living in the real world.
True.
FDR deserves credit for steady leadership during WWII. The problem came during his first two terms, prior to the US entering into WWII. From 1933 to 1941 the US was caught in the worst economic times in our history. If not for onset of WWII, the US could easily have fallen into deeper economic decay and on a course towards socialism. WWII ended the Great Depression and gave FDR an opportunity to rectify the early mistakes he made.
What kind of green tobacco is this writer smoking? It is WELL KNOWN by all here that Reagan worked in the entertainment industry. "Win One For The Gipper!" That is something conservatives often say. And he thinks we are somehow ashamed that Reagan played the Gipper in the movies?
The writer of the article forgot to mention that the KKK was formed and populated by Democrats.
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