Reagan Took On Hollywood ElitesWes Vernon
Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2004
Read the first article in this series, Reagan Defeated the Evil Empire With FaithRead the second article in this series, Belief Brought Reagan and Gorbachev Together
WASHINGTON -- When President Ronald Reagan set about bringing down the Soviet Union, he was confronting an old adversary: Communism. His faith had guided him throughout his life, starting with his days as a young boy in Dixon, where his religious mother Nelle guided him.
Later, when he went to Hollywood, he got to know the home-grown communists there and their camp-followers among the show business elite.
All of this is documented by author Paul Kengor in his new book, “God and Ronald Regan: A Spritual Life.” Through his upbringing in the faith of his mother, Reagan early-on recognized the evil that communism perpetrated.
In an interview with NewsMax.com, the author tells of Reagan, the anti-fascist crusader of the Hollywood community.
One day, in the early years after World War II, the young actor was approached by the Reverend Cleveland Kliehauer of the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church. The reverend complimented Reagan for taking on the fascists and Nazis.
However, he said there was an even more disturbing cloud on the geopolitical horizon; the prospect of Soviet Communism.
Until then, Ronald Reagan had not given much thought to the Red threat. After all, the Soviet Union had been our ally in World War II. But he respected Reverend Kliehauer and took his advice to heart.
So when he spoke before a citizens organization of Hollywood elites, he devoted most of his speech to his stock warnings of post-war stirrings of neo-fascism. The popular actor was interrupted with boisterous applause after almost every paragraph.
Soon the mood would take a different turn.
Reagan added a comment that there is “another ‘ism,’ communism, and if I ever find evidence that communism represents a threat to all that we believe in and stand for, I’ll speak just as harshly against communism as I have fascism.”
Dead silence. The crowd that had wildly cheered Reagan up until that point met this last line with a thundering silence. You could hear a pin drop.
“Reagan,” the author explained, “had stumbled on the fault line between Hollywood’s opposition to fascism and its naiveté to communism.”
Why the inconsistency? Who could explain the double standard in judging two bloodthirsty regimes and evil ideologies?
Dr. Kengor, a PHd in Political Science at Grove City College, Pa., told NewsMax he could never understand why fascism and Nazism were placed “on the right” by opinion-makers.
“Nazism was statist. Hitler was no advocate of the free market,” he told us. “You didn’t hear any theories of Hayek or Milton Friedman in Nazi writings or Adolph Hitler’s speeches.”
The author theorizes that Hollywood’s non-communist left looks the other way on the communist threat, in part, because communism plays the class hatred/warfare card, just as liberals do.
“Harmless crackpots,” as Eleanor Roosevelt once called U.S. Reds.
“Actually, they were very harmful crackpots,” Kengor told NewsMax.
Five decades later, after his presidency and after the Soviet Union was no more, Reagan thanked Rev. Kliehauer for the “wake-up call.” Even today in the 21st Century, Nancy Reagan sends the Hollywood Beverly Church a monthly check in her and her husband’s name.
During his childhood, the difficulty of his father to keep a job for very long — especially during the Great Depression - resulted in the Reagans constantly moving. That made it difficult for the lonely boy to develop lasting friendships. His mother Nelle saw to it that he had plenty of spiritual nourishment.
“Today,” says Kengor, Reagan ends his days on earth “with Nancy as his caretaker, and a faith that sustained him for more than nine decades. Still now, he is never alone.”
