Free Republic

If liberals had supported Ronald Reagan the actor, they wouldn't have had to deal with Ronald Reagan the politician. In 1954, my father Ronald Reagan began hosting a weekly TV series, "General Electric Theater." The show aired Sunday nights at 9 on CBS, and consistently ranked in the top 10. Dad hosted the show and appeared as an actor in a number of episodes. Nancy made sure we watched it every week. Under my father's contract with General Electric, he toured the country by train and visited GE factories, local chambers of commerce and civic groups. The thousands of speeches...

Today, it's an astonishing, even eerie, scene: the icon of modern American conservatism, whose rise to political prominence was galvanized by the cultural rebellion of the 1960s, fighting off an attack-at-gunpoint by the quintessential modern American rebel. But when "The Dark, Dark Hours" episode of General Electric Theater aired live from Hollywood on December 12, 1954, Ronald Reagan and James Dean were just two actors yet to find the roles that would define them. No one has seen this episode in the decades since; the kinescope has been locked away, until now. My friend Wayne Federman, a writer for NBC's...