GROWING PAINS:

According to sources cited by one of Reagan's biographers, in 1938 the handsome young actor from Illinois was briefly attracted to Hollywood's Red flame. It seems that in a moment of rash idealism, Reagan attempted to become a member of the Communist Party, only to be turned down as unreliable by the local party boss. The party evidently preferred to keep the callow enthusiast on the outside, as a potentially useful "friend."[5]

Whatever the accuracy of this story (which Reagan later denied), nearly everyone who knew him in the late 1930s and early 1940s agreed that his consuming offscreen passion was politics and that his political stance was "very liberal."[6] An omnivorous reader with a photographic memory, Reagan effortlessly stored up in his head an amazing array of statistics and knowledge with which he cheerfully bombarded anyone who would listen. A pro-Communist filmmaker who worked closely with him during World War II later remarked that Reagan "had more knowledge of political history than any other actor I'd ever met."[7] Genial but zealous, the FDR loyalist liked nothing better than to debate politics by the hour with conservative Republican friends, each trying in vain to convert the other to his position. Curiously, two of these early right-wing sparring partners--the actor George Murphy and the California businessman Justin Dart--would help to launch Reagan's career in politics, as a conservative, twenty years later.

But in the early 1940s this denouement was nowhere in sight. After the United States entered World War II, Reagan eventually found himself in uniform. For most of the war, he served in California, where he rose to captain in the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Here he performed administrative tasks and helped to prepare military training films. During this period, the no-enemies-on-the-left spirit of Popular Front liberalism--temporarily eclipsed by the notorious Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939--had returned in force, and Reagan again felt its gravitational pull. With the United States and the Soviet Union allied in war against Nazi Germany, it was not surprising that in 1943 he joined the Hollywood Democratic Committee, a Popular Front-style mélange of liberals and hard leftists devoted to encouraging President Roosevelt's conciliatory policy toward Stalinist Russia. The committee's executive director was a member of the Communist Party.

In 1944 Reagan went to a Roosevelt reelection rally in Hollywood. During the war, he also showed interest in attending what a far-left Army colleague later described as "left-wing functions."[8] Whether he actually did so in any serious way is unclear. Most likely his few political gestures in this period betokened little more than a desire to stay in touch with like-minded liberals while waiting for the war to end--at which time he could again release his crusading and proselytizing impulses.

Years later, reflecting upon his wartime experience in uniform, Reagan wrote that it had led to "the first crack in my staunch liberalism." While in the Army, he had been obliged to deal with the bureaucratic inanities and "empire building" of the Civil Service.[9] Nevertheless, when Reagan returned to civilian life (and a full-time Hollywood acting career) in 1945, he was, by his own admission, a "near-hopeless hemophilic liberal" and "a New Dealer to the core."[10]

I thought government could solve all our problems just as it had ended the Depression and won the war. I didn't trust big business. I thought government, not private companies, should own our big public utilities; if there wasn't enough housing to shelter the American people, I thought government should build it; if we needed better medical care, the answer was socialized medicine.[11]

Determined to do his part for "the regeneration of the world,"[12] Reagan excitedly plunged into a frenzy of left-wing activism, including contacts with at least five organizations later accused of being Communist fronts.[13] On December 10, 1945, he read aloud an anti-nuclear poem at a formal dinner where other speakers denounced nationalism and capitalism and demanded international control of nuclear weapons. The popular movie star joined and quickly became a "large wheel" in the aggressively liberal American Veterans Committee (AVC), whose California ranks included more than a few Communists and fellow travelers. He joined the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), the Popular Front-style successor to the Hollywood Democratic Committee. He signed up with the World Federalists, whose policy goals included a world government. He even put his name on a petition by an outfit called the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, demanding that the United States abandon China's anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek (who was then fighting a civil war against the Chinese Communists). The petition was soon printed in the Communist Party's West Coast newspaper.

Above all, in the first months after the war Reagan went on a speaking spree around Hollywood, decrying what he saw as the rise of "neofascism" in the United States. It is little wonder that during these heady months he was "a favorite of the Hollywood Communists." "I was their boy," he ruefully admitted a few years later.[14]

Otto von Bismarck once reputedly remarked: "Fools say they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others' experience." In early 1946 Ronald Reagan was neither a fool nor a Communist sympathizer. But like many Roosevelt Democrats at the time, he was, by his later account, an innocent who was "not sharp about Communism" and the true nature of the Soviet despotism.[15] He was a non-Communist, not yet an anti-Communist. He was about to learn the political facts of life the hard way.

Reagan's slow political awakening took place amid a tectonic shift beneath the landscape of the American left. The war against Nazi Germany had not quite ended in 1945 when Joseph Stalin laid down a new line for obedient Communists worldwide: with Hitlerism all but destroyed, a new enemy had arisen--American imperialism--and Communists must prepare to struggle against it. The halcyon era of the prewar and wartime Popular Front, in which "progressives" could happily unite against fascism, was over. In its place Stalin had inaugurated a new struggle--the Cold War--in which the focus of evil for Communists everywhere would be Washington, D.C. No longer could the American comrades sing hosannas to Franklin Roosevelt and to Soviet-American friendship. Under direct orders from the Kremlin, they must now confront the "reactionary," "warmongering" administration of Harry Truman. Up to now the American Communist Party had been able to portray itself as a patriotic part of the grand coalition against Hitler. Now, in the quickening Cold War, the Party was forced to show what it really was: a witting tool and agent of a totalitarian, foreign power.

Meanwhile Reagan had begun orating around Hollywood under the auspices of the American Veterans Committee about the alleged threat of domestic "neofascism." His "hand-picked" audiences loved it. But then, one evening in the spring of 1946, upon the advice of his minister, the liberal celebrity altered the conclusion of his speech. After first denouncing fascism to the usual "riotous applause," he added a new closing line: "I've talked about the continuing threat of fascism in the postwar world, but there's 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 against fascism." The audience reaction, in Reagan's word, was "ghastly": not a single person applauded as he left the stage. He was stunned.[16] His turn to the right, it may be said, commenced that very night.

A few weeks later, on July 2, his disillusionment deepened when he attended his first meeting as a member of HICCASP's executive council, to which he had recently been appointed. HICCASP was already beset by accusations that it was Communist-controlled. To allay these concerns, James Roosevelt (a son of FDR) proposed at the meeting that the council issue a statement repudiating Communism. Instantly howls of outrage burst forth from John Howard Lawson (the "dean" of Hollywood's Communists) and other radicals in the room. When Reagan, the newcomer, rose in support of Roosevelt's proposal, he was greeted by shouts of "Fascist," "Red-baiter," and "capitalist scum," among other vituperative epithets of the Communist lexicon. The verbal brawl ended in the appointment of a committee of the two factions to draft an acceptable policy statement. It also ended in Reagan's joining the anti-radicals for a strategy session later that evening.

A few nights later, Reagan and the non-Communists on the drafting committee met with their leftist colleagues. Reagan's side offered a draft resolution (partly written by Reagan himself) ending with these words: "We [the executive council of HICCASP] reaffirm our belief in free enterprise and the democratic system and repudiate Communism as desirable for the United States." Once again pandemonium erupted. Shaking his finger under Reagan's nose, Lawson shouted that HICCASP would never adopt such a statement. "Let's let the whole membership decide by secret ballot," Reagan replied; this matter "shouldn't be left to the board of directors." Lawson retorted that the membership "isn't politically sophisticated enough to make this decision." Reagan never forgot the chilling, authoritarian condescension of those words.

The drafting committee eventually thrashed out a compromise resolution that ducked the question of Communism and watered down the reference to free enterprise. The HICCASP's executive council adopted this version with amendments a few days later. When Reagan's ally Olivia de Havilland then submitted the more anti-Communist resolution to the council's executive committee, it received exactly one vote: her own. A few weeks later HICCASP's executive council declared that it had no "affiliation" with any political party, including the Communists. For Reagan and many other Hollywood liberals, this anemic statement was a case of "too little, too late." In the aftermath of the stormy meetings in early July, he and many other prominent liberals resigned. To Reagan, HICCASP's refusal to unequivocally affirm democracy and repudiate Communism was "all the proof we needed" that the organization had indeed become a Communist front, "hiding behind a few well-intentioned Hollywood celebrities to give it credibility." Only weeks before, he had been inclined to dismiss talk of Communist infiltration and manipulation as "Red-baiting" and "Republican propaganda." No more. He had discerned, as he later put it, "the seamy side of liberalism. Too many patches on the progressive coat were of a color I didn't personally care for."[17]

Reagan's eye-opening entanglement with Communist front groups was only a prologue to the political education he was about to receive in the workplace.

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