International control of atomic energy, however, was also the policy solution advocated by another American political faction: Communists. In April 1946, it was among the resolutions issued by a “National Committee to Win the Peace” in Washington, D.C. The other resolutions included a demand to remove Herbert Hoover as honorary chairman of an emergency famine relief committee, a call for the new United Nations Security Council to denounce the Spanish fascist Franco, and calls for an end to General MacArthur’s “one-man rule of Japan,” and for full employment legislation, the extension of Social Security, and the establishment of a national health insurance system. The last paragraph of the Associated Press dispatch on the meeting noted that “five of 20 members of Congress listed as sponsors before the conference was held asked that their names be withdrawn.” Cryptic—unless you were reading the tea leaves of America’s impending Cold War. For if the above positions were generally congruent with broad liberal opinion, other resolutions at the meeting—denunciation of recent government statements “which appear to be aimed at the embarrassment of the Soviet Union,” and a request to the State to Department to “maintain and extend friendly cooperation” with Russia instead—pointed in a more controversial direction.
The Soviet Union had just sacrificed some 20 million of its citizens to vanquish Hitler, in alliance with the United States. In 1943, after, the Germans retreated following the awful siege of Stalingrad, Warner Bros. produced Mission to Moscow at President Roosevelt’s personal request. It portrayed America’s new ambassador to the Soviet Union in his journey from skepticism to enthusiasm for the Communist state. At its gala premiere at Washington’s Earle Theater (in the afternoon, to accommodate the wartime blackout), an audience of 4,400 that included cabinet members and senators raised “a burst of applause,” the Washington Post reported, “that ended only when the theater orchestra drowned it out with the finale.” MGM produced Song of Russia and The North Star, idealized portraits of angelic Russians standing up to barbarian Germans. Life devoted its entire March 29 issue to hymning the USSR’s glories. (“They live under a system of tight state-controlled information. But probably the attitude to take toward it is not to get too excited about it.”) That November some six thousand rallied at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium to celebrate the tenth anniversary of normalized U.S.-Soviet relations. The next year Bette Davis cut a birthday cake, with twenty-six candles and inscribed TO OUR GALLANT RUSSIA, with a ceremonial Kazakh sword to honor the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Red Army.
And then, in March 1946, British prime minister Winston Churchill traveled to the small town of Fulton, Missouri, to describe how the lands under Soviet military control following Germany’s surrender had fallen behind an “iron curtain” of tyranny—and all of a sudden, with the speed of a swerve in a Communist Party line, the taint of association with the Soviet Union was something all Americans were to avoid on pain of ostracization from decent society or worse.
The problem was discerning where that taint lived.
The history of the Communist Party in the United States was morally complicated: under its Depression-era “Popular Front” strategy, Communists were anodyne bearers of a garden-variety liberalism—while upholding one position that was not anodyne at all: they were the only organized force in white American political life who said black Americans deserved equal rights. In 1940s Hollywood, that hothouse of moral preening, cocktail parties dedicated to the fight against Spanish fascism, to freedom for Chinese sharecroppers, and civil rights, under the sponsorship of the “Communist Political Association” (the party’s wartime name), were the places for up-and-coming thespians to see and be seen. “They had not the remotest idea of what Communism was in terms of economic structures of political superstates,” Reader’s Digest’s Communism expert, Eugene Lyons, wrote later. “For nearly all of them, it was an intoxicated state of mind, a glow of inner virtue, and a sort of comradeship in super-charity.”
Then peace, and a swerve. Communist leader Earl Browder, who had said that “capitalism and socialism have begun to find their way to peaceful coexistence and collaboration in the same world,” was purged; the party reorganized on a Cold War footing and began maliciously infiltrating liberal organizations. It also organized front groups—like the National Committee to Win the Peace. The resolutions at its April 1946 meeting marked that group to those in the know as a Communist front. Which is why five of twenty congressmen sponsoring the meeting dropped out—while the fact that fifteen stayed showed how in flux the situation truly was.
These were complexities to which Ronald Reagan had apparently not given a thought. J. Edgar Hoover, who testified that March that Communism was not a political party but “a condition akin to a disease that spreads like an epidemic, and like an epidemic, quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the nation,” was also immune to such complexities. His FBI eagerly took the coincidence of positions between liberal idealists and Communist subversives as prima facie evidence of infection, and drew no distinction between groups that seemed genuinely to have begun as Moscow fronts and those, such as the American Veterans Committee, that Communists merely wished to infiltrate. As for HICCASP, an FBI report said, “Every endorsement of public officials made by this organization coincides exactly with that made by the Communist Party of the state.”
THE FACT THAT RONALD REAGAN was a principal in all these groups—and also narrator of Operation Terror, a thirteen-part radio series exposing the Ku Klux Klan and sponsored by the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a Communist front—explained why two FBI agents showed up at Reagan’s doorstep one day for the encounter that would change his life forever.
The agents announced themselves at the sprawling modern ranch house he had built for himself and his wife, perched high above Sunset Boulevard at the bend of a cul-de-sac and an endless curving driveway, with either the ocean or the twinkling valley spread dramatically before any window he cared to peer out of. He remembered serving the FBI agents coffee. “We have some information which might be useful to you,” Reagan reported one of them saying, in his memoir Where’s the Rest of Me? “We thought you might have some information helpful to us.”
Reagan then depicted himself introducing a morally complicating factor, a scruple about civil liberties: “Now look, I don’t go in for Red-baiting.”
Thereupon he depicted the moral complexity melting in the space of a few lines.
G-Man #1: “You served with the Air Corps. You know what spies and saboteurs are.”
G-Man #2: “We thought someone the Communists hated as much as they hate you might be willing to help us.”
“That got me,” he wrote.
“What did they say about me?”
“The exact quotation was: ‘What are we going to do about that sonofabitching bastard Reagan?’ Will that do for openers?”
He was convinced. From then on he was to be a warrior in a struggle of good versus evil—a battle for the soul of the world.
SOMEWHERE AROUND THIS TIME—THE CHRONOLOGY has never been quite clear—Reagan attended a HICCASP board meeting in which all the subtleties of liberal politics in an age of Communist infiltration were aired in a wide-ranging debate. James Roosevelt, the son of the late president, said it was time groups like theirs became more “vigilant against being used by Communist sympathizers.” Which, however, meant what? The ranks of such sympathizers had always thinned in the wake of each party-line shift; by the time Earl Browder was purged, there were hardly any Communists left in Hollywood. Wouldn’t the attempt to smoke out what few remained turn their group into an ineffectual nest of recrimination? If some random screenwriter agreed that atomic energy should be placed under international control, did that make him fit to be purged? Then so was Albert Einstein—and maybe even Harry Truman, who had said three days after Hiroshima, “We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force . . . and . . . turn it into the channels of service to mankind.”
Reagan rejected the complexity. Alongside Olivia de
Havilland, he put a resolution up for a vote at the next meeting: “We reaffirm belief in free enterprise and the democratic system and repudiate Communism as desirable for the United States.” (Planning their move, de Havilland and Reagan each pronounced themselves surprised that the other wasn’t a secret Communist.) Screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson argued against it, because they were Communists. Others, like bandleader Artie Shaw, opposed it on civil liberties grounds. The resolution was voted down. “It was all the proof we needed,” Reagan said. “HICCASP had become a Communist front organization, hiding behind a few well-intentioned Hollywood celebrities to give it credibility.”
His math did not add up. Lawson and Trumbo represented but one position in an argument that had at least three sides; there were plenty of reasons to vote down the resolution besides some submerged desire for the hammer and sickle to fly over the White House. But the Manichaean logic of Communists and dupes was now how Ronald Reagan thought—and, enraged at having been one of the dupes, he gave the Communists no quarter.
Reagan and de Havilland resigned from HICCASP, but not before Reagan cast himself in a real-life adventure movie: he absconded with the records of the group, and—in a midnight rendezvous at a hamburger stand with his brother, also an FBI informant—claimed to have found in them a plot to deploy an obscure membership regulation to neutralize the power of anti-Communist members; this, Reagan said, was the only reason his resolution could possibly have been voted down.
THAT MANICHAEAN DISPOSITION SOON TURNED out to be very useful to the barons who ruled Hollywood, and who were at that moment badly on the ropes.
Hollywood might be slightly more glamorous. But given its intensely time-sensitive production routines, economically speaking, the dream factory was little different from a fish market (fish rotted by the minute; movie labor costs ballooned by the minute). Which was why Hollywood had something in common with the Brooklyn docks: its unions were controlled by mobbed-up bosses who amassed enormous power by threatening to shut the whole operation down in an instant with the snap of their chubby fingers.
The union that thus controlled Hollywood’s dozens of craft locals was the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or “IA.” It also represented the theater projectionists—everywhere, so a studio that crossed the IA was in danger of losing its entire revenue stream nationwide if the IA’s union bosses ordered those projectionists off the job. And one way to cross the IA was to refuse the endless kickbacks, bribes, and featherbedding schemes it demanded. Studio bosses, however, had few problems cooperating, the devil they knew being so useful to them in keeping their workers in line.
In 1941 the IA suffered a setback when its leader, George Browne, and his enforcer, Willie Bioff, an associate of Al Capone’s, were sentenced to eight and ten years, respectively, for extortion. Meanwhile, Browne’s slightly less corrupt successor, Roy Brewer, fought off an annoyance on his left flank: another labor outfit bidding to represent his workers by promising them actual, honest-to-God integrity—and better wages and hours. The rival organization was called the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), and its leader was an extraordinary figure. Herbert Sorrell was a former amateur boxer who first got a job painting a movie set in 1925, attended his first union meeting because he heard that the union served illegal beer, and stayed because he loved what unions did at their best—win better lives for regular guys who just wanted to give their kids chances they themselves never got. “We were not out to kill the goose that laid the golden egg,” as he put it in settling a 1933 strike, “but we were out to get as many of them as we could.”
He also wanted to do something else: prove a union could be run democratically. Bioff offered him $56,000 to stop trying to raid IA locals. No dice; years later, Sorrell told a congressional hearing, “I think you should pass legislation that labor leaders who accept bribes . . . should be shot.” And he was hardly less tough than the mobsters who enforced for the IA. He just deployed violence to different ends. When in March 1945 his CSU called a three-day walkout on behalf of set dressers who’d been barred from disaffiliating from the IA, and the IA’s president wired its projectionists to stop working so the ruin of an entire industry could be laid at Herb Sorrell’s feet, he just laughed. “I have no fear of anybody,” he said. “I don’t fear the hereafter, and I don’t fear no thugs, and I don’t fear anybody or anything and I will take mine as it comes. . . . I don’t want to be attacked because I will attack back.” He won that strike, after thirty-four weeks—and kept on raiding IA jurisdictions. Brewer, meanwhile, tightened his dictatorial grip on his nineteen thousand members and girded for war.
Thus the order of battle: two union federations, one corrupt, the other clean, both prepared for violence, both fighting for the very same prize—the right to represent Hollywood’s tens of thousands of production workers. The scene was set for a years-long drama of exceptional complexity—except, of course, to Ronald Reagan, who had looked into Roy Brewer’s soul and found him a hero, and into Herb Sorrell’s and found a dirty Communist rat.
The CSU’s strategy was to charge that workers represented by the IA were doing jobs that rightfully did not belong to them. The American Federation of Labor, called upon to adjudicate the jurisdictional dispute, sent a panel of “Three Wise Men” from the postal workers’ union, the barbers’ union, and the trainmen’s union to referee. Sorrell, meanwhile, called an escalating series of work stoppages through the winter, spring, and summer of 1946. The campaign ended in triumph, with a 25 percent increase in base pay for all production workers—including those represented by the IA—and the first guaranteed full workweek in movie history. It was not enough to endear him to the rival whose monopoly over Hollywood unionism he had broken. Brewer called one of the stoppages leading up to the deal “a last desperate effort to keep Communist control of certain AFL unions in Hollywood.” Red-baiting had long been a useful way to destroy enemies in Hollywood—for example, Walt Disney, after Sorrell won a cartoonists’ strike against him in 1941, took out a full-page ad in Variety braying, “I am positively convinced that Communistic agitation, leadership, and activities have brought about this strike.” Shortly after Sorrell’s coup in getting a 25 percent raise out of the studios, his enemies—both the studio bosses and the mobbed-up IA—devised an additional way to destroy him.
In September 1946, Americans opened their papers to see extraordinary images: billy clubs, smashed windows, stoned buses, and overturned cars in the place where dreams were made. Ronald Reagan’s beloved Hollywood was a war zone. By November, it got even worse: CSU picketers, bearing flyers reading, “Our purpose here is to keep the scabs out and to close the studio down,” defied a court ruling keeping them two hundred feet from the gates of Columbia Pictures. Their defiance led to the largest mass arrests in California history. “If it ain’t worth going to jail for it ain’t worth fighting for!” Herb Sorrell told newsmen as he was led off. His thousands of loyalists cheered—and then, crowded together in the Lincoln Heights lockup, chanted, “We don’t want bail, we like this jail!” Los Angeles’s overwhelmingly right-wing press knew whom to blame. “RED BID REPORTED,” ran the headline above the Los Angeles Times’ account of the arrests.
Ronald Reagan’s political passions had by then found a new channel: the Screen Actors Guild. He showed up in that article addressing a meeting alongside the president of the IA to protest the firebombing of the homes of workers who had crossed the picket lines, allegedly by the CSU, and expressing “gratitude to law enforcement officers for protection given them in their right to work as non-striking union members.”
He didn’t always quite grasp what unionism was all about—his appearance at a right-to-work meeting demonstrated that. Though at that, SAG was a curious sort of union. Founded in 1933 with a tiny membership of eighty that quickly grew to more than four thousand after the producers formed a cartel among themselves and agreed not to bid competitively for talent, the union impressively pledged itself to help establish
ed actors and up-and-comers equally, and signed a pioneering collective bargaining agreement in 1937, a model of union solidarity—but by the end of World War II its leadership was larded with conservative Republicans (George Murphy, the song-and-dance man known as the “Irish Fred Astaire”; Robert Montgomery, who became Reagan’s best friend) at a time when the dominant agenda item on the Republican right was destroying the bargaining power of unions.
Reagan rose to the Screen Actors Guild’s second vice presidency. In October 1946, the guild voted 2,748 to 509 not to honor the CSU’s picket line. The vote was the result of a letter sent to members maintaining that both sides were equally to blame. The CSU called that position “phony impartiality”—claiming that SAG was actually taking the side of management, by coming to the aid of what was effectively a union controlled by the company, not the workers. In public, Reagan aggressively pushed the position that neutrality was the only moral stance. He came to another conclusion privately. It was not that the CSU was equally to blame: it was that they were captive to the Red conspiracy. “The Communist plan for Hollywood was remarkably simple,” he wrote in his 1965 memoir. “We had a weekly audience of about 500 million souls. Takeover of this enormous plant and its gradual transformation into a Communist gristmill was a grandiose idea. It would have been a magnificent coup for our enemies. . . . Using the CSU as a vehicle for Communist aims, was a first step of admirable directness.” In Ronald Reagan’s mind, for a movie actor to show up on set thus made him a frontline hero in the long twilight struggle between freedom and slavery. Honoring the picket line would have made him a stooge of Moscow. Which certainly suggests why he supported neutrality in the strike.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 50
