“Nino was amazed to discover that my idea of fun was to do what needed to be done, myself,” Reagan wrote. “This included building paddock 1 6 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House fences—even a quarter-mile track with the inner rail posts slanted at the proper angle and every post hole dug by hand, by me.”73 Ronnie named the Northridge ranch Yearling Row, for The Yearling, which won Jane raves when it opened at the end of the year, and Kings Row, his biggest screen success.
“Meanwhile I was blindly and busily joining every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world,” he would write of this crucial transition period in both his personal and professional life, when his movie work “at times seemed to be a sideline, what with everything else that was happening.”74 Whether he realized it or not at the time, during these years Reagan was launching his third successful career—after radio announcer and movie star—as a political activist and industry spokesman. “I found him totally changed after the war,” recalled producer Frank McCarthy. “He had gotten so serious, to the point that he was talking about the world and politics all the time. People started listening to him at parties.”75
In June 1946 he was approached to run for Congress again—this time as a Democrat. “Heck, I couldn’t do that,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
“If I did, I’d be the subject of criticism as a politician. I couldn’t go around making speeches without feeling I was doing it for self-glorification. No, I don’t want to have any ax to grind.”76 Wyman was quoted in another paper: “They wanted him to run for Congress. He’s very politically minded.
I’m not.”77
Reagan’s postwar political activities began the day after he left Fort Roach in late August 1945, when he won a seat on the board of the Hollywood chapter of the American Veterans Committee. The newly formed AVC’s high-minded internationalism stood in contrast to the raw anti-Communism of such traditional organizations as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and it enlisted such notables as Franklin D.
Roosevelt Jr., theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, cartoonist Bill Mauldin, and Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II.
Even General Eisenhower was an early supporter.78
“I myself observed more than forty veterans’ organizations arise,”
Reagan later wrote. “[M]ost of them seemed to be highly intolerant of color, creed and common sense. I joined the American Veterans Committee because of their feeling that the members should be citizens first and veterans afterward—and, as it worked out, I became a large wheel in their operations.”79 The Hollywood chapter was the second largest of Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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some seven hundred chapters; as chairman of its membership committee, Reagan personally enrolled at least one tenth of its two thousand members.80
Reagan also stepped up his involvement in the Hollywood Democratic Committee, which continued to wield considerable clout in California politics after the impressive role it had played in Roosevelt’s 1944 reelection. In early 1946, the HDC merged with its New York counterpart, the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP), and became its Hollywood affiliate, known as HICCASP. Harold Ickes was named executive chairman of the combined organization, and FDR’s Hollywood-based son, James Roosevelt, became executive director of HICCASP. George Pepper, who had run the HDC, became the executive secretary of HICCASP. By mid-year, “3,300 professional exhibitionists,” as Time dubbed the Hollywood contingent, stood beside Albert Einstein and sociol-ogist Max Weber in support of both legitimate progressive issues, such as repeal of the poll tax, and hidden Communist party-line positions, such as transferring control of America’s atomic weapons to the United Nations.81
“In the old days,” Time noted, “a motion picture star had needed nothing but a white Duesenberg and 175 suits to round himself out socially. In the words of Dorothy Parker, there was no ‘ism’ in Hollywood but plagia-rism. But modern studio life has become much more complicated. Today few stars, male or female, would be caught dead at a commissary lunch table without a Cause. Most of them, horrified at the thought of being considered bloated capitalists, favor leftish causes of one kind or another.”
Edward G. Robinson told the magazine he belonged to HICCASP “because the atom bomb, when it exploded over Hiroshima, blew up every ivory tower in the world.” Humphrey Bogart signed up “because I believe in the principles promulgated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”82
Reagan became one of the most active stars working the “rubber-chicken and glass-tinkling circuits” on behalf of the AVC and HICCASP. “It fed my ego,” he said, “since I had been so long away from the screen. I loved it.”83
He started wearing his glasses again for these public speeches—an indication of how seriously he took his new role. His first speech, at Santa Ana on December 8, 1945, was to promote racial harmony by honoring Japanese-American veterans. In four brief lines, he displayed his innate idealism with eloquence: “The blood that has soaked into the sands of the beaches is all one color. America stands unique in the world—a country not founded on race, but on a way and an ideal. Not in spite of, but because of our polyglot 1 6 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.”84
Two nights later, at an opening dinner for HICCASP’s conference on
“Atomic Power and Foreign Policy,” Reagan’s reading of “Set Your Clocks at U-235,” a Norman Corwin poem warning of the danger of nuclear annihi-lation and calling for world unity, was followed by speeches by Congress-woman Helen Gahagan Douglas, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, and novelist Thomas Mann.85 During the winter and spring of 1946, Reagan delivered speeches and wrote articles on the necessity of international cooperation, the promotion of racial and religious tolerance, and the threat of a neo-Fascist conspiracy to keep the world divided and unstable.
In an article for the A.V.C. Bulletin of February 15, 1946, he lambasted the American Order of Patriots, a whites-only veterans organization, and the anti-Semitic demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith as “home-grown fascists”
intent on installing “a strongman government in America” and starting World War III. He ended: “I think the A.V.C. can be a key organization in the preservation of democracy for which 300,000 Americans died, and because I have attacked the extreme right does not mean I am ignorant of the menace of the complete left. They, too, want to force something unwanted on the American people, and the fact that many of them go along with those of us who are liberal means nothing because they are only hitching a ride as far as we go, hoping they can use us as a vehicle for their own program.”86
Yet later that month, along with Gregory Peck, bandleader Artie Shaw, and director Edward Dmytryk, he lent his name to an anti-colonialist ad taken by the Los Angeles Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy in the People’s Daily World, a local Communist Party newspaper.87 After giving a speech to the men’s club of the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church, he was approached by the pastor, Reverend Cleveland Kleihauer.
Kleihauer had married Jane and Ronnie, and Reagan admired him for his sermons against discrimination. “Don’t you think,” the minister asked,
“while you’re denouncing Fascism, it would be fair to speak out equally strongly against the tyranny of Communism?”88 At his next speaking engagement, filling in for James Roosevelt, Reagan tacked an explicitly anti-Communist paragraph onto the end of his stock text, only to have it met with total silence—even though he had received “riotous applause” more than twenty times during the previous forty minutes. Startled, Reagan began to reassess the implications of his political commitments.89
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After watching a small but dedicated Communist faction outmaneu-ver the liberal majority at the American Veterans Committee’s state convention in April, he wrote a letter expressing
concern to Charles Bolté, the chairman of the organization’s national planning commission.90 A few weeks later, he was angered to learn that the location for a meeting of the Hollywood chapter had been inexplicably moved from KFWB’s 750-seat auditorium—which Reagan had secured free of charge from Warners—to a seventy-five-seat hall owned by the leftist-dominated Screen Cartoonists Guild. When Reagan arrived at the meeting, he recalled, “hundreds of A.V.C. boys were milling about outside, unable to get in. The KFWB hall was still available and gratis—but someone preferred a hall which could hold only a ‘small, working majority.’ It was an old Communist trick but new to me.”91
Using such tactics, the Communists took over the AVC’s Los Angeles–area council, but their attempt to gain control of the entire organization was thwarted by the liberals at its national convention in Des Moines in June, which Reagan was unable to attend because he was filming Stallion Road.92 But soon after the convention he wrote to Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson, who had called the AVC a Communist front, informing him that the organization had dealt with “a tentative pink infiltration . . . in true democratic fashion.”93
That same month, Olivia de Havilland set off a similar power struggle within HICCASP when she refused to deliver two speeches in Seattle as written by her fellow executive council member Dalton Trumbo, one of Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriters and a secret Communist since 1943. She felt that Trumbo’s text was too left-wing and worried that the organization was becoming “automatically pro-Russian.” In her rewritten speech, she sought to stake the liberal claim for the soul of the organization while answering right-wing accusations that groups like HICCASP
were controlled by party-liners loyal to Moscow by unequivocally stating,
“The overwhelming majority of people who make up the liberal and progressive groups of this country believe in democracy, and not in communism. We believe that the two cannot be reconciled here in the United States, and we believe that every effort should be exerted to make democracy work, and to extend its benefits to every person in every community throughout our land.”94
Trumbo was outraged, but at the next meeting of the executive council, 1 6 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House on July 2, James Roosevelt weighed in with his concern about the growing perception that the organization was dominated by leftists, and he proposed a resolution supporting the democratic, free enterprise system and rejecting Communism. Reagan, who had been asked to fill a vacancy on the council, was attending his first meeting and was amazed by the hysterical reaction to Roosevelt’s suggestion:
A well-known musician [elsewhere identified as Artie Shaw] sprang to his feet. He offered to recite the USSR constitution from memory, yelling that it was a lot more democratic than that of the United States. A prominent movie writer leaped upward. He said if there was ever a war between the United States and Russia, he would volunteer for Russia. . . . After this hubbub of dismay had continued for a while, I decided that an Irishman couldn’t stay out. . . . I took the floor and endorsed what [James Roosevelt] said. Well, sir, I found myself waist-high in epithets such as “Fascist” and “capitalist scum” and “enemy of the proletariat” and “witch-hunter” and “Red-baiter” before I could say boo. . . . Dalton Trumbo, the writer, was very vociferous. Most vehement of all, however, was John Howard Lawson. . . . You can imagine what this did to my naivete. Here was a H.I.C.C.A.S.P. that I had admired and honored. Suddenly it was broken up into a Kilkenny brawl by a simple statement which I thought any American would be proud to subscribe to.95
This tumultuous meeting ended with the formation of a seven-member policy committee—including Roosevelt, Trumbo, Lawson, and Reagan—which was to draft a resolution in time for the next executive council meeting. As Reagan was leaving, producer Dore Schary, who was then working for David O. Selznick, invited him to Olivia de Havilland’s home. There he found Roosevelt and a small group of HICCASP’s leading liberals, including the screenwriter Don Hartman and the composer Johnny Green. According to Reagan, Roosevelt and de Havilland revealed that they had deliberately provoked the dissension that night to flush out the “others.” In turn, he helped them write what they called a “disinfect-ing resolution” to force the hand of the Communist faction at the next meeting. Reagan had co-starred with de Havilland in Santa Fe Trail before the war, but he didn’t know her well. They had a good laugh, he said, over the fact that each had suspected the other of being a Communist until that night.96
The ideological wrangling went on for the rest of the month, but Law-Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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son and Trumbo blocked all attempts to clearly dissociate HICCASP from the Communist Party. Fed up, Roosevelt and de Havilland submitted their resignations, as did a number of other liberals. On July 30, what was left of the executive council adopted a resolution declaring HICCASP independent of “any political party or organization, Republican, Democratic, Communist, Socialist, or other.”97
That week, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a young associate professor of history at Harvard and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Age of Jackson, published an article titled “The U.S. Communist Party” in Life magazine. Its publication in the country’s most widely read weekly indicated how central the subject had become to the national conversation. Schlesinger began: For better or for worse, the Communist Party of the U.S. is here to stay. It grew when the U.S.S.R. was still a gamble; it will grow faster as the gamble pays off, and it will persist if repressive legislation forces it underground. . . . The Center, as party members call the smoky brick headquarters on 12th Street in New York City, controls an active and disciplined following through the country. . . .
Communists are working overtime to expand party influence, open and covert, in the labor movement, among Negroes, among veterans, among unorganized liberals.
Schlesinger used the AVC and ICCASP as examples of “groups of liberals” that were “organized for some benevolent purpose, and because of the innocence, laziness and stupidity of most of the membership, perfectly designed for control by an alert minority.” He went on to make his most urgent point: “The Communist Party is no menace to the right in the U.S. It is a great help to the right because of its success in dividing and neutralizing the left. It is to the American left that Communism presents the most serious danger. On the record, Communists have fought other leftists as viciously as they have fought fascists. Their methods are irrecon-cilable with honest cooperation, as anyone who has tried to work with them has found out the hard way.”98
When HICCASP regrouped, Dore Schary succeeded Jimmy Roosevelt, and the young Frank Sinatra took de Havilland’s place as vice chairman and the group’s most tireless public speaker.99 Its membership roster still boasted stars ranging from Humphrey Bogart to Gypsy Rose Lee, as well as Ronald Reagan. When Time questioned national executive director 1 7 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Hannah Dorner about alleged “Communist influence,” she dismissively replied, “Says who and so what? If the ICCASP program is like the Communist line, that is purely coincidental.”100
After Henry Wallace criticized Truman’s hardening policy toward the Soviet Union at an ICCASP rally in New York on September 12, and was fired as secretary of commerce, the Hollywood group passed a resolution supporting Wallace and calling for “permanent cooperation with the Soviet Union.”101 By October even Eleanor Roosevelt was saying privately that the organization was “Communist-dominated,” and Jules Stein was warning his client Bette Davis, “You had better get out.”102
Reagan had been getting similar warnings from his brother for months.
HICCASP “was as bad as you could get,” Neil Reagan recalled in a 1981 interview. “I used to beat him over the head, ‘Get out of that thing. There are people in there who can cause you real trouble.’” Neil also boasted that he had been spying on HICCASP for the FBI: “I was doing little things. . . .
You know, ‘Neil, we’d like to have you go
out and lay in the bushes and take down the [license plate] numbers off of the cars that are going to be at this little meeting in Bel Air. Put it in a brown envelope, no return address. And always remember, if you get caught in the bushes, you can just forget about saying, well, you’re doing this for the FBI, because we’ll just . . . say, We never saw this guy in our lives.’”103
According to Neil, late one night his brother had an epiphany of sorts and summoned him to “a Nutburger stand at the corner of Sunset and Doheny.” Reagan shared his suspicions that the HICCASP board was being packed with Communists and their allies and showed him minutes he had “filched” to prove his case. “I just looked at him,” Neil recalled, “and said, ‘Junior, what do you suppose I’ve been talking about all these weeks and weeks and weeks?’ ”104
Neil doesn’t date this incident. Nor is it clear when Reagan severed ties with HICCASP. He would later say that he had resigned via telegram in July, a claim contradicted by HICCASP records (which show him being appointed to its labor committee in late August) and by de Havilland’s recollection that he remained involved for three months after she quit.
“He always seemed to be observing,” she told an interviewer in 1989.
“And then I learned much later he was with the F.B.I.” (Some people said she was, too.)105
Reagan’s FBI file was made public in 1985, after the San Jose Mercury News had obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI first Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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contacted Reagan in September 1941, at Warner Bros. In November 1943
he was interviewed by an agent at Fort Roach and reported that he had almost come to blows at a party with a fellow actor who had made pro-German and anti-Semitic remarks.106 By March 1946, Reagan himself was being watched by the bureau’s Los Angeles office as a suspected Communist sympathizer because of his involvement with HICCASP, the AVC, and other left-leaning groups.107 In June an agent reported that Reagan had introduced a pro-Communist speaker at an AVC luncheon.108 But sometime later that year—most likely between mid-July and late September—he agreed to help the bureau monitor Communist activity in Hollywood.
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