Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  PEARL HARBOR PROVED the starting point for Reagan’s long march across the political spectrum. It was a complicated journey, for it required moving along two axes. In the 1930s, Reagan was a liberal isolationist: Rooseveltian in domestic affairs but anti-Rooseveltian on foreign policy. In the next two decades he would undergo a double transformation, becoming a conservative internationalist: anti-Rooseveltian domestically but Rooseveltian in foreign policy.

  The march began in foreign policy. Reagan’s work had kept him too busy to develop strong views about America’s role in the world; he leaned toward the anti-German opinions of the Warners and others in the film industry’s Jewish community, but he hadn’t considered matters closely enough to develop convictions of his own. His patriotism was sporadic and opportunistic. While working in radio in Iowa, he had encountered a member of the U.S. Army reserve who informed him that the local cavalry regiment was recruiting. The cavalry was a dying branch of the army; though horses had played a larger role in World War I than was generally appreciated, no one expected they would have much to offer in the next war. Yet the army clung to the past in many things, and it clung to its horses. And it was looking for new horsemen. Reagan had become enamored of horses watching movies as a boy, and the chance to ride at the army’s expense made the recruitment pitch appealing. Equestrian skills certainly wouldn’t hurt his film career; to be the next Tom Mix, he’d have to learn to ride. So he enlisted. “I didn’t have a burning desire to be an army officer,” he conceded afterward. “I still thought we’d fought the war to end all wars. But it was a deal too good to turn down.”

  The rising tension with Japan changed the terms of the bargain. As Roosevelt applied economic pressure against Tokyo, the army called up reserve officers like Reagan. He received a letter telling him to put his affairs in order and prepare to report on short notice. He was in the middle of filming Kings Row with Warner Brothers, and the studio set its lawyers to securing a deferment lest the project, with its $1 million budget and large crew of workers, be jeopardized. Such deferment requests were neither unusual nor particularly unpopular at a moment when most Americans still hoped and many expected to avoid a war. The Warner lawyers succeeded, and in October 1941 Reagan was informed he would not be called before January 1, 1942. But the army told him to be ready to report at “any time after that date.”

  The studio sought an additional extension. It had other movies in the works, and Reagan’s impressive performance in Kings Row made the Warner executives think they had a valuable property in him. They strove to keep him working.

  Pearl Harbor spoiled their plans. The onset of war accelerated the army’s timetable for mobilization, and it altered the public’s perception of military service. Special treatment for celebrities no longer sat well with those the film industry relied on to fill the theaters. Reagan’s screen persona as a defender of the public weal would have been badly damaged had he dodged service. And so, after a final reflexive effort to delay the inevitable, Warner dropped its lobbying on his behalf, and in April 1942 off to the army he went.

  BUT HE DIDN’T go very far. Warner’s surrender on Reagan was part of a larger reorientation of the film industry. Hollywood had survived the depression better than most industries; the dream machine allowed Americans to put their troubles out of their minds for a few hours at modest cost. Whether Hollywood would survive the onset of war was unclear at first. The manufacturing industries and everything connected to armaments and war provisions took precedence in government planning, and these were subject to dictates from Washington. Auto production was halted as Detroit’s assembly lines were converted to making airplanes and tanks; the sale of consumer goods was strictly controlled lest their frivolous use by noncombatants weaken the war effort. The escapist entertainment that formed a staple of the Hollywood studios was about as frivolous as anything could be; in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor, movie executives faced the distinct possibility that the government would order them to suspend production until the war ended.

  But no such order was given. Its withholding reflected the resourcefulness of Jack Warner and other movie executives; it also owed to the vision of Hap Arnold and certain fellow officers in the U.S. Army. Warner’s commitment to the war effort was unimpeachable; having warned about the Nazis for years, he was determined to see Hitler crushed as quickly as possible. But Warner was no less devoted to the welfare of Warner Brothers, and he calculated that by making the movie industry a wing of the War Department, he could ensure that the studio not suffer in the anti-Axis struggle. Warner went to Washington with a proposal that the army publicize the brave work its officers and men were doing on behalf of the nation’s security. He met General Henry Arnold, called Hap, who headed the U.S. Army Air Forces and believed his fliers were the future of warfare. Arnold enlisted Warner—literally, as a lieutenant colonel—to create a motion-picture unit.

  The two men served each other’s purposes. Warner made Arnold and the air force look good, giving Arnold an edge in the competition for resources that became a central aspect of the politics of the war effort. Arnold and the army ensured that the movie industry was classified as essential to the nation’s struggle against fascism.

  An early collaboration, Winning Your Wings, starring Jimmy Stewart, depicted army pilots as heroes and dramatically stimulated recruitment. In fact the prospective pilots enlisted faster than Arnold’s air force could handle them. “Jack, we’ve got enough pilots to fly every plane in the world since you released Winning Your Wings,” Arnold told Warner.

  “Good,” Warner replied.

  “Not good,” Arnold rejoined. “We need rear gunners on the planes, too, and we’re not getting them. Can you put something together in a hurry? Give it some romantic appeal.”

  “I couldn’t see anything very romantic about the duties and hazards of a rear gunner’s job,” Warner observed later. “But we turned out a quickie at General Arnold’s request.” The Rear Gunner had the desired effect, and within weeks the rear-gunner enlistees exceeded Arnold’s capacity, too.

  REAGAN REPORTED TO Fort Mason, which had guarded the entrance to San Francisco Bay since the Civil War. It still guarded the bay, but after an initial panic that the Pearl Harbor attack presaged a Japanese assault on the American mainland, Fort Mason served chiefly as a point of embarkation for American army units headed to the western Pacific.

  Reagan assisted with the embarkation. Any thought that he would join the departures dissipated when army doctors discovered his nearsightedness. “If we sent you overseas you’d shoot a general,” one of the doctors told him. “And you’d miss him,” the doctor’s colleague added.

  Reagan remained at Fort Mason just long enough for the army to find a higher use for his gifts and experience. Jack Warner’s film outfit, the First Motion Picture Unit, had set up shop in Culver City, ten miles from Hollywood. The unit gathered top movie talent, including such stars as Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and William Holden. Reagan seemed a natural, having played a pilot in prewar films and possessing a voice well suited to the narration many of the films featured.

  He was ordered to Culver City and subsequently took part in the production of dozens of films. He played a lieutenant in The Rear Gunner who recognizes the aptitude and grit in the young man who becomes the movie’s hero and thereby a model for other young men who might want to enlist. He narrated Beyond the Line of Duty, about an actual airman who won the Distinguished Service Cross on a mission over the western Pacific. He helped fan the enthusiasm for war with Westward Is Bataan and Target Tokyo, which respectively celebrated early American victories in the Pacific and the onset of the strategic bombing of Japan’s home islands. The Fight for the Sky portrayed the exploits of American airmen over Europe. This Is the Army, a musical produced with the assistance of the army but not by the film unit, included Reagan as a World War I veteran’s son who, in a metaphor for America collectively, receives the task of completing the unfinished work of his father.

  His
wartime movies made Reagan more familiar to audiences than ever. Millions saw him in uniform on-screen and came to recognize his voice as the voice of those protecting America against aggression. They learned to associate him with American power and American patriotism. Reagan discovered that the role of defender of the nation suited him, and he happily added it to his repertoire.

  WORLD WAR II changed Americans’ thinking about much more than their country’s place in the world. It radically reshaped their attitudes toward one another. Advocates of women’s political rights had won a signal victory when Reagan was too young to notice, with the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But though women could subsequently vote, most remained economically dependent on the men in their lives. During the Great Depression many employers unashamedly laid women off first, assuming that their female employees were not the principal breadwinners in their families. The entry of the United States into the war dramatically increased job opportunities for women, who replaced the millions of men pulled from the civilian workforce into the military. As women assumed jobs previously reserved for men, they brought home paychecks previously claimed by men. For some the experience of economic independence was unsettling; for many it was empowering.

  African Americans were similarly drawn into the industrial workforce. Blacks had begun moving from the rural South to the urban North and Midwest during World War I, but amid the Great Depression the migration slowed and in some places reversed. World War II again opened employment opportunities, and blacks once more moved to the industrial cities. For centuries America’s race question had been a southern issue; now it became a national one. And it grew entwined with the war effort. A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a largely black union, organized a march on Washington to spotlight segregation by federal war contractors. Franklin Roosevelt did his best to stop Randolph’s march, believing it would distract from the war effort. A deal was struck: no march and no discrimination in war industries. The bargain bought Roosevelt the war focus he desired; it taught African Americans that in organization lay strength.

  Yet the war’s largest result in domestic life was its validation of the New Deal belief that big government could solve America’s big problems. This belief had faded during the late 1930s, as the depression dragged on and the New Deal ran out of steam. Republicans and Democrats alike looked beyond Roosevelt to the 1940 election, and both parties assumed that whoever replaced him would be less willing or able to expand government than he had been.

  The war changed everything. Its bow wave, in advance of American entry, refloated the American economy by justifying heavy federal spending on military readiness. After Pearl Harbor the federal spending on defense, and on myriad activities related to defense, increased even more rapidly, lifting the country to levels of production, employment, and income it had never before experienced. The approach of the war meanwhile allowed Roosevelt to run for a third term and win. The attack on Pearl Harbor caused Americans to look to their president for leadership and to support the government he headed.

  The onset and prosecution of the war retrospectively rehabilitated and prospectively entrenched the New Deal. Absent the war, Roosevelt would have left office under the cloud of the continuing depression; with the war, he got credit for the recovery it brought. And the New Deal, despite having nothing to do with the war and little to do with the recovery, shared the credit, such being the correlational logic of democratic politics. The war, moreover, provided time for such New Deal programs as Social Security to become woven into the fabric of the national consciousness. Not until 1940 did Social Security issue its first monthly retirement checks; until then, and for some years after, Social Security was a net drain on the finances of most participants. A hostile successor to Roosevelt—and had the depression continued, his successor almost certainly would have been hostile—would likely have limited and might even have undone the system. Instead, Roosevelt remained in office and Social Security prospered.

  Most tellingly, the war showed big government at its best. The patriotic reaction the war elicited in Americans caused them to cooperate with government and with each other in the common war effort. This cooperation made government more effective than it ever had been before or would be after. Government commanded the economy, telling workers they couldn’t have higher wages and manufacturers they couldn’t charge higher prices, and the workers and the manufacturers went along. Government provided medical care, and doctors didn’t complain. Government built housing, and the real estate and construction industries didn’t protest. Government increased taxes drastically, and taxpayers paid up.

  What rendered it all acceptable was that government won the war, in astonishingly short order. Had the war dragged on or ended badly, the trust reposed in government might have been withdrawn. But the greatest conflict in human history was brought to a victorious conclusion for the United States only three and a half years after American entry. America’s unprecedentedly large government defeated fascism; America’s big government placed the United States at the pinnacle of world power. In the process, big government restored the nation’s economic vitality and self-confidence. By 1945 most Americans found big government thoroughly acceptable, even necessary, and they had ample reason for feeling the way they did.

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  REAGAN WAS AMONG those who took comfort in the arms of big government. “At the end of World War II, I was a New Dealer to the core,” he remembered later. “I thought government could solve all our postwar 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 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.” Neil Reagan had left the family fold to become a Republican, and Reagan berated him for the apostasy. “We spent hours arguing—sometimes with pretty strong language—over the future of the country,” he said. “He complained about the growth of government, claimed Washington was trying to take over everything in the American economy from railroads to the corner store, and said we couldn’t trust our wartime ally, Russia, any longer. I claimed he was just spouting Republican propaganda.”

  Reagan didn’t at first intend to carry the arguing beyond his family. Three and a half years in the army had made him long for life as a civilian again, as well as for the civilian pay that came with it. His responsibilities were growing: he and Jane had had their first child, Maureen, in January 1941. For a second child they chose to adopt; Michael entered the Reagan home shortly after his birth in March 1945. The money Jane made from acting meant that the family didn’t have to live on the $300 per month the army paid Reagan while he was in the service, but they both were delighted for him to return to his Warner Brothers salary, which was many times higher.

  Warner wanted him to earn that money, and it looked for suitable projects. They weren’t easy to find. Tastes had changed; the audience had changed. For Reagan to flop in his first postwar feature might have been fatal to his career and to the investment the studio had made in him. Warner moved slowly, and Reagan took what amounted to a paid vacation. “I was well fixed,” he explained afterward. “My $3,500-a-week contract was running.” He was healthy and still young: thirty-four when the war ended. “I didn’t have a practical thought in my head. I hoped it would be a long time before I got one.” He visited Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, and spent days speeding around in a motorboat. He returned to Hollywood and devoted two months to building a pair of model ships. He had never done anything like this in his life before and would never do it again. “But then it seemed exactly the right thing to do,” he said later.

  Warner still had nothing for him, so he looked for other ways to fill his time. His celebrity and wealth made him appealing to people and groups with causes to promote. He was invited to join the Hollywood Independent C
itizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, or HICCASP, which had begun life as a New Deal support group and persisted as a gathering ground for liberal-minded activists in the film industry. Reagan was flattered by the invitation and became an earnest member.

  The group took vocal positions on numerous issues. It opposed atomic weapons, emphasizing not the role of the atomic bomb in precipitating Japan’s surrender but the danger of atomic weapons to civilization. In HICCASP, as in the day jobs of its members, there was a division of labor. Writers wrote and actors spoke. This was fine with Reagan, who appreciated his innocence on the issues that engaged the group and was willing to read lines written by others. Norman Corwin was a writer for radio, film, and print and had devoted himself to numerous social and political causes; in the autumn of 1945 he grew most exercised about the impending doom that hung over humanity in the shape of a mushroom cloud. He wrote a poem titled “Set Your Clock at U-235,” which he and others in HICCASP persuaded Reagan to read to a large gathering of the like-minded. “The secrets of the earth have been peeled, one by one, until the core is bare,” Reagan declaimed. “The latest recipe is private, in a guarded book, but the stink of death is public on the wind from Nagasaki.” Reagan continued, “Unless we work at it together, at a single earth … there will be others out of the just-born and the not-yet-contracted-for who will die for our invisible daily mistakes … Oneness is our destination, has long been, is far the best of places to arrive at.”

  The poem wasn’t especially controversial. Singer and actor Paul Robeson had read the same lines to a well-heeled gathering at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel; appearing on the same program was General George C. Marshall, the architect of the American victory in the war. But Reagan’s bosses at Warner decided that public one worldism might upset conservative audiences. Arguing that his reading was a dramatic performance in violation of his exclusive contract, the studio ordered him to cease and desist. Reagan chose not to challenge the order and stepped off that particular stage.