Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Not long after the release of the Waldorf Declaration, as the producers’ policy statement came to be called, Reagan and other representatives of the movie guilds met with the industry executives. Louis Mayer explained that the motive behind the declaration was economic rather than political; the producers’ primary obligation, he said, was “to protect the industry and to draw the greatest possible number of people into the theaters.”

  Reagan saw his responsibility in similar terms. He quizzed Mayer and the other producers on the terms of the declaration. How would they know who was a communist and who wasn’t? Would the word of the person in question suffice? Mayer responded that no formal screening procedure had been established. The producers would use their discretion. Reagan asked what would happen if the congressional investigators charged someone with being a communist and that person denied it? Nicholas Schenck of Loew’s, the corporate parent of MGM, answered that the industry would not abdicate decisions on hiring to Congress, but if a congressional committee called a studio employee to testify and that employee refused to say whether he was a communist, he would be terminated. Reagan didn’t object.

  Though Mayer and the other producers, and Reagan with them, cast the communist question as an economic issue, in the anxious atmosphere of the emerging Cold War it had undeniable political ramifications. It would have had them even if the Hollywood Ten had not taken their stand precisely on the politics of the HUAC probe. After they did so, no one could deny that politics was at the heart of the matter. By siding with the producers against the Hollywood Ten, Reagan proclaimed his anticommunist politics to the world. He didn’t know it yet, but he had found the issue on which he would build a political career.

  PARNELL THOMAS WASN’T the only one investigating communists in Hollywood, nor was his committee the only group to whom Reagan spoke. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had tracked subversives since before the war. They initially focused on German sympathizers, and in this context agents of the bureau interviewed Reagan in 1943. He reported having encountered a man they were trailing, and he said he had nearly punched him for anti-Semitic remarks at a party. After the war Hoover’s men shifted their aim to communists, and they renewed their acquaintance with Reagan. They visited him at his and Jane’s home in Hollywood amid the stagehands’ strike. By Reagan’s recollection he initially rebuffed them. “I don’t go in for red-baiting,” he said. They replied that they didn’t either. They were looking for spies and saboteurs. They added that they thought Reagan would want to help them, in light of the fact that the communists hated him so much. He asked what they meant. They described a meeting at which some radicals had posed the question: “What are we going to do about that sonofabitching bastard Reagan?” Reagan decided to cooperate. “We exchanged information for a few hours,” he recalled. “The whole interview was an eye-opener.”

  Reagan received another visit from FBI agents in the spring of 1947. He spoke of the politics of the Screen Actors Guild. Most members were loyal and true, he said, but a small faction always seemed to “follow the Communist Party line.” Reagan gave the names of several of the offenders, including Anne Revere, the guild treasurer and an Academy Award winner.

  Reagan didn’t publicize his contacts with the FBI. The bureau cul tivated various informants in Hollywood. There were at least eighteen; Reagan was “T-10.” For obvious reasons the bureau preferred that the informants’ identities remain secret. Reagan was happy to oblige. He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He supported the effort to root out subversives. And he judged he would be more effective if the subversives didn’t know he was reporting on them.

  Yet in at least one instance he went beyond silence about his FBI contacts to misrepresentation. His first memoir, published in 1965, included the assertion: “In all the battles over the weary months the Screen Actors Guild never used the word Communist except in general terms, nor did we point a finger at any individual.” Yet finger-pointing was precisely what Reagan did in his 1947 meeting with the FBI.

  REAGAN’S INCREASING POLITICIZATION distracted him from his marriage. This did the marriage no good, but the marriage was having trouble already. He and Jane had never grown close. Part of the problem was temperamental and historical. Neither he nor she had a childhood model of a happy, fulfilling marriage to pattern their own after; they had to invent the institution for themselves. And neither opened to the other without difficulty. Both had learned in childhood to fend for themselves emotionally; to let another inside the wall risked repeating the pain and disappointment they so often felt when young.

  The circumstances of their lives made avoidance of emotional intimacy easy. They had their jobs and careers, and even the children they shared did little to bring them together. They hired help to manage Maureen and Michael, who saw more of the help than of their parents. “I think we both measured the attention we received from our parents, because there wasn’t all that much of it to go around,” Maureen recalled later. “More often than not, they were working six days a week. Like many children of famous people, Michael and I were left to the daily care of people like Nanny Banner”—their principal caregiver. Children often anchor families emotionally; as the parents bond with the children, they become closer to each other. Not in the Reagan household.

  Economics has frequently served as marital glue, especially in that mid-century era when most American wives depended on their husbands for material support. But, again, not in the Reagan household. During the war Jane earned far more than Reagan, and she grew accustomed to the feeling of independence it afforded her. After the war the scales rebalanced, but she remained entirely capable of supporting herself, if it came to that.

  She seems to have lost respect for him professionally. When they married, they both had bright careers ahead of them. For the first couple of years they advanced commensurately. But during and after the war his acting arc flattened and tipped down, while hers continued to rise. She was simply a better actor than he was, able to convey complex emotions in a way he never could. Her roles and performances kept getting better, leading to a part as a deaf-mute rape victim in the 1948 Johnny Belinda, for which she won an Academy Award without speaking a single line of dialogue.

  As Reagan’s movie prospects drooped, he doubtless seemed less the stalwart than she had thought him. Meanwhile, she grew bored with the politics of the industry, which fascinated him. She found the labor troubles tedious when they weren’t downright distasteful. And the politics of the nation, which were claiming more of his interest, were even worse. Years later Reagan was asked whether Jane Wyman was a Republican or a Democrat. He said he didn’t know; she had never shown sufficient interest in politics for her views to register with him.

  In early 1947, Jane became pregnant. Possibly the pregnancy was planned; quite likely it was inadvertent. Perhaps another child would have drawn the family together; probably not. In any event, the child, a girl, was born prematurely and died the next day. The experience was understandably difficult for Jane, and Reagan had no chance to comfort her, for at that moment he was battling a severe case of pneumonia and was in another hospital miles away. Doubtless Jane felt very alone.

  Maybe she realized she didn’t mind being alone, for during the months that followed they grew further and further apart. She retreated into herself and into the character she would play in Johnny Belinda. She stuffed her ears with wax to simulate deafness, and possibly to shut out his voice. He grew busier than ever with the work of the guild, the hearings of the House committee, and the fallout from the Hollywood Ten.

  The film press caught wind of their troubles. He denied that anything was wrong; she didn’t. The difference in their reactions drove them still further apart.

  Did he see the end approaching? Likely not. Things had been much worse between his parents, and Nelle had never left Jack. Neither Catho lics nor Disciples divorced; nor, for that matter, did most Dixonians of other denominations. Even Hollywood remained committed to marriage as an institution, at
any rate by comparison with a later day.

  And so he was stunned when she told him, in the autumn of 1947, that she wanted out of the marriage. More immediately, she wanted him out of the house.

  He didn’t know what to do. He had to leave, of course; he was too much the gentleman to force his presence on a reluctant woman, even if she was his wife. But where to go? How to live from one day to the next? His home had been his harbor—an imperfect harbor, to be sure, but a harbor nonetheless. He had thought it could provide the security he had never felt in his childhood home. But now, without warning, he was cast adrift, as vulnerable as he had been as a child, when he never knew when the next eviction notice would arrive and the family would have to move again, never knew whether his father would be the happy Jack of the rollicking stories or the drunken Jack passed out in the snow.

  The rootless childhood had taught him how to fit in but not how to make friends. A smile and a story gave him entrée to new settings, made people see him as sunny and optimistic, caused people to want to be around him. But he never let people get close. He had learned to protect himself by holding back.

  His marriage to Jane had made him think, for a time, that he didn’t have to hold back. She would provide the security he had never had. She would be his wife forever. He would let himself lean on her as he had leaned on no one before.

  But he didn’t know how. His mother and father had coexisted because his mother couldn’t see an alternative. Jack wasn’t much of a breadwinner, but he brought in something. And in their straits every little bit counted. Yet they hadn’t really loved, not in a way Reagan could imitate. He had no map for intimacy, no guideposts or landmarks. He was traveling blind.

  Jane’s own issues made intimacy still harder. She too sought intimacy without knowing how to give or receive it. But unlike him, she could see alternatives to remaining married. She had divorced before and survived. She would survive this time.

  And so the marriage ended. Jane officially filed for divorce in June 1948. California laws required her to show cause; she unconvincingly but satisfactorily cited mental cruelty. Reagan didn’t contest the suit. The divorce was granted.

  12

  HARRY TRUMAN HAD never expected, before Franklin Roosevelt died, to be president, and afterward he often wondered why anyone wanted the job. The Republican majorities in Congress stymied him in domestic affairs, blocking any extension of the New Deal and rolling back, by the Taft-Hartley labor law and other measures, some of the New Deal’s gains. The rest of the world wasn’t much more cooperative. Nearly everyone had assumed that the Allied victory in the war would be followed by an Allied-dominated peace conference, much as World War I had been followed by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. But American and Soviet leaders couldn’t agree on the terms of a conference, and a status quo of distrustful military occupation congealed in the heart of Europe. American and Soviet soldiers glowered at each other in Berlin and on the border of the German zones their armies had captured from the Nazis in 1945.

  Elsewhere on the continent the rivalry between democracy and communism took other forms. Communist parties flourished in France and Italy, threatening to win control of those countries by democratic means. In Greece communist insurgents battled a conservative government and raised the specter of a Marxist-Leninist beachhead in the Balkans. Throughout Europe national economies struggled amid the wreckage of the war; millions wondered if they would survive the next week, the next month, the next winter. Under the circumstances they seemed susceptible to the blandishments of those groups—here the communists conspicuously identified themselves—who hadn’t caused either the war or the depression that triggered it.

  American leaders and their democratic counterparts in Britain and France recalled how Hitler had gradually gathered power to his noxious regime; they swore not to repeat the appeasing mistakes of their predecessors. But the British and the French lacked the funds to conduct the kinds of policies anti-appeasement appeared to demand. In early 1947, London’s envoys told the Truman administration that Britain could no longer play its traditional stabilizing role in the Balkans. American officials responded with an alarm that combined concern for the region’s future with fear of the broader consequences of the fall of Greece or its neighbors to communism. The State Department prepared a rescue plan for the conservative regime in Greece, balanced by funds for rival Turkey, which had lesser leftist problems of its own. Truman went to Congress to sell the package. He delineated the threat to the Balkans and placed it in a sweeping ideological and moral context. “At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life,” Truman said. “The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” For America to stand idle while brutal minorities crushed the liberties of majorities would be unconscionable folly. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”

  Truman got what he wanted in the near term: a package of aid to Greece and Turkey that kept those countries friendly to the United States. He got perhaps more than he wanted in the longer term. His statement of principle, soon called the Truman Doctrine after the model of the Monroe Doctrine of the nineteenth century, apparently committed the United States to a policy of opposing whatever looked like communist expansion almost anywhere on earth. Having rhetorically separated humanity into the sheep and the goats, Truman had committed the United States to acting as global shepherd.

  The Truman Doctrine was merely the start. Two years after the end of the war Europe still couldn’t get its economy going. French and Italian communists capitalized on capitalism’s distress, making political gains that perhaps augured their imminent takeover of the French and Italian governments. American leaders couldn’t imagine anything more calamitous, and they mobilized to prevent it. Secretary of State George Marshall proposed a reconstruction plan for Europe, underwritten by American taxpayers. The sums required were many multiples of those Truman had requested for Greece and Turkey, yet Congress went along, in part because the money would yield benefits to American producers, contractors, and shippers even as it reconstructed Europe.

  Truman’s emerging strategy in the evolving Cold War would become the basis for forty years of American foreign policy. Eight presidents after Truman, including Ronald Reagan, would applaud his foresight and follow his lead. But he got precious little support from his contemporaries. Republican conservatives complained that the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were simply more of what they had hated about the New Deal: big government growing bigger and bleeding the American people. Other Republicans opposed Truman merely for being a Democrat and sought to prevent this accidental occupant of the White House from signing a new lease in his own name. The 1948 election looked unpromising for Truman, with voters seeming restive after sixteen years of Democrats in the presidency, and it grew even less promising when a significant wing of southern Democrats defected over the issue of civil rights. Truman had ordered the military to desegregate, and though the desegregation went slowly, it boded ill for the future of Jim Crow in Dixie.

  Yet Truman survived the election, barely. Reagan, out of habit, remained loyal to the Democrats, endorsing the president and raising money for his campaign. Just enough other voters developed a grudging admiration for the feisty Missourian to push him over the top against Thomas Dewey of New York.

  Truman celebrated by affronting the conservatives even more. He re
jected the advice of America’s founders and overturned a cardinal principle of American foreign policy by negotiating a treaty of peacetime alliance. The North Atlantic Treaty committed the United States, in advance of any conflict, to defend Britain, France, Italy, and eight other countries of the North Atlantic region against external attack. The Soviet Union wasn’t mentioned in the treaty, but everyone understood that it was the only country the allies were seriously worried about.

  The North Atlantic Treaty completed the edifice of “containment,” as Truman’s anti-Soviet policy was summarized. It angered conservatives who judged George Washington smarter than Harry Truman and who objected to what they considered power grabbing by the executive. The Atlantic treaty evidently took war-making authority out of the hands of Congress and gave it to the president, who would determine when an attack triggered the treaty’s required response. Robert Taft of Ohio, Truman’s Senate bête noire on the labor issue, again wrung his hands and shook his finger at the president. He warned that the Atlantic treaty would produce a permanent American occupation of Europe and an overweening American defense establishment.

  Yet Taft took the road less traveled. The treaty compelled conservatives to make a fateful choice: between their devotion to small government and their aversion to communism. Many supposed that Taft was right in predicting that the Atlantic alliance and the rest of containment would inevitably swell American government. But with varying degrees of difficulty, most decided that the threat to American liberty from foreign communists was greater than that from domestic liberals. They approved the treaty and endorsed Truman’s Cold War agenda.