Reagan: The Life (10 page)

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.

R
EAGAN 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 Citizens 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.

But he mounted others, slightly chastened and somewhat more skeptical of the company he was keeping. Dozens of committees and leagues had formed among the sixteen million veterans of the war; some were straightforwardly self-interested and lobbied Congress for such measures as extensions to the
GI Bill, which already provided mortgage assistance, college grants, and unemployment pay to veterans. Reagan, among the top earners in the country, didn’t require government help and consequently chose his affiliation on other grounds. The American Veterans Committee had a slogan that appealed to him: “Citizens First, Veterans Second.” So he joined. “
I expected great things of the AVC,” he recalled.

He threw himself into its work. He helped arrange venues for fund-raisers, and he gave speeches to Rotary Clubs and other civic organizations. His famous name and familiar face ensured large crowds, and most of the audiences responded favorably when he lauded America’s victory over fascism and spoke of the need to be vigilant against any sort of neo-fascism. One listener, however, approached him after an address to the men’s club of the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church, where Reagan regularly worshipped. This man, the congregation’s pastor, remarked that he liked everything Reagan had said but thought he should say more. “
I think your speech would be even better if you mentioned that if
communism looked like a threat, you’d be just as opposed to it as you are to fascism.”

Reagan confessed that he had never thought of this. But it seemed so obvious that he said of course he would. A short while later he gave a speech to another local group, a citizens’ organization that supported various political and social causes. He repeated his praise of the late war effort and his defiance of fascism should it again appear. The audience loved
him, until the closing paragraph. “I’ve talked about the continuing threat of fascism in the postwar world,” he said, “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 out just as harshly against communism as I have fascism.”

A heavy silence fell upon the room.

A few days later he heard from a woman who had been there. “I have been disturbed for quite some time, suspecting there is something sinister happening in that organization that I don’t like,” she wrote. “I’m sure you noticed the reaction to your last paragraph when you mentioned communism. I hope you recognize what that means. I think the group is becoming a front for communists. I just wanted you to know that that settled it for me. I resigned from the organization the next day.”

Looking back, Reagan considered this period a turning point in his political education. “Thanks to my minister and that lady,” he said, “I began to wake up to the real world.”

A
NOTHER LESSON OCCURRED
a few months later. In the summer of 1946, Reagan was asked to join the executive council of HICCASP. He was pleased by the recognition and eager to participate. But his first council meeting proved disillusioning. Held at the home of a prominent council member, it brought out some sixty people, including
James Roosevelt, the eldest son of Franklin Roosevelt. Like Reagan, James Roosevelt thought it proper to strike what he considered a balance between the threats to America from the right and from the left. Roosevelt told the group that HICCASP was being assailed by outsiders as a communist front; it would behoove the executive council to go on record as opposing communism as well as fascism.

“
It sounded good to me,” Reagan remarked later, “sort of like that last paragraph I had inserted in my speech.” But it didn’t sound good to many of the people at the meeting. “I was amazed at the reaction. A well-known musician sprang to his feet. He offered to recite the U.S.S.R. 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 that if there was ever a war between the United States and Russia, he would volunteer for Russia.”

Reagan took Roosevelt’s side, thereby attracting the leftists’ ire. “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,” he recalled. One man, screenwriter
John Howard Lawson, grew especially incensed. “He persisted in waving a long finger under my nose and telling me off.”

The meeting dissolved in disorder. As Reagan left, he was approached by
Dore Schary, an executive with MGM. “Come up to
Olivia de Havilland’s apartment,” Schary said quietly.

Reagan did so. “I found a solid group of about a dozen gathering in glee,” he recounted. His puzzlement at their high spirits showed, and the group explained that the blowup at the HICCASP meeting hadn’t been accidental. De Havilland said she had grown suspicious of HICCASP when she had been given a speech written by author and screenwriter
Dalton Trumbo to deliver to a gathering in Seattle. She had decided it was too communist tinged. She had suggested to
James Roosevelt that they put the HICCASP council on the spot; Roosevelt’s proposal did just that, with the results Reagan had witnessed.

Reagan laughed as he heard the story. De Havilland thought unmasking the communists more serious than amusing, and she asked Reagan what he found so funny. “Nothing,” he replied, “except that I thought you were one.”

“I thought
you
were one,” she rejoined.

M
EANWHILE, HE STILL
got no good movie roles. He blamed his unlucky timing. If not for the war, which pulled him from the screen at the moment of his dramatic breakthrough in
Kings Row
, he might have become the next
Jimmy Stewart or
Henry Fonda. The war had set him on a side track. Now, in the wake of conflict,
Warner Brothers gave the best parts to actors the younger postwar audiences found more appealing.