Ronnie and Nancy (30 page)

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
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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.

According to his 1965 memoir, Reagan was visited at home by “three men from a well-known government agency” several months
after
he quit HICCASP. “Now look, I don’t go in for Red-baiting,” Reagan told them, but after being convinced that national security was at stake, “we exchanged information for a few hours.”109 At a 1955 trial involving the Screen Extras Guild, however, he had testified under oath that he received confidential information from government agents while still in HICCASP,110 and in his 1990 presidential memoir he would confuse matters further by saying that two FBI men had knocked on his door shortly
before
he went on HICCASP’s executive council.111 His FBI file doesn’t resolve this contradiction, but it does show that by 1947 he was one of at least eighteen informers for the bureau within the motion picture industry. Reagan’s code name was T-10, and his fellow moles most likely included Walt Disney and Billy Wilkerson, the publisher of the
Hollywood Reporter
and owner of the Sunset Strip hotspots Ciro’s, La Rue, and Trocadero.112

Reagan’s willingness to work with the government law enforcement agency most anathema to the Hollywood left was one more sign of the political metamorphosis he was undergoing during the summer and fall of 1946. Reagan’s disillusionment with the AVC and HICCASP, his cooperation with the FBI, his rise to leadership at the Screen Actors Guild during Hollywood’s worst period of labor strife—all these were taking place almost simultaneously. One experience reinforced the other and perhaps made the transformation from “near-hopeless hemophiliac liberal”113 to anti-Communist crusader seem something like an act of fate.

Reagan returned to the SAG board in February 1946 on the recommendation of his conservative debating partner from
This Is the Army
, George Murphy, who had succeeded another conservative, Robert Montgomery, as 1 7 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Guild president. Although several liberals, including James Cagney, Gene Kelly, and Henry Fonda, sat on the board, it tended to be dominated by its more middle-of-the-road and conservative members, among them Reagan’s friends Pat O’Brien, Dick Powell, Robert Taylor, and William Holden. Jane Wyman had stayed on all through the war, and was one of only four women on the forty-four-member board.114 One of those women, Anne Revere, was an outspoken leftist who would later recall that Reagan let down his liberal colleagues within a matter of months.115

In the spring of 1946, SAG was considering forming a tri-guild council with the somewhat more liberal Screen Directors Guild and the decidedly left-wing Screen Writers Guild. But the attempt to draft a statement of purpose for the proposed council led to a sharp disagreement on SAG’s board: Murphy and Montgomery insisted on language condemning Communist, as well as Fascist, “influence in the motion picture industry or the ranks of labor.”116 When the wording came up for a vote in mid-June—just two weeks before Jimmy Roosevelt and de Havilland raised the very same issue at HICCASP—Reagan voted with the board’s anti-Communist majority. He also joined Murphy and Montgomery in rejecting the tri-guild council after the directors and writers agreed to the entire statement of principles
except
the condemnation of Communism.117 He was proving himself a valuable liberal ally to SAG’s conservative powers that be and, perhaps, was starting to see things their way. Murphy and Montgomery, he would later write, were “equally aware of the strange creatures crawling from under the make-believe rocks in our make-believe town.”118