Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  “When I walked into the board room… I saw it crammed with the famous men of the business.… I knew that I was beginning to find the rest of me,” he once wrote. He overlooked the women on the board—his wife, Jane Wyman, Anne Revere, Louise Beavers and Agnes Moorehead. The famous men gathered around the huge director’s table included Murphy, Robert Montgomery, Franchot Tone, Dick Powell, Leon Ames, James Cagney, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Boris Karloff, Pat O’Brien, Edward Arnold, Walter Pidgeon, Gene Kelly and Robert Taylor. Shortly after this meeting, Murphy stepped down and Robert Montgomery once again took over the reins of the SAG as president. Montgomery was a political activist with a conservative viewpoint, as were Murphy, Powell, Arnold and Taylor.

  With Truman in the White House, Reagan’s former presidential fervor was dissipated. Truman was “as inspiring as mud. To listen to a Truman radio address was an experience devoutly to be missed.” Reagan would perhaps have liked Truman better had he known him personally. For in private, his manner was lively and his speech direct. Occupying the White House had not changed his proclivities toward playing poker, drinking whiskey and talking politics. He was impulsive, plain-spoken and possessed a crass streak in his nature, but was openly deferential to his wife and daughter. He dressed absurdly in shirts too small for him and wore two-toned shoes. He loved the ceremonial and redesigned the presidential seal and the presidential flag. But behind this public image was a man possessing a great sensitivity to the human condition. Viewed as a failure until nearly fifty, he had fought adversity with great nobility and had deep concern for struggling farmers, the small businessman, the old, the poor and minority groups. Bold ideas did not intimidate him. Truman’s complex personality baffled the country the first year he was in office. With the war’s end, he was being blamed “for every shortage, all the inflation, intractable foreign problems, and the mediocrity of the people around him.”

  Communism was one of the principal issues of the 1946 congressional elections. In California, Richard M. Nixon, formerly a lawyer but at the time a lieutenant commander in the navy due for release, was approached by the Republican Committee of 100 and asked to run, all campaign costs paid, against Jerry Voorhis, a Democratic incumbent who had been an effective member of Congress for a number of years and who had just sponsored the National School Lunch Act. Nixon quickly accepted the offer and cast himself as “the Fighting Quaker” and engaged in a “scurrilous smear campaign” to label Voorhis as “the candidate of the Kremlin.” He attempted, unsuccessfully, to link Voorhis to two “communist-dominated” organizations and to prove that Voorhis followed the Communist party line in his voting record. By this kind of innuendo and unsubstantiated attack, Nixon won the election.

  In the wake of the Nixon-Voorhis campaign, with communism becoming a central issue, Reagan—waiting for Warners to put him to work—dedicated his time to giving speeches denouncing fascism for the various organizations to which he belonged, always to thunderous applause. Then, on one occasion, he ended his speech by denouncing communism and calling it fascism as well. Silence greeted his words. He claims this had a strong effect on him, propelling him to do some heavy homework, which in turn alerted him to the danger of communism and the presence of Communists in Hollywood. This hardly seems to present the full facts.

  The meeting Reagan refers to, under the auspices of HIC-CASP, was on July 11, 1946, and several others spoke first. Reagan said he felt “honored” when he was notified (June 1946) that he had been named to its board of directors. The July 11 meeting was his first board meeting. Jimmy Roosevelt (whom Reagan was thrilled to meet) made a speech asking the board to adopt a resolution against communism.

  “Jimmy Roosevelt was an employee of HICCASP in New York,” Elenore Bogigian recalled, as was Harold Ickes (secretary of the interior). “And then he came out to California, where he was the executive director of HICCASP, and I was legislative director. He had the office right next to mine, which he moved into with his complete staff. The Democratic primaries were approaching, and… there ensued a fight between Ellis Patterson and Will Rogers, Jr., who both wanted the office [of senator from California].… HICCASP was split over whom to endorse… Patterson or Rogers.”

  “Everybody who was anybody was active in HICCASP,” recalls Joan LaCoeur, the organization’s recording secretary. “There was this upbeat feeling of power in the support of both the artistic and scientific and the professional communities. Everyone assumed Jimmy Roosevelt would one day be president [of the United States]—there was still this awe of him, based on his father.… The Red-baiting [had] reached such a pitch that people began to quietly withdraw [from HICCASP]. There was a board meeting and some of the right-wing members wanted to make an anti-Communist statement to clear HICCASP. People like Johnny Green and Olivia de Havilland—not strong people, middle-of-the-roaders—began to panic early in the fight. It was decided that if a statement could be arrived at that all could subscribe to, people would stand fast.… A six man committee was appointed representing left and right.… The committee met for three days and three nights. [John Howard] Lawson and [Dalton] Trumbo represented the Left; Reagan and [Don] Hartman represented the Right; Linus Pauling and Jimmy Roosevelt represented the middle; and writer True Boardman was Chairman.”

  “Reagan took a leaf from the supposed Communist book and organized a faction,” Elenore Bogigian continued. “The Left and Right were, at this point, at each others’ throats.… I remember gruesome meetings.”

  At the end of three days, the tripartite committee arrived at a statement that declared the HICCASP was a totally independent organization without ties to any one group. “It was… ridiculous,” Bogigian recalled. “Everybody jumped overboard… the board resigned… the middle weakened… the Right resigned. This was how the ‘Communists’ supposedly took over. It was the beginning of the end of the organization.…”

  LeCoeur’s and Bogigian’s recollections of Reagan’s association with HICCASP are very much at odds with his, for he disclaims any intensive involvement and has never mentioned his work on the statement committee.

  Moon Reagan remembered “when he was in [this] organization… I used to beat him over the head, ‘Get out of that thing. There are people in there who can cause you real trouble. They’re more than suspect on the part of the government, as to their connections that are not exactly American, and one thing and another.’ Now, in those days, I was doing little things for the FBI. You know, ‘Neil, we’d like to have you go out and lay in the bushes and take down the car 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 look him right in the eye and say, “We never saw the guy in our lives.” Forget it____’

  “I talked to him and talked to him about this organization. One evening he calls me—evening, hell, it was about midnight—he had stopped up at the Nutburger stand (there was a Nutburger stand at the corner of Sunset and Doheny at the time, across the street from the drugstore). He says, ‘I’m having a cup of coffee, come on up.’ I said, ‘Do you know what time it is?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, I’ve been in bed for three hours. Have your coffee and go on home and go to bed.’ ‘No, I want you to come up.’ And I said all right; so I put a pair of trousers on and a shirt and drove up the hill. Here he is—parked. I got in, and—he’s a member of the board [HICCASP]—he says, ‘You wouldn’t believe it. It just came to me tonight. We have a rule that if a board member misses two meetings without being excused, you’re automatically off the board. There’s a gal out at the such and such studio,’ and he says, ‘I’ve been a little suspicious of her. All of a sudden, we had one of these cases come up tonight, that so-and-so had missed two board meetings, and so they were off, and now we’ve got to find somebody else. It suddenly dawned on me that over the last several months, every time one of these cases came up, she had just the indiv
idual that would be excellent as a replacement. I managed to filch the minute books before I left. I can show you the page where her board members became a majority of the board, with her replacements.’*

  “I just looked at him and said, ‘Junior, what do you suppose I’ve been talking about all these weeks and weeks and weeks?’ He looks me right in the eye and says, ‘Why, you never mentioned a word about anything like that.…’“

  Jimmy Roosevelt has said that “part of my work for the Committee [HICCASP] included making speeches in other cities. They wanted me to submit my speeches to them in advance and I noticed they always removed any critical references to Russia and Communism. Of course, I always put them back in.” Roosevelt left the organization several months after the July 11 meeting, although later he put the meeting as the date he severed his ties.†

  The HICCASP was under surveillance by the FBI—a fact that Reagan knew. Reagan had, in fact, been in contact with the FBI since September 17, 1941, when an FBI agent in Washington (whose name was later inked out of the papers the author obtained through the Freedom of Information Act) sent a memo to Hugh Clegg, assistant special agent in charge of the Los Angeles division.

  As a result of my previous position as [obliterated], I became intimately acquainted with the following persons who might be of some assistance to the Bureau. [I will be] glad to contact them and give them the name of the special [Hollywood] agent involved.

  A list of eleven names followed, but all are heavily crossed out except for one: RONALD REAGAN, WARNER BROTHERS STUDIO, HOLLYWOOD. Whoever the agent was, he would have had to meet Reagan (as an employee of a company or organization both belonged to) often to become an intimate. The possibilities include someone at the studio, the SAG, Nino Pepitone’s ranch in Burbank,* or the Hillcrest Country Club. Further FBI memos indicate Reagan must have agreed to supply the FBI with any anti-American or pro-German information that came his way (considering the war, not an unreasonable acquiescence). On November 18, 1943, Reagan (at Camp Roach) met with an agent and in the interview told of “nearly coming to blows with a German sympathizer at a cocktail party [this could have been during the production of This Is the Army] because [name obliterated] made several anti-Semitic remarks.

  “Due to the nature of the remarks made by the subject, Reagan became highly incensed and withdrew from the conversation… although he emphasized that considerable drinking had been done by all persons involved.”

  Records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act also make clear that Reagan and Wyman met with FBI agents on April 10, 1947. Reagan claimed three men appeared unannounced at his home one evening and identified themselves as FBI agents. One asked, “We thought someone the Communists hated as much as they hate you might be willing to help us?” He protested that he did not want to “go in for Red-baiting.” They then rattled off a list of names, dates, places and conversations that he had been privy to and others that, as he said, “opened my eyes to a good many things.” One quote given by the FBI agent, claimed to have been said by an actor Reagan trusted, was: “What are we going to do about that sonofabitching bastard Reagan?”

  According to the Freedom of Information Act records, Reagan, after being assured that HICCASP was a Communist front group, “stated that he was present [at the July 11, 1946, meeting] and that this meeting was precipitated by the fact he and nine other members of HICCASP had attempted to create the issue to justify their resignation.… Reagan’s group advocated a resolution condemning Communism as well as Fascism, a proposal that [he claimed] faced a heavy opposition.

  “Reagan advised considerable discussion pro and con ensued and finally [name obliterated] took the floor and stated…, ‘Regardless of how much discussion occurs here, I can tell you this much for certain: HICCASP will never pass any resolution condemning Communism or condoning capitalism.’… The resolution was voted down by 60 to 10 at an ensuing meeting and Reagan submitted his resignation by telegram the next night.”

  Besides Reagan’s membership in the allegedly Communist front HICCASP, there were his activities on behalf of the equally suspect American Veterans’ Committee. The previous August, in an Open Forum letter in The Hollywood Reporter in answer to an accusation by Billy Wilkerson, the Reporter’s publisher, Reagan had written: “… you referred to our outfit (A.V.C.) as ‘fronters’… that seems a little strange when a few months ago the members of any veterans group were ‘heroes’ who were defending their country.… I would like to call to your attention the fact that at a recent A.V.C. National Convention in Des Moines, Iowa, a tentative pink infiltration was met and dealt with in true democratic fashion, with the result that everyone was convinced that the vast majority of A.V.C. members were interested only in perpetuating our forms of democracy. Of course, to deny that there are some ‘Commies’ aboard would be ridiculous as those guys inkle in just about everywhere.” Obviously, the FBI visitors convinced him Wilkerson was right because he quit the AVC shortly after he met with them.

  However, the April 10, 1947, FBI meeting was geared not to warn him of Communist front organizations but to enlist both Wyman and Reagan as informants on the activities of the SAG. Of the two, Reagan appears to have taken the lead and told the FBI agents that he was aware of “two cliques within the Guild that on all questions of policy follow the Communist Party line.” These two cliques were not “particularly close,” Reagan said, “but they [unite] on electing individuals to office.” There follows a long list of inked-out names provided, according to the agent, by Reagan and Wyman, although only Reagan is quoted in the report. A request was made by the agent to check the names to determine which were known Communist party members.

  Reagan (not Wyman) was given a number—”T-10”—as a confidential informant. His job was to report the names of any SAG members whom he suspected of contributing to the “Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry” (a lengthy Bureau report on December 19, 1947, carries that title and discusses Reagan’s cooperation in giving names to the FBI).*

  Reagan’s lifelong hatred of Communists came to the fore at this time. The Nazis licked, he feared a second bully was expanding its power—this time right on U.S. soil. He neglected to recall that Hitler’s power grew as the German people turned informer against friend, neighbor and one’s own family. One of the most unaccountable actions in all of Reagan’s life was that he not only continued his SAG activities, agreeing to be an FBI informant, but did so at a period when he had just been elected to the presidency to succeed Montgomery. As president, he would have access to privileged information and gain firsthand observations earned through more intimate relationships. With this step, he was to lose his wife and the home and family he considered dear. But he never understood why.

  When they had returned from New York in August 1945, the Reagans were reconciled and apparently happy and Reagan had just signed his one-million-dollar contract. Then, while he worked on his ship models waiting for Warners to put him in front of the cameras, Wyman fought through several long months of steamy Florida-location hardships as she filmed The Yearling. In late March 1946, Reagan finally returned to work on Stallion Road, and Wyman, without any time off, began shooting Cheyenne, a rugged Western, opposite Dennis Morgan. Although Cheyenne was an A feature, Wyman knew that the role she played and the movie itself were a major comedown after her last two films, and she had unsuccessfully tried to convince Jack Warner not to cast her in it.

  Reagan had been able to use his own horse—Baby (considered stubborn by his co-players)—in Stallion Road, and to cast his friend Nino Pepitone in a small role (also to help with the horse). The film was shot on location in Hidden Valley, forty miles from the studio. But he did not mind the distance, the work or the heat. He loved riding and the fact that (except for one scene) he was able to go through the film tieless. He took all jumps and did all his own stunts. One day, he made seven jumps on Tar Baby (the horse’s name in the film) in the hot sun and tipped the bar each time. The director, James V. Kern (a form
er lawyer who had also directed Wyman in The Dough Girls), wanted to have a stuntman double. Reagan refused and on the eighth try made it. At one point in the picture, a horse (not Baby) was being filmed crossing a water hole when it slipped and panicked. Reagan dived in, fully dressed, and led the animal to shore (to a chorus of enthusiastic applause). The genre of horse story pleased him. He wanted to do a Western and spoke to Warner about it, but could not engender any enthusiasm.*

  As one reviewer said, “In ‘Stallion Road,’ the human beings don’t come off as well as the horses.” Reagan did not have to wait to see the final cut to know this. While he enjoyed being literally back in the saddle again, he had no false illusions about the film.

  During the early shooting of Stallion Road, a labor union strike threatened to shut down the entire film industry. The SAG board (and membership) was overwhelmingly in favor of a no-strike policy.†

  In 1945, Herbert Sorrell, a former boxer who had become a business agent of the Motion Picture Painters Local 644, had drawn together nine unions including the Screen Cartoonists, Office Employees, Film Technicians, Machinists atd the powerful Carpenters Local, an amalgamation of ten thousand workers. They called themselves the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) and were looked upon as a democratic and honest alternative to the other, more massive IATSE, the union that had been run by Willie Bioff and George Browne before they were sent to jail. Sensing the CSU as a major threat, the IATSE strengthened its executive forces and sent Roy Brewer (an officer in the Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals) and IATSE president Richard Walsh into action.‡

  On March 12, 1945, the CSU Local 1421 struck on behalf of the set decorators (350 jobs), for whom they claimed exclusive bargaining rights. The IATSE contested this, declaring that the CSU contract with Local 1421 had lapsed in January and not been renegotiated. The IATSE union, Local 44, insisted they had jurisdiction over the set decorators and proclaimed their adherence to labor’s “no-strike” wartime pledge. At the same time, IATSE president Walsh issued an ultimatum to the studios that if they settled with the CSU, “every movie projectionist in every theater in the United States would take a walk.” The strike continued, the studios refusing to be strong-armed by threats and yet not willing to give in to the demands of the CSU. An impasse had been reached and there was “escalating violence and bitterness on the picket lines.”