Three Days in Moscow

by Bret Baier

  But the movie that made the greatest emotional impact on Reagan was King’s Row, a 1942 drama about the hardships suffered in a small American town at the turn of the twentieth century. More than any other project, King’s Row taught Reagan how to reach inside for human truth even when playing a fictional character. In the film, Reagan played the role of Drake McHugh, whose legs are amputated by a sadistic surgeon. Reagan agonized about that scene, trying to feel the reality of the terrible moment when McHugh awakes to find his legs gone. The prop department cut a hole in his mattress, and lying there with his legs visibly gone, Reagan felt a very strange sensation—an empathy he’d thought was beyond him. When the scene played and he delivered his famous line—“Where’s the rest of me?”—he recalled having felt real alarm. It was the first film he’d done where there was anything approaching Oscar buzz, and he titled his 1965 Hollywood memoir Where’s the Rest of Me?

  In 1940, Reagan married a fellow contract performer, Jane Wyman, whom he had met while filming Brother Rat in 1938. The marriage lasted nine years, and Wyman became much more successful than her husband, winning an Oscar for Johnny Belinda and receiving four Oscar nominations during her career. Television viewers would later know her as the iron-willed head of a California winery in the popular television series Falcon Crest. They had two children, Maureen, born in 1941, and an adopted son, Michael, born in 1945. Both children suffered some alienation from their father before coming to a more positive resolution with him later in their lives.

  Much has been made of Reagan’s difficult relationship with his children. One can feel some compassion for a man who surely loved his kids and meant well but never quite knew how to reach them. There’s no way of knowing what really was in his heart, much less what happened in his marriage, as he didn’t write or speak of it. (In his memoir, An American Life, Reagan devoted only a slim paragraph in passing to the topic of his marriage and first two children.) Jane Wyman remained silent until Reagan’s death, when she gave a brief public statement, deeming him “a great president and a great, kind and gentle man.”

  Until he met Nancy, his primary focus was on career, not family, and even his devotion to his wife did not always extend to his children. To be fair, fatherhood in 1940s and 1950s America was not always hands-on. Add to that the environment of a household with two Hollywood stars, whose children were often relegated to the care of housekeepers and nannies, and later to boarding schools, and a lot of the distance is explained.

  As Michael wrote in a memoir when he was forty-two, pointedly titled On the Outside Looking In, his adopted status made him feel insecure, and he always struggled to measure up. “In every story the family tells about Dad, he always emerges heroic,” he wrote. “I have never heard of him doing anything wrong. There was no way a child of his, especially one who was adopted, could live up to the image of the man who never made a mistake.” The distance between the two was public, increasingly so during Reagan’s presidency, when it caught the attention of the press. “Are you and your son Michael closer to resolving your differences?” Sam Donaldson called out at the end of one press conference, receiving no response as Reagan left the room. He refused to talk about his children, much less allow the press to psychoanalyze his parenting flaws. His children were less circumspect. However, by the time their father was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Michael and Maureen had come to terms with him and were able to express their love for him—and he, in his own way, for them. “At the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease my father and I would tell each other we loved each other, and we would give each other a hug,” Michael wrote in his later book, Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan. “As the years went by and he could no longer verbalize my name, he recognized me as the man who hugged him. So when I would walk into the house, he would be there in his chair opening up his arms for that hug hello and the hug good-bye. It was truly a blessing from God.”

  Maureen, who preceded Reagan in death—of cancer in 2001—also had warmer sentiments to express in later life, when she wrote of her admiration for her father, feeling he had achieved so much. As we’ll see later, his children with Nancy had a different, but no less difficult, dynamic.

  THE JAPANESE ATTACK ON Pearl Harbor changed the trajectory of Reagan’s career. Before King’s Row was released, the United States was at war. Reagan had been in the Army Reserves since 1937, although his poor eyesight had precluded his joining the war effort directly. However, within months of December 7, 1941, he was ordered to report for duty. He was assigned to a new unit creating training films for combat camera crews and producing patriotic films. For part of the war he was located at “Fort Roach,” so named because the unit, commanded by Jack Warner, worked out of the Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, California. He was promoted to first lieutenant and then captain, and the unit produced some three hundred training and propaganda films during the war.

  Reagan came out of World War II passionate about the fight against fascism, preaching the dangers of neo-fascism. He’d given little thought to communism at that point—after all, the Soviet Union had been an important ally during the war. That soon changed as he began participating in Hollywood organizations and found himself encountering a Communist undercurrent. Communist sentiments had been around Hollywood’s labor unions for decades, to little effect, but rising Cold War tensions after the war heightened the danger of increased Communist influence in the entertainment industry. Nazism was defeated, but now there was a new fear, that the emboldened Soviet Union, under Josef Stalin, would make a direct attempt to control the American movie industry. Many people felt that unionism was a socialist construct. Reagan, a liberal Democrat and union man, experienced a growing shift in sentiment, a feeling that the world, rendered less dangerous by the defeat of Adolf Hitler, might be subjected to a Soviet threat.

  As a self-proclaimed “near hopeless hemophiliac [bleeding heart] liberal,” Reagan might have been fair game for recruitment by Communist sympathizers. But he was generally unaware of any efforts in that regard and even unknowingly joined organizations that were increasingly believed to be Communist fronts.

  Reagan had been an alternate on the Screen Actors Guild board before the war; he resumed his position afterward and was soon elected as a full board member. Union conflicts at that time were severe. The strike of 1946 was a wake-up call. The strike was called by the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), led by a far-left organizer, Herb Sorrell, who was suspected of being a Communist sympathizer. CSU’s aim was to create a power base that would undermine the Screen Actors Guild and the other craft unions. But it soon became clear that CSU’s strike was a fraud; it had been designed purely as a power move, with no interest in improving wages and conditions. Reagan was among those criticizing the strike, and he even urged members to cross the picket lines. For that he was threatened—“Your face will never be in pictures again,” one anonymous caller vowed. But actually crossing the picket lines was a treacherous matter. There was some violence, but Reagan and others in the Guild kept the lines of negotiation open. The strike was finally ended, but in its aftermath a new possibility was advanced: that Moscow was behind the effort to disrupt and take over the reins of power in Hollywood.

  Reagan’s resolve during the strike impressed the SAG board, and in 1947 he was chosen to replace Robert Montgomery as president. Increasingly, he began to pay attention to the political environment and his role in it. “I didn’t realize it,” he wrote in his memoir, “but I’d started on a path that was going to lead me a long way from Hollywood.”

  Chapter 2

  A Political Evolution

  The hearing room in the Cannon House Office Building was mobbed with press and onlookers, there for the riveting spectacle of real “American royalty,” flown in from Hollywood to testify before Congress. It was October 23, 1947, the fourth day of hearings of the investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) into communism in the motion picture industry. Spectators
shoved their way in, jostling for position to witness the testimony of Gary Cooper, Robert Montgomery, and Ronald Reagan.

  When it was Reagan’s turn to testify, he sat upright and serious, peering at the committee members through horn-rimmed glasses. He might have been contemplating the journey that had brought him to this point, front and center in the investigation into the influence of Communists in Hollywood. It was, without a doubt, a central issue of his life.

  The formative effect on Reagan of this early experience with communism cannot be overestimated, and he would make references to it throughout his life and presidency. In time, he came to see that too often, the use of terms like “Red Scare” and, later, “McCarthyism,” were attempts to hide the historical record about Soviet attempts to undermine American democracy and commit espionage against the US government. Yet early on, Reagan saw it in a far more nuanced way. He disagreed with the Communist ideology, but he believed that people had a right to believe in any ideology they chose. On the other hand, when that belief system turned into subversive activity that worked against the interests of the United States, that was a different matter.

  Reagan could see that the congressional focus on Hollywood and communism had some resonance with ordinary Americans. “Perhaps part of it was the thought of shelling out money at the box office to support some bum and his swimming pool while he plotted the country’s destruction,” he wrote.

  As the head of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan’s dilemma was how to straddle the line. He honestly believed that the Communist Party USA, and by extension the Soviet government, was trying to take over Hollywood using cutouts—willing surrogates. At the same time, he wanted to protect those people who were being falsely accused, and he was worried that HUAC’s broad sweep would envelop the innocent as well as the guilty.

  “Suddenly,” he wrote, “subpoenas descended on Hollywood like a first snow of winter.” Forty-one witnesses, among them the most famous names in Hollywood, were called to testify. Some, like Reagan, were viewed as “friendly” witnesses. But others refused to cooperate. Among the latter were the so-called Hollywood Ten—writers John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, and Dalton Trumbo; writer/producer Adrian Scott; writer/director Herbert Biberman; and director Edward Dmytryk. They announced that they would not testify and were held in contempt of Congress. They were briefly imprisoned, and their careers came to a halt. The atmosphere in the industry was by turns defiant and terrified. The thing was—and this worried Reagan—it wasn’t just members of the Communist Party whose reputations and livelihoods were at stake; anyone whose name came up in any context, via any hint or suggestion, was subject to intense scrutiny. There was too much room for error, especially when the grip of hysteria took hold. Not only that, it wasn’t illegal to be a Communist, and the most sacred freedoms of American life allowed free speech, even the right to speak out against the government when you disagreed with it. Any fight against the Communist threat had to be conducted with a reverence for constitutional principles.

  Now. as he sat before the congressional committee, Reagan attempted to articulate his strong aversion to communism, while making a robust defense of democratic freedoms. When Robert Stripling, the chief investigator for HUAC, asked him, “Mr. Reagan, what is your feeling about what steps should be taken to rid the motion-picture industry of any Communist influences, if they are there?” he gave what many judged to be the most thoughtful, balanced analysis of the hearings:

  Well, sir . . . 99 percent of us are pretty well aware of what is going on, and I think within the bounds of our democratic rights, and never once stepping over the rights given us by democracy, we have done a pretty good job in our business of keeping those people’s activities curtailed. After all, we must recognize them at present as a political party. On that basis we have exposed their lies when we came across them, we have opposed their propaganda, and I can certainly testify that in the case of the Screen Actors Guild we have been eminently successful in preventing them from, with their usual tactics, trying to run a majority of an organization with a well organized minority.

  So that fundamentally I would say in opposing those people that the best thing to do is to make democracy work. In the Screen Actors Guild we make it work by insuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake.

  Whether the party should be outlawed, I agree with the gentlemen that preceded me that that is a matter for the Government to decide. As a citizen I would hesitate, or not like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent 170 years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a power, a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party, and I think the Government is capable of proving that, if the proof is there, then that is another matter . . .

  I happen to be very proud of the industry in which I work; I happen to be very proud of the way in which we conducted the fight. I do not believe the Communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion-picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology.

  Unlike other friendly witnesses, such as studio head Jack Warner and director Elia Kazan, he did not name names during his testimony. He had made his position clear: In opposing communism, the best thing to do was to make democracy work. In this, he laid down a marker that would stand during his political life: that the fight against communism would succeed only if Americans remained true to their ideals.

  Sitting on the committee that day was a freshman congressman from California named Richard Nixon, who had been appointed to HUAC as one of his first assignments. The following year, Nixon’s aggressive pursuit of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of being a Communist operative, made him a household name and paved the way for a successful Senate run. Interestingly, Nixon did not ask a single question of Reagan that day. In 1947, few could have guessed that either Reagan or Nixon, much less both of them, would one day reach the heights of the presidency.

  The fallout from the hearings was dramatic. Meeting in New York City the next month, studio heads devised the “Waldorf Statement,” named after the hotel where the meeting took place. It contained a vow to deny employment to anyone who refused to cooperate with HUAC or who was suspected of being a Communist—including the Hollywood Ten. The action formalized the Communist blacklist, an idea Reagan supported in spite of his doubts about its fairness.

  His activism also had a more personal impact: when he returned to Los Angeles after testifying before HUAC, he found his wife packing his bags. Their marriage was over, she told him. The reasons were open to speculation but never fully aired in public: the loss of their third child, Christine, who had died the day she was born; an affair on Wyman’s part; Reagan’s increasing political passion, which bored his wife; or just the fact that they had grown apart. Their early infatuation, burnished by the silver screen, could not survive the complexities of real life. Reagan was devastated by Wyman’s decision—he hadn’t seen it coming—but he responded to his heartbreak by throwing himself even more determinedly into his work.

  As the president of SAG, Reagan continued to struggle with his conscience. It was an issue never resolved in that troubling era: how to reject the evils of communism while holding high the American values of free speech and creative autonomy. But in the following years he became more convinced than ever that the Communist threat was real.

  In hindsight, the scourge of the Hollywood purge might seem overwrought and misdirected, even as Joe McCarthy’s actions did—not to mention that it destroyed thousands of careers. Reagan abhorred many aspects of the Communist witch-hunt in Hollywood. Any validity the investigations might have had was undermined by the investigators’ reliance on innuendo, anecdotal evidence,
and political partisanship. While a later release of the HUAC investigation results showed Communist leanings and Party memberships in Hollywood, it was never determined whether the attempted takeover had made any headway. However, having lived through those years, Reagan never abandoned his conviction that communism was a great threat to the American way of life.

  Ironically, it was blacklist mania that introduced Reagan to Nancy Davis, who would become the love of his life. As they both told the story, in 1949, Nancy was an up-and-coming young actress with a worrisome problem: reading the trade papers one day, she saw her name on a list of Communist sympathizers in Hollywood. That was no small matter; even the barest hint of an association with the Communist Party was enough to get a person blacklisted, thus ending their career. She was horrified. The Nancy Davis listed was not her but another person in the industry with the same name. She appealed to Mervyn LeRoy, the director of East Side, West Side, the movie she was filming, and he took her case to Reagan, who promised to take care of it. Nancy was relieved to have the Guild on her side, but she was also interested in meeting the handsome bachelor. She told LeRoy she’d feel much better if Reagan explained things to her himself. Obligingly, he called and asked her to dinner.

  When she opened her door, she found herself looking up into Reagan’s handsome face and teasing blue eyes. He was leaning on a crutch, the result of having broken his leg at a charity baseball game, but that just made him seem more dashing. Their date lasted until three in the morning. “If ever God gave me evidence that He had a plan for me, it was the night he brought Nancy into my life,” Reagan wrote. But it was hardly a whirlwind romance. Reagan still felt burned by the end of his marriage, and Nancy gave him the time and space he needed. Their courtship stretched out over two years, until Reagan’s doubts dissolved. “Let’s get married,” he said one night over dinner. Nancy took his hand and looked into his eyes. “Let’s,” she replied. They married on March 4, 1952, in a small church ceremony with only five people in attendance. Their first child, Patti, was born in October, followed by Ron in 1958.