Ronnie and Nancy (28 page)

In August 1944, as Allied forces pushed the Japanese back across the Pacific, the FMPU embarked on a top secret project designed to assist in the bombing and invasion of Japan itself. The film unit’s set designers and special effects wizards built a miniature replica of Tokyo and other targets on the floor of one of the soundstages and mounted cameras on cranes above it so that simulated bombing runs could be filmed and sent to the front to brief bombing crews before they took off for Japan. In turn, footage from the actual raids was sent back to Fort Roach, where the model was adjusted to reflect bombing damage. Security surrounding the project was so tight that, Reagan later wrote, “it was enough to make all of us fearful of talking 1 5 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House in our sleep, or taking an extra drink. We knew the bomb targets well in advance, including the proposed time of the bombing raid, because our geniuses—informed in advance of possible weather conditions—were even floating the right kind of clouds between the camera and the target.”38

He played the briefing officer in these films, directing the pilots toward their targets as if he were sitting in the cockpit with them, thirty thousand feet above the Pacific, rather than in a projection room in Culver City—a task not so different from giving play-by-play descriptions of baseball games he wasn’t actually watching. “I would usually open with lines such as, ‘Gentlemen, you are approaching the coast of Honshu on a course of three hundred degrees. You are now twenty miles offshore. To your left, if you are on course, you should be able to see a narrow inlet.

To your right . . .’ ” His closing line was always the same: “Bombs away.”39

Reagan later said that his disillusionment with big government—“the first crack in my staunch liberalism”—began during his last year and a half in the Army. He attributed his nascent doubts to his experience with the civil service bureaucrats who arrived at Fort Roach halfway through the war. Until then, the FMPU, because of the sensitive nature of its work, had made do without civilian workers. According to Reagan, the new arrivals were transferred to Culver City after the Army, acting under pressure from Congress, ordered a 35 percent cut in civilians at all installations that employed them. “Neither Congress nor the military had figured on the ability of the Civil Service to achieve eternal life here on earth,” Reagan later wrote. “As fast as reductions took place, new positions were found for the displaced.”40 Whereas the FMPU’s personnel section had eighteen employees to handle the records of 1,200 men, he noted, the civil service sent more than twice that number to keep track of the 250 civilians assigned to Fort Roach. Furthermore, Reagan asserted, incompetent workers could be removed only by promoting them to better jobs, supervisors opposed reductions in the workforce because their own pay was based on how many workers they had under them, and requests to destroy unnecessary documents were met with orders from Washington to copy each document before destroying it. Although Reagan would one day de-ride such inefficiency and empire building as “the peculiar ways of the federal bureaucracy,” and use his Fort Roach anecdotes in political speeches, during the war years his New Deal beliefs were still strong.41

While filming
This Is the Army
, he spent his lunch hours debating politics with his Republican co-star, George Murphy, who like Reagan had been
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brought up a Democrat and was hooked on politics at an early age. Murphy, however, had switched parties in 1939, and was heavily influenced by his good friend FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who told him that the New Deal was a Communist plot.42 For all their heated arguments, the two actors grew close. Two decades later Senator Murphy and Governor Reagan would be the first and second movie stars, respectively, to hold high government office, and the latter would write of the former, “I owe a great deal to this cool, dapper guy who had to deal with me and my early white-eyed liberal daze.

There were some of our associates, I’m sure, who believed I was as red as Moscow, but Murph never wavered in his defense of me even though I ranted and railed at him as an arch-reactionary (which he isn’t).”43

As his words make clear, Reagan moved left—not right—during the war, along with the Roosevelt administration and most of the movie industry’s liberal Democrats. The Soviet Union was now America’s ally, and once again Hollywood Communists, leftists, and liberals were united in the great anti-Fascist battle, as they had been from 1936 to 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin pact tore the first Popular Front apart. Even Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, prodded by the White House, joined the pro-Soviet campaign, releasing
Song of Russia
and
Mission to Moscow,
respectively, in 1943: the first was scripted by secret Communist Party members Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins; the second, written by leftist Howard Koch, was so soft on Stalin that conservative critics called it
Submission to Moscow
.44

In 1943, Reagan became friendly with Bernard Vorhaus, an FMPU

writer-director who had been active in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in the late 1930s and would be blacklisted as an alleged Communist. The New York–born, Harvard-educated Vorhaus was Fort Roach’s resident left-wing intellectual, and Reagan was no doubt flattered to be taken seriously by him.

Vorhaus directed Reagan in the instructional short
Recognition of the Japanese Zero Fighter
in January 1943, and according to Edmund Morris, Reagan and Vorhaus developed the same kind of “political intimacy” that Reagan would later share with his longtime California aide and national security adviser, William Clark. Although Vorhaus was never able to win Reagan over entirely to his pro-Moscow views, he told friends at the time, “Dutch R.

knows more about politics than any other actor in Hollywood.”45

That year Reagan joined the Hollywood Democratic Committee—curiously, for someone so highly opinionated, he had managed to avoid joining any political organization until then. The HDC had been formed as a

“support group” for the Roosevelt administration after the Republicans 1 5 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House made significant gains in the 1942 midterm elections, but it was more radical than its name suggested. Several Communists, including the Party’s not-so-secret Hollywood leader, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, sat on its board, alongside such liberal stalwarts as Walter Huston, Gene Kelly, Olivia de Havilland, and Ira Gershwin. So did Herbert Sorrell, the fiery Hollywood union leader, who may have been a Communist.

Officially chaired by liberal screenwriter Marc Connelly, the HDC was actually run by George Pepper, “an energetic young violinist whose career was cut short by a hand injury” and who was later identified as a Communist Party member.46

With nearly one thousand members by January 1944, the HDC had

“emerged as the most sophisticated partisan political organization Hollywood had ever seen: well-funded, fluent in the latest campaign technology, and committed to hardball campaigning,” according to Ronald Brownstein in
The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood–Washington Connection
.47

In the July primaries, it was credited with unseating anti-FDR Representative John M. Costello—a Rita Hayworth broadcast castigating him as a

“renegade Democrat” was thought to be the final blow—and with securing the party’s nomination in a second Los Angeles congressional district for one of its members, actress Helen Gahagan Douglas.

As the influence and prestige of the HDC grew, the movie colony’s frustrated right wing reacted by forming an activist organization of its own. In February 1944, one hundred industry conservatives, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, and Walt Disney, met at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to announce the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Director Sam Wood, with whom Reagan had argued politics on the set of
Kings Row
, was named president, and MGM screenwriter and producer James Kevin McGuinness, a favorite of Louis B. Mayer’s, became executive committee chairman. Both were fanatic anti-Communists, eager to purge Hollywood of what they saw as a dangerously subversive minority and convinced that the Roosevelt administration was a Trojan horse packed with Reds and pinkos poised to take over the government.48

“The American motion picture is, and will continue to be, held by Americans for the American people, in the interests of America, and dedicated to the preservation and continuance of the American scene and the
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American way of life,” Wood declared at the Beverly Wilshire meeting.49

The group’s Statement of Principles—which attempted to cross Harry Warner with Abraham Lincoln, but now sounds proto-Nixonian—was reprinted in full-page ads in the trade papers the following morning: In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crackpots. We believe that we represent the vast majority of the people who serve this great medium of expression.

But unfortunately it has been an unorganized majority. This has been almost inevitable. The very love of freedom, of the rights of the individual, make this great majority reluctant to organize. But now we must, or we shall meanly lose “the last, best hope on earth.”

As members of the motion-picture industry, we must face and accept an especial responsibility. Motion pictures are inescapably one of the world’s greatest forces for influencing public thought and opinion, both at home and abroad. In this fact lies solemn obligation. We refuse to permit the effort of Communist, Fascist, and other totalitarian-minded groups to pervert this powerful medium into an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs. We pledge ourselves to fight, with every means at our organized command, any effort of any group or individual to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.50

The launching of the Alliance, as it came to be known, was timed to coincide with a dinner in honor of Vice President Henry Wallace hosted by the liberal Free World Association, and it was the opening shot in the ideological war that would dominate Hollywood politics well into the 1950s.

Less than three months after its first meeting,
The New York Times
reported,

“A wide cleavage in Hollywood’s political and economic thought . . . has resulted in the breaking up of some long-established writing teams and has even extended into the colony’s social life. The factional spirit is most pronounced in studio commissaries at lunchtime. Talent groups—particularly writers and directors—have broken previous bonds of friendship, the so-called liberal thinkers grouping at certain tables, the conservatives at others.

But in their references to one another they are ‘Fascists’ or ‘Communists.’”51

As the 1944 presidential election approached, the fledgling Alliance was no match for the thriving HDC, which went all-out to win a fourth term for FDR, despite his replacement of Henry Wallace, the darling of the left, 1 6 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House with the provincial but less controversial Harry Truman. Working closely with the California State Democratic Committee and the Democratic National Committee, George Pepper deployed hundreds of movie stars across the nation, culminating in an election eve broadcast on all four major radio networks. Humphrey Bogart narrated, Judy Garland sang, Groucho Marx told jokes, and lyricist E. Y. Harburg, who had written “Over the Rainbow,” provided jingles. As a finale, one star after another stepped up to the microphone and endorsed the Democratic ticket: Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Bennett, Irving Berlin, Joseph Cotten, John Garfield, Rita Hayworth, George Jessel, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Lana Turner, Claudette Colbert, and even the supposedly apolitical Jane Wyman.52

Although Reagan did not take part in the broadcast, he gave $100 to the HDC during the 1944 campaign.53 Along with Wyman, he was among the horde of stars who turned out to hear Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, give a speech attacking the Republican candidate, New York governor Thomas Dewey. Neil Reagan recalled the endless political arguments he and Ron had then: “On Sunday afternoon up at his house above Sunset Boulevard . . . there used to be a big gathering of the

[Jack] Bennys and the [George] Burnses. . . . If they were all out around the pool, in about thirty minutes the Reagan brothers would have driven everybody into the house with our battles on politics. His statement to me always was: ‘That’s the trouble with you guys. Anybody who voted for Roosevelt is a Communist.’ And I used to agree with him heartily, at which point he’d get the screaming meemies.”54

Ronald Reagan was crushed to hear the news of FDR’s death on April 12, 1945. Nearly fifty years later, Elvin Crawford, who served with Reagan at Fort Roach, remembered how upset he looked: “That weekend I had to stay over at the base, and Ronnie was Duty Officer. Saturday afternoon the whole place was empty. I saw him coming down Main Street, past Stage 2, with his head down and slowly shaking. He seemed really stricken, like he had a migraine. When he looked at me I saw he was in despair. ‘Oh, ser-geant, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country.’”55

Eighteen days after the President’s death, Hitler committed suicide as Allied troops closed in on Berlin; Victory in Europe was declared on May 8. Shortly after, raw footage filmed by FMPU combat-camera crews at German concentration camps arrived at Fort Roach to be edited for viewing at the Pentagon. Reagan was among the handful of officers on the base
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1 6 1

to see the “ghastly images,” an experience that only intensified his anti-Fascism, as well as the sympathy for Jews and other minorities drilled into him by his father. Reagan would later say that he kept a print of one of these films to show his children.56