Playing President by Robert Scheer

Author:Robert Scheer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: akashic books
Published: 2006-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

In his view, it was war, as he stated back in 1951: “The Russians sent their first team, their ace string, here to take us over … We were up against hard-core organizers.”

Some of Reagan’s critics of the time suggested that the aging actor (he was forty then) was attempting to lay out a political string to compensate for a stalled acting career. But whatever the original motivation, there can be little doubt of the passionate hatred that Reagan developed for the people he considered Hollywood’s hard-core Communists and their liberal fellow travelers. And the feeling was mutual. It was a civil war within a community that pretends to familial intimacy and even attains it at times, perhaps more than in any other industry. To hear each side tell it, the other had all the guns. There is now substantial literature documenting the fact that there was a blacklist and that many artists—actors, writers, directors—had their careers destroyed because people like Reagan could reach producers and theater owners and advertisers. But as Reagan describes it, the Reds had the power of the pen and mouth—to besmirch reputations and to organize effective fronts to cloak subversion with the protection of the First Amendment. To be sure, both sides played hardball and Reagan, who was out in front for his cause, took his lumps.

It was similar to the ways in which one could view the campus disturbances at Berkeley over the Vietnam War when he was Governor more than fifteen years later. The students saw that Reagan had the regents of the university and the cops, but he must have recognized that the students had grabbed the high moral ground and would win.

It is easy for Reagan to feel the aggrieved party. But then again, that’s not unusual in an activist. The problem, however, is that Reagan’s basic education for the presidency—his worldview—seems to have grown rather linearly and simplistically out of the Hollywood and Berkeley skirmishes with “communism.” To this date, a conversation with Reagan clearly indicates that he knows and cares less about the Sino-Soviet dispute in judging world events than he does about the battles within the Screen Actors Guild of the early ’50s.

In fact, Reagan must now detest the Sino-Soviet dispute, because any such complexity, if accepted, would mitigate against the rage that still wells up in him at the memory of those Commies who first broke his liberal faith and led him on the long march toward a conservative presidency. The new faith, steeled in combat, was simple, direct: Communism is godless and its practitioners are monsters. He believed that in 1951 in Los Angeles and in 1980 in Orlando, Florida:

SCHEER You attacked “godless communism,” and I’m curious about the use of the word godless—why is that an important element there?

REAGAN Well, because this is one of the vital precepts of communism, that we are accidents of nature.

SCHEER But is it the godlessness that makes them more violent, more aggressive, more expansionist?

REAGANWell, it is one that gives them less regard for humanity or human beings.

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