Ronnie and Nancy (21 page)

“I want all of you to know that I did not sleep last night, thinking of my trip back to Dixon, where I could meet my old friends,” Reagan said in his speech at the kickoff of the parade. “I counted the 77 persons whom I have been credited with pulling out of the Rock River at Lowell Park many times during the night.”101 As Louella rose to cut him off, Bob
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Hope’s sidekick, Jerry Colonna, whispered, “This fellow must be running for Congress!”102

“During the couple of days it took to reach Dixon, I got to know Ronnie quite well,” recalled Ann Rutherford, then an MGM starlet, who was also traveling with her mother. “You know, who else are you going to talk to? Picture people stuck with picture people when you went into the dining car, and over a couple of dinners my mother and I were so impressed with him. He had an idea about everything, especially political things. My mother shook her head and said to me, ‘He is
not
going to stay in the picture business. He has far more important fish to fry, and he’ll do it.’ He really had suggestions on
everything
. For instance, he said to me, ‘You do have a three-check bankbook, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, why?’ He said,

‘Well, what do you do with your canceled checks?’ I said, ‘I put a rubber band around them and throw them in a shoe box.’ And he said, ‘Well, what you should do is, when you get them back, take a little Scotch tape and tape them to the stubs. That way you know where everything is.’ ”103

Clouding the festivities in Dixon was the inevitability of America’s involvement in World War II. The war had started two years earlier with Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and as country after country fell to the Nazis, including France in the summer of 1940, an increasingly bitter and urgent debate divided America. On one side were the isolationists, who were opposed to America’s entanglement in any foreign wars; on the other the interventionists, who believed it was America’s duty to fight beside Britain, the only Western European democracy still resisting Hitler.

Although Roosevelt had been reelected in November 1940 promising to keep the country out of war, he was secretly plotting with Winston Churchill to do just the opposite while publicly promoting preparedness, rearmament, and aid to Britain. For most of 1940 and 1941, the isolationists, led by the influential America First Committee, were ascendant. By May 1941, eight months after it had been founded, the AFC had almost 850,000 dues-paying members,104 and among its most prominent supporters were Charles Lindbergh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alice Longworth Roosevelt, and former ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who had been recalled from London by FDR for being too eager to appease the Germans.

The AFC was headquartered in Chicago, where its principal backers were General Robert E. Wood, the chairman of Sears Roebuck, and
Chicago
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House
Tribune
publisher Colonel Robert McCormick. The only movie star on its national board was Lillian Gish, who during 1940 and 1941 was starring in the Chicago production of
Life with Father
105 and, through her good friend Colleen Moore, seeing a lot of Loyal and Edith Davis. Although the AFC

would later come to be seen as a reactionary and even anti-Semitic group, its membership included such leading liberals as future ambassador Chester Bowles, and it began as a student antiwar group at Yale that included Gerald Ford, Sargent Shriver, and future Yale president Kingman Brewster.106 It should also be remembered that between August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact, and June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the American Communist Party and its left-wing sympathizers were also vociferously isolationist.

Indeed, the American political scene during the prewar period was so complicated that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been started in 1938 by Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a far-left Democrat from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to investigate pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund, was soon taken over by Congressman Martin Dies, a far-right Democrat from Texas, who promptly launched an investigation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, claiming it was “under the control of Communists.”107 As the Brown Scare turned into the Red Scare, and Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe, the Anti-Nazi League—which had been formed in 1936

and had in its vanguard everyone from Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Ham-mett, and Dorothy Parker to Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, and Groucho Marx108—changed its name to the Hollywood League for Democratic Action and lost many of its movie star members.109

Nonetheless, Congressman Dies spent the month of August 1940 in Hollywood personally interviewing many of the stars associated with the Anti-Nazi League and like-minded groups. “One by one, the accused came to his hotel to seek absolution,” Neal Gabler writes in
An Empire of Their
Own
, “Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Luise Rainer, Franchot Tone, even Jimmy Cagney, who left telling reporters that the charges claiming Hollywood was permeated by Communism were ‘so exaggerated that they are ridiculous.’”110

Cagney was papering over the fact that the Communist Party in Hollywood had been steadily growing since the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and had a strong appeal for the socially conscious intellectuals in the community. As Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner write in
Radical Hollywood
,
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“In this world where networking meant everything, the Communist Party’s Popular Front was, from the middle thirties until the late forties,
the
network for the cerebral progressive, the inveterate activist, and the determined labor unionist.”111 Ring Lardner Jr., for example, was drawn into the Party by his co-writer on
A Star Is Born
, Budd Schulberg, in 1937. In his memoir,
I’d Hate Myself in the Morning
, he says, “I thus became one of about two dozen party members in Hollywood. (Five years later, the count was well over two hundred.)”112

In
Dutch
, Edmund Morris repeats a startling claim by the screenwriter Howard Fast, that Ronald Reagan tried to join the Party in 1938. “Reagan got carried away by stories of the Communist Party helping the dispossessed, the unemployed, and the homeless,” Fast told Morris. “Some of his friends, people he respected, were Party members. So he turned to them.

Said he wanted to become a Communist.” According to Fast, who was in the Party at the time, Reagan’s
Brother Rat
costar Eddie Albert and his far-left Mexican wife, Margo, talked him out of it, at the behest of the local Party hierarchy, who thought Reagan was a “flake.”113 Leonora Hornblow told me she was “shocked” by Morris’s story, and said Ronnie “never gave any indication” of Communist leanings in their political discussions on the
Brother Rat
set.114

The first HUAC investigation of Hollywood fizzled out, but a year later the movie industry was under attack again. “[The movies have]

ceased to be an instrument of entertainment,” declared the isolationist Senator Gerald B. Nye of North Dakota in an inflammatory speech he gave at an America First rally in St. Louis on August 1, 1941. “They have become the most gigantic engines of propaganda in existence to rouse . . .

war fever in America and plunge this nation to destruction.” The studios had the power to “address 80 million people a week,” he pointed out, and were run by executives who came from “Russia, Hungary, Germany, and the Balkan countries.” As he shouted out their names—Mayer, Warner, Goldwyn, Cohn—the crowd booed.115 “Are you ready to send your boys to bleed and die in Europe, to make the world safe for Barney Balaban and Adolph Zukor and Joseph Schenck?” he railed, naming the president and chairman of Paramount and the president of Fox.116

One month later, on September 11—just four days before Louella Parsons Day in Dixon—Lindbergh, the AFC’s most popular spokesman, weighed in with a speech in Des Moines that created a national uproar and would tarnish his reputation forever. “The three most important 1 1 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House groups,” he said, “who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” He went on to say that the Jews’ “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”117

On September 25, 1941—ten days after the Dixon festivities—Harry Warner was called before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Moving Picture Propaganda. The subcommittee, chaired by Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho, a leading isolationist, had compiled a list of fifty films it said contained pro-war propaganda, including eight made by Warner Bros. Harry Warner didn’t flinch. “You may correctly charge me with being anti-Nazi.

But no one can charge me with being anti-American,” he told the committee.118 “Shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany I became convinced that Hitlerism was an evil force designed to destroy free people, whether they were Catholics, Protestants, or Jews.” He added that he had

“always been in accord with President Roosevelt’s foreign policy.”119

Warner Bros. wasn’t making propaganda movies so much as historical movies, Harry Warner calmly claimed. But as both proud Jews and the most conspicuous Roosevelt supporters among the Hollywood hierarchy, the Warners had taken the lead in opposing the Nazis and preparing the American public for eventual intervention in Europe. In April 1938, to give one example of their high-profile efforts, Jack and Ann Warner had hosted a $100-a-plate dinner at their Beverly Hills estate to raise money for refugees from Germany, with the exiled Nobel Prize writer Thomas Mann as guest of honor.120 In a 1939 article Harry Warner wrote for the
Christian
Science Monitor
, he stated that the film industry had “implied duties to ethics, patriotism, and the fundamental rights of individuals.”121 Despite his demurrals to the Clark subcommittee, Warners was definitely making propaganda movies, including at least two starring Ronald Reagan.

Murder in the Air
, which Reagan began shooting a few days after the war started in Europe in September 1939, was originally titled
The Enemy
Within
and briefly retitled
Uncle Sam Awakens
before its release in early 1940. It was the fourth and last in a series in which he played Brass Bancroft, a nonchalantly heroic Secret Service agent who defends America from smugglers of illegal aliens, international counterfeiters, foreign sabo-teurs, and home-grown subversives.122 These were the films in which he earned his self-described reputation as the “Errol Flynn of the Bs,”123 with

“one fight per every 1000 feet of film.”124 To promote the third in the series,
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Smashing the Money Ring
, Warners filled theater lobbies with fingerprint booths, wanted posters, and “crime clue boxes,” in which patrons were encouraged to drop the names of suspicious neighbors.125
Murder in the Air
introduced a futuristic weapon that could shoot enemy aircraft out of the sky, and the trailer beckoned: “Join Ronald Reagan battling 20,000 unseen enemies to protect . . . the most deadly weapon ever known to man . . . a death ray projector . . . the greatest force for peace ever discovered.”126

International Squadron
, the other Reagan movie cited by the Clark committee, actually opened with an on-screen dedication to the men of the RAF and, like all Warners war movies, was made with the full cooperation of the Department of Defense. “I was a rascal who ferried Lockheed bombers to London, joined the R.A.F., and squared all my sins by taking a suicide mission,” Reagan would describe his role as a bomber pilot in this “timely production about the Battle of Britain. . . . Twin engine Lockheed planes were rolling off the line a few blocks from the studio and being flown directly to England. If we needed one of those in our picture, we’d jolly well use it in a Lockheed hangar from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m. and then it was on its way to a real war.”127

According to Stephen Vaughn in
Ronald Reagan in Hollywood
, “Warner Brothers estimated in 1940 that it based a fifth of its movies on newspaper headlines.”128 Historians have suggested that this was where Reagan’s tendency to blur fact and fiction, to dramatize the political with the anecdotal, began, and point to the death ray projector as the model for his Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars, forty years later. Yet as his description of the use of U.S. military planes in
International Squadron
indicates, Reagan was quite aware of the difference between the fake and the real, and of the ironies that grew out of basing the former on the latter.

Lest anyone miss
International Squadron
’s pro-British message, Warners flew Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon from London for the splashy premiere in Dixon. This American comedy couple had become immensely popular in England for continuing to broadcast their weekly radio show during the darkest days of the Blitz. In Dixon they gave interviews to the local press in which they spoke of the fear and bravery of the English people, who had lived through nine months of nightly air raids by the Luftwaffe during the previous fall, winter, and spring.129

It’s clear which side Reagan was on—that of his bosses at Warners and his idol in the White House. As someone who avidly followed the news, he was keenly aware of the desperate situation in Europe—Hitler’s troops 1 2 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House had laid siege to Leningrad, and German submarines were blockading Britain, trying to stop American supplies released under the Lend Lease Act from getting through. Yet, as late as that November, a Gallup Poll disclosed that only 17 percent of the American public supported going to war against Germany.

On December 7, 1941, the debate between isolationists and interventionists was rendered moot by Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A day later, the United States Senate, with only one dissenting vote, declared war on Japan. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. America was at war whether it wanted to be or not. And suddenly the world apart didn’t seem so far away from the rest of the world and its problems after all.