Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [101]
“Nino was amazed to discover that my idea of fun was to do what needed to be done, myself,” Reagan wrote. “This included building paddock 1 6 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House fences—even a quarter-mile track with the inner rail posts slanted at the proper angle and every post hole dug by hand, by me.”73 Ronnie named the Northridge ranch Yearling Row, for The Yearling, which won Jane raves when it opened at the end of the year, and Kings Row, his biggest screen success.
“Meanwhile I was blindly and busily joining every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world,” he would write of this crucial transition period in both his personal and professional life, when his movie work “at times seemed to be a sideline, what with everything else that was happening.”74 Whether he realized it or not at the time, during these years Reagan was launching his third successful career—after radio announcer and movie star—as a political activist and industry spokesman. “I found him totally changed after the war,” recalled producer Frank McCarthy. “He had gotten so serious, to the point that he was talking about the world and politics all the time. People started listening to him at parties.”75
In June 1946 he was approached to run for Congress again—this time as a Democrat. “Heck, I couldn’t do that,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
“If I did, I’d be the subject of criticism as a politician. I couldn’t go around making speeches without feeling I was doing it for self-glorification. No, I don’t want to have any ax to grind.”76 Wyman was quoted in another paper: “They wanted him to run for Congress. He’s very politically minded.
I’m not.”77
Reagan’s postwar political activities began the day after he left Fort Roach in late August 1945, when he won a seat on the board of the Hollywood chapter of the American Veterans Committee. The newly formed AVC’s high-minded internationalism stood in contrast to the raw anti-Communism of such traditional organizations as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and it enlisted such notables as Franklin D.
Roosevelt Jr., theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, cartoonist Bill Mauldin, and Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II.
Even General Eisenhower was an early supporter.78
“I myself observed more than forty veterans’ organizations arise,”
Reagan later wrote. “[M]ost of them seemed to be highly intolerant of color, creed and common sense. I joined the American Veterans Committee because of their feeling that the members should be citizens first and veterans afterward—and, as it worked out, I became a large wheel in their operations.”79 The Hollywood chapter was the second largest of Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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some seven hundred chapters; as chairman of its membership committee, Reagan personally enrolled at least one tenth of its two thousand members.80
Reagan also stepped up his involvement in the Hollywood Democratic Committee, which continued to wield considerable clout in California politics after the impressive role it had played in Roosevelt’s 1944 reelection. In early 1946, the HDC merged with its New York counterpart, the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP), and became its Hollywood affiliate, known as HICCASP. Harold Ickes was named executive chairman of the combined organization, and FDR’s Hollywood-based son, James Roosevelt, became executive director of HICCASP. George Pepper, who had run the HDC, became the executive secretary of HICCASP. By mid-year, “3,300 professional exhibitionists,” as Time dubbed the Hollywood contingent, stood beside Albert Einstein