Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [102]
“In the old days,” Time noted, “a motion picture star had needed nothing but a white Duesenberg and 175 suits to round himself out socially. In the words of Dorothy Parker, there was no ‘ism’ in Hollywood but plagia-rism. But modern studio life has become much more complicated. Today few stars, male or female, would be caught dead at a commissary lunch table without a Cause. Most of them, horrified at the thought of being considered bloated capitalists, favor leftish causes of one kind or another.”
Edward G. Robinson told the magazine he belonged to HICCASP “because the atom bomb, when it exploded over Hiroshima, blew up every ivory tower in the world.” Humphrey Bogart signed up “because I believe in the principles promulgated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”82
Reagan became one of the most active stars working the “rubber-chicken and glass-tinkling circuits” on behalf of the AVC and HICCASP. “It fed my ego,” he said, “since I had been so long away from the screen. I loved it.”83
He started wearing his glasses again for these public speeches—an indication of how seriously he took his new role. His first speech, at Santa Ana on December 8, 1945, was to promote racial harmony by honoring Japanese-American veterans. In four brief lines, he displayed his innate idealism with eloquence: “The blood that has soaked into the sands of the beaches is all one color. America stands unique in the world—a country not founded on race, but on a way and an ideal. Not in spite of, but because of our polyglot 1 6 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.”84
Two nights later, at an opening dinner for HICCASP’s conference on
“Atomic Power and Foreign Policy,” Reagan’s reading of “Set Your Clocks at U-235,” a Norman Corwin poem warning of the danger of nuclear annihi-lation and calling for world unity, was followed by speeches by Congress-woman Helen Gahagan Douglas, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, and novelist Thomas Mann.85 During the winter and spring of 1946, Reagan delivered speeches and wrote articles on the necessity of international cooperation, the promotion of racial and religious tolerance, and the threat of a neo-Fascist conspiracy to keep the world divided and unstable.
In an article for the A.V.C. Bulletin of February 15, 1946, he lambasted the American Order of Patriots, a whites-only veterans organization, and the anti-Semitic demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith as “home-grown fascists”
intent on installing “a strongman government in America” and starting World War III. He ended: “I think the A.V.C. can be a key organization in the preservation of democracy for which 300,000 Americans died, and because I have attacked the extreme right does not mean I am ignorant of the menace of the complete left. They, too, want to force something unwanted on the American people, and the fact that many of them go along with those of us who are liberal means nothing because they are only hitching a ride as far as we go, hoping they can use us as a vehicle for their own program.”86
Yet later that month, along with Gregory Peck, bandleader Artie Shaw, and director Edward Dmytryk, he lent his name to an anti-colonialist ad taken by the Los Angeles Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy in the People’s Daily World, a local Communist Party newspaper.87 After giving a speech to the men’s club of the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church, he was approached by the pastor, Reverend Cleveland Kleihauer.
Kleihauer had married Jane and Ronnie, and Reagan admired him for his sermons against discrimination. “Don’t you think,” the minister asked,
“while you’re denouncing Fascism, it would be fair to speak out equally strongly against the tyranny of Communism?”88 At his next speaking engagement, filling in for James Roosevelt, Reagan