Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [103]
Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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After watching a small but dedicated Communist faction outmaneu-ver the liberal majority at the American Veterans Committee’s state convention in April, he wrote a letter expressing concern to Charles Bolté, the chairman of the organization’s national planning commission.90 A few weeks later, he was angered to learn that the location for a meeting of the Hollywood chapter had been inexplicably moved from KFWB’s 750-seat auditorium—which Reagan had secured free of charge from Warners—to a seventy-five-seat hall owned by the leftist-dominated Screen Cartoonists Guild. When Reagan arrived at the meeting, he recalled, “hundreds of A.V.C. boys were milling about outside, unable to get in. The KFWB hall was still available and gratis—but someone preferred a hall which could hold only a ‘small, working majority.’ It was an old Communist trick but new to me.”91
Using such tactics, the Communists took over the AVC’s Los Angeles–area council, but their attempt to gain control of the entire organization was thwarted by the liberals at its national convention in Des Moines in June, which Reagan was unable to attend because he was filming Stallion Road.92 But soon after the convention he wrote to Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson, who had called the AVC a Communist front, informing him that the organization had dealt with “a tentative pink infiltration . . . in true democratic fashion.”93
That same month, Olivia de Havilland set off a similar power struggle within HICCASP when she refused to deliver two speeches in Seattle as written by her fellow executive council member Dalton Trumbo, one of Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriters and a secret Communist since 1943. She felt that Trumbo’s text was too left-wing and worried that the organization was becoming “automatically pro-Russian.” In her rewritten speech, she sought to stake the liberal claim for the soul of the organization while answering right-wing accusations that groups like HICCASP
were controlled by party-liners loyal to Moscow by unequivocally stating,
“The overwhelming majority of people who make up the liberal and progressive groups of this country believe in democracy, and not in communism. We believe that the two cannot be reconciled here in the United States, and we believe that every effort should be exerted to make democracy work, and to extend its benefits to every person in every community throughout our land.”94
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House on July 2, James Roosevelt weighed in with his concern about the growing perception that the organization was dominated by leftists, and he proposed a resolution supporting the democratic, free enterprise system and rejecting Communism. Reagan, who had been asked to fill a vacancy on the council, was attending his first meeting and was amazed by the hysterical reaction to Roosevelt’s suggestion:
A well-known musician [elsewhere identified as Artie Shaw] sprang to his feet. He offered to recite the USSR constitution from memory, yelling that it was a lot more democratic than that of the United States. A prominent movie writer leaped upward. He said if there was ever a war between the United States and Russia, he would volunteer for Russia. . . . After this hubbub of dismay had continued for a while, I decided that an Irishman couldn’t stay out. . . . I took the floor and endorsed what [James Roosevelt] said. Well, sir, I found myself waist-high in epithets such as “Fascist” and “capitalist scum” and “enemy of the proletariat” and “witch-hunter” and “Red-baiter” before I could say boo. . . . Dalton Trumbo, the writer, was very vociferous. Most vehement of all, however, was John Howard