Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [104]
This tumultuous meeting ended with the formation of a seven-member policy committee—including Roosevelt, Trumbo, Lawson, and Reagan—which was to draft a resolution in time for the next executive council meeting. As Reagan was leaving, producer Dore Schary, who was then working for David O. Selznick, invited him to Olivia de Havilland’s home. There he found Roosevelt and a small group of HICCASP’s leading liberals, including the screenwriter Don Hartman and the composer Johnny Green. According to Reagan, Roosevelt and de Havilland revealed that they had deliberately provoked the dissension that night to flush out the “others.” In turn, he helped them write what they called a “disinfect-ing resolution” to force the hand of the Communist faction at the next meeting. Reagan had co-starred with de Havilland in Santa Fe Trail before the war, but he didn’t know her well. They had a good laugh, he said, over the fact that each had suspected the other of being a Communist until that night.96
The ideological wrangling went on for the rest of the month, but Law-Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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son and Trumbo blocked all attempts to clearly dissociate HICCASP from the Communist Party. Fed up, Roosevelt and de Havilland submitted their resignations, as did a number of other liberals. On July 30, what was left of the executive council adopted a resolution declaring HICCASP independent of “any political party or organization, Republican, Democratic, Communist, Socialist, or other.”97
That week, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a young associate professor of history at Harvard and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Age of Jackson, published an article titled “The U.S. Communist Party” in Life magazine. Its publication in the country’s most widely read weekly indicated how central the subject had become to the national conversation. Schlesinger began: For better or for worse, the Communist Party of the U.S. is here to stay. It grew when the U.S.S.R. was still a gamble; it will grow faster as the gamble pays off, and it will persist if repressive legislation forces it underground. . . . The Center, as party members call the smoky brick headquarters on 12th Street in New York City, controls an active and disciplined following through the country. . . .
Communists are working overtime to expand party influence, open and covert, in the labor movement, among Negroes, among veterans, among unorganized liberals.
Schlesinger used the AVC and ICCASP as examples of “groups of liberals” that were “organized for some benevolent purpose, and because of the innocence, laziness and stupidity of most of the membership, perfectly designed for control by an alert minority.” He went on to make his most urgent point: “The Communist Party is no menace to the right in the U.S. It is a great help to the right because of its success in dividing and neutralizing the left. It is to the American left that Communism presents the most serious danger. On the record, Communists have fought other leftists as viciously as they have fought fascists. Their methods are irrecon-cilable with honest cooperation, as anyone who has tried to work with them has found out the hard way.”98
When HICCASP regrouped, Dore Schary succeeded Jimmy Roosevelt, and the young Frank Sinatra took de Havilland’s place as vice chairman and the group’s most tireless public speaker.99 Its membership roster still boasted stars ranging from Humphrey Bogart to Gypsy Rose Lee, as well as Ronald Reagan. When Time questioned national executive director 1 7 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Hannah Dorner about alleged “Communist influence,” she dismissively replied, “Says who and so what? If the ICCASP program is like the Communist line, that is purely coincidental.”100
After Henry Wallace criticized Truman’s hardening policy toward the Soviet Union