Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [156]
By then, after Mao Zedong’s takeover of China, the North Korean invasion of South Korea, and the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving atomic secrets to the Russians, anti-Communism had become something akin to a national religion. The movement’s wild-eyed ayatollah, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, had burst from obscurity that February with a fiery Lincoln’s Birthday speech accusing the State Department of harboring 205 “card-carrying Communists.” Its holy grail, the Internal Security Act of 1950, which provided for the registration of Communist and Communist front organizations and for the internment of Communists during a national emergency, was passed over Truman’s veto in September.
Reagan wisely refrained from praising McCarthy—he would later say that McCarthy was “using a shotgun when he should have been using a rifle”—perhaps because McCarthy never targeted Hollywood, perhaps because Reagan still considered himself a Democrat.137 In the November 1950 election for a Senate seat from California he campaigned for Con-gresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of actor Melyvn Douglas, against Richard Nixon, who had made a name for himself with HUAC
by helping to expose Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department offi-2 5 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House cial, as a Soviet spy, and who now accused the liberal Douglas of being
“pink right down to her underwear.”138
There is reason to believe, however, that Reagan’s loyalty to the party of his father, as well as to Douglas, was wavering—and that Nancy may have had something to do with that. Nancy Reagan told me, “I knew nothing about politics, and I wasn’t even registered when I met Ronnie.”139 Reagan, however, later wrote that the girl he had met “was more than disinterested in Leftist causes: she was violently opposed to such shenanigans.”140 Once, when I asked her if she believed that there was a Soviet-backed plan to infiltrate Hollywood, she declared without a moment’s thought, “Damn right there was. And they were trying to get their message into the movies.”141
In her memoir, A Full Life, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalls that Nancy’s old acting mentor and would-be political instructor, ZaSu Pitts, “who was livid on the subject of communism, made a particularly vicious speech about me.”142 Anne Edwards quotes Pitts referring to Douglas as “the Pink Lady who would allow the Communists to take over our land and our homes as well.” Unbeknownst to Douglas, Reagan was in the audience that night with Nancy, and he apparently liked what he heard.143 Robert Cummings, Reagan’s co-star from Kings Row, recalled Ronnie calling in the middle of the night to ask him to support Nixon. “We’re giving a party for him tomorrow night,” he said. “Can you come?” “But isn’t he a Republican?” Cummings asked. “I’ve switched,” said Reagan. “I sat down and made a list of the people I know, and the most admired people I know are Republicans.”144 Reagan would not formally change his party registration for another twelve years, but he never endorsed another Democrat.
In 1951, Reagan stepped up his anti-Communist activities. He took to the dinner speaker circuit on behalf of the Crusade for Freedom, and even made a short film for the organization that was “circulated to schools, civic groups, and churches around the country.”145 That spring HUAC held another round of hearings on Communist influence in the film industry, which both the SAG and MPIC boards endorsed. The SAG board refused to support Gale Sondergaard—Nancy’s colleague from East Side, West Side—after she took an ad in Variety announcing she had been subpoenaed by the committee and intended to take the Fifth Amendment. Sondergaard wouldn’t make another movie until 1969.146 Actor Sterling Hayden, on the other hand, testified that “joining the party was the stupidest thing I ever did,” identified