Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [96]
He played the briefing officer in these films, directing the pilots toward their targets as if he were sitting in the cockpit with them, thirty thousand feet above the Pacific, rather than in a projection room in Culver City—a task not so different from giving play-by-play descriptions of baseball games he wasn’t actually watching. “I would usually open with lines such as, ‘Gentlemen, you are approaching the coast of Honshu on a course of three hundred degrees. You are now twenty miles offshore. To your left, if you are on course, you should be able to see a narrow inlet.
To your right . . .’ ” His closing line was always the same: “Bombs away.”39
Reagan later said that his disillusionment with big government—“the first crack in my staunch liberalism”—began during his last year and a half in the Army. He attributed his nascent doubts to his experience with the civil service bureaucrats who arrived at Fort Roach halfway through the war. Until then, the FMPU, because of the sensitive nature of its work, had made do without civilian workers. According to Reagan, the new arrivals were transferred to Culver City after the Army, acting under pressure from Congress, ordered a 35 percent cut in civilians at all installations that employed them. “Neither Congress nor the military had figured on the ability of the Civil Service to achieve eternal life here on earth,” Reagan later wrote. “As fast as reductions took place, new positions were found for the displaced.”40 Whereas the FMPU’s personnel section had eighteen employees to handle the records of 1,200 men, he noted, the civil service sent more than twice that number to keep track of the 250 civilians assigned to Fort Roach. Furthermore, Reagan asserted, incompetent workers could be removed only by promoting them to better jobs, supervisors opposed reductions in the workforce because their own pay was based on how many workers they had under them, and requests to destroy unnecessary documents were met with orders from Washington to copy each document before destroying it. Although Reagan would one day de-ride such inefficiency and empire building as “the peculiar ways of the federal bureaucracy,” and use his Fort Roach anecdotes in political speeches, during the war years his New Deal beliefs were still strong.41
While filming This Is the Army, he spent his lunch hours debating politics with his Republican co-star, George Murphy, who like Reagan had been Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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brought up a Democrat and was hooked on politics at an early age. Murphy, however, had switched parties in 1939, and was heavily influenced by his good friend FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who told him that the New Deal was a Communist plot.42 For all their heated arguments, the two actors grew close. Two decades later Senator Murphy and Governor Reagan would be the first and second movie stars, respectively, to hold high government office, and the latter would write of the former, “I owe a great deal to this cool, dapper guy who had to deal with me and my early white-eyed liberal daze.
There were some of our associates, I’m sure, who believed I was as red as Moscow, but Murph never wavered in his defense of me even though I ranted and railed at him as an arch-reactionary (which he isn’t).”43
As his words make clear, Reagan moved left—not right—during the war, along with the Roosevelt administration and most of the movie industry’s liberal Democrats. The Soviet Union was now America’s ally, and once again Hollywood Communists, leftists, and liberals were united in the great anti-Fascist battle, as they had been from 1936 to 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin pact tore the first Popular Front apart. Even Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, prodded by the White House, joined the pro-Soviet campaign, releasing Song of Russia and Mission to Moscow, respectively, in 1943: the first was