Recollections of Ronald Reagan’s time in Hollywood are full of myth and misinformation. From the right’s perspective, his role as a union man who campaigned for Truman is conveniently forgotten; the left, on the other hand, has held tight to its view of him as an archconservative Red baiter.
What is indisputable is that the 40th president of the United States came to office with a deep-seated hatred of Communism. But less known than his commitment to its end was that he already had a plan for seeing to it. In fact, it was during the bizarre McCarthy-era Red Scare that the seeds of his campaign against the ideology were planted.
The key to unlocking and understanding Reagan’s evolution was found in 75 legal-file boxes in a house at the end of a dirt road in Canoga Park, where former movie-industry union chief Roy Brewer lived with his daughter and son-in-law. Brewer, who turned out to be both a witness and archivist for Reagan’s time in Hollywood, became the closest thing the future commander in chief—an officer and later president of the Screen Actors Guild—ever had to a mentor.
Brewer saved everything from his life in Hollywood, and as it turns out, his papers form a remarkable portrait of Reagan’s life as a movie star, liberal Democrat and union man. The boxes held a treasure trove of private correspondence, speeches, congressional documents, Communist Party newspapers, transcripts of testimony from executive sessions and minutes from closed union meetings—the total of which provides a new view of the most enigmatic president in recent memory.
He was no buffoon of a conservative either because being liberal is the solely sensible thing to be ... otherwise we can all go hurtling back to a pre-liberal age when groups today who think nothing of their own liberties and even less for those who live without them, would know the ignoble life of withheld liberties.
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