2. Ron and Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), 117–22.
3. “Threatened in ’46 Strike, Ronald Reagan Testifies,” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1954, 3. Reagan subsequently wrote and talked about this a number of times.
4. Peggy Noonan, When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan (New York: VikingPenguin, 2001), 56–57; and Schweizer, Reagan’s War, 11–12.
5. Bill Clark has told me about the many threats during the gubernatorial years, which Clark said were too frequent to count. See Schweizer, Reagan’s War, 51–53, 124, 178–79, 216.
6. John Meroney, “Rehearsals for a Lead Role,” Washington Post, February 4, 2001, G8.
7. Joseph Shattan, Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Heritage Press, 1999), 236; Meroney, “Rehearsals for a Lead Role”; and Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, 6–7.
8. Arthur F. McClure, C. David Rice, and William T. Stewart, eds., Ronald Reagan: His First Career, A Bibliography of the Movie Years (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988), 12–17.
9. Doug McClelland, ed., Hollywood on Ronald Reagan: Friends and Enemies Discuss Our President, the Actor (Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber, 1983), 178.
10. John Meroney, an expert on Reagan’s Hollywood years, correctly notes that today’s conventional wisdom on Reagan’s movie work was poisoned by politics. The “B movie actor” tag was not slapped on Reagan until the 1980s, long after he left the industry, when people who disliked his politics aimed to discredit him across-the-board. John Meroney, “Night Unto Reagan,” National Review Online, August 4, 2005.
11. Daily Variety, February 9, 1950. Excerpted by McClelland, Hollywood on Ronald Reagan, 96. See Jack Gould, “Sweeping and Imaginative in Conception, ‘Omnibus’ of Ford Foundation Makes Video Debut,” New York Times, November 10, 1952.
12. He joined SAG on June 30, 1937, was appointed to the board July 1941, was elected
CHAPTER 3
1. Quoted in Joseph Lewis, What Makes Reagan Run? A Political Profile (New York: McGrawHill, 1968), 46; and Lou Cannon, Reagan (New York: Putnam, 1982), 141.
2. Reagan performed at the Last Frontier in February 1954. Later in 1954, he began the GE job. Information on Reagan at the Last Frontier was provided by the same hotel, which is now called the New Frontier; the name has been changed a number of times.
3. McClure et al., Ronald Reagan: His First Career, A Bibliography of the Movie Years, 188–93.
4. “General Electric Theater—1954–57,” directory of show episodes on file at RRL.
5. Reagan said this in a 1980 campaign stop at a GE plant in Erie, Pennsylvania. Text located at RRL. The show began on September 12, 1954 and ran in thirty- to sixty-minute installments. In all, 200 episodes were made during the show’s eight-year run. McClure et al., Ronald Reagan: His First Career, A Bibliography of the Movie Years, 188. See Morris, Dutch, 304.
6. Reagan, “Commencement Address at Eureka College,” June 7, 1957.
7. Ibid.
8. This episode of GE Theatre was titled, “No Skin Off Me.” It aired February 3, 1957. A copy of the video is located at the RRL.
9. McClure, Rice, and Stewart, eds., Ronald Reagan: His First Career, 188–93. See Schweizer, Reagan’s War, 33.
10. Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, Reagan’s Path to Victory (New York: The Free Press, 2004), 228.
11. Matthews said it gave him his first “sense of Reagan the politician.” Chris Matthews speaking at “The Reagan Legacy” conference, Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, CA, May 20, 1996.
12. McClure, Rice, and Stewart, eds., Ronald Reagan: His First Career, 193–94; and Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, eds., Reagan: A Life in Letters, 145n.
13. Reagan letter to Lorraine and Elwood Wagner, June 3, 1962, YAF collection.
14. Morris, Dutch, 314.
15. This is a UPI article that ran in the New York Times, May 9, 1961, titled, “Red Threat is Cited.”
16. Among these, see, for example: “Reagan Spreads Warning About Reds in Hollywood,” The Independent (Wilkes-Barre, PA), July 23, 1961. This was a UPI syndicated article.
17. Ronald Reagan, “Encroaching Government Controls,” Human Events, July 21, 1961, 457.
18. Ibid.
19. “Reagan Warns U.S. Is In War,” Bartlesville Examiner Enterprise, March 1, 1962.
20. “Reagan Says Free Word, Reds at War,” Dallas Times Herald, February 27, 1962; and Editorial, “In Our Opinion—‘Losing Our Freedom….By Installments,’” Angleton Times, February 29, 1962. (The date on the paper seems inaccurate, since that year was not a leap year.)
CHAPTER 4
1. Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, 311–12.
2. Ibid.
3. In 1968, Reagan made this exact plea in a stump speech in California—still prior to the deals later brokered by détente. Quoted in Smith, Who is Ronald Reagan?, 90.
4. Lyn Nofziger, Nofziger (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992), 43–44.
5. This quote was used vigorously in Reagan campaign ads at the time. See Gary G. Hamilton and Nicole Woolsey Biggart, Governor Reagan, Governor Brown: A Sociology of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 165.
6. Quotes cited in Lee Edwards, Ronald Reagan: A Political Biography (Houston, TX: Nordland, 1980), 203, 209.
7. Debate between Ronald Reagan and Robert F. Kennedy, “The Image of America and the Youth of the World,” CBS News, “Town Meeting of the World,” internationally televised, May 15, 1967. A video of the debate is located at the Reagan Library. I have a transcript of the debate, which I obtained from Bill Clark, who has held a copy in his personal files for almost forty years.
8. “The Ronnie-Bobby Show,” Newsweek, May 29, 1967, 26–27.
9. Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan (Roseville, CA: Prima, 2001), 169; and Michael Knox Beran, The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 150.
10. Lou Cannon, Ronnie and Jesse: A Political Odyssey (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 264.
11. Lewis, What Makes Reagan Run?, 196–97.
12. “The Ronnie-Bobby Show,” Newsweek, May 29, 1967, 26–27.
13. Cannon, Ronnie and Jesse, 264.
14. Hayward, The Age of Reagan, 170; and Jules Witcover and Richard M. Cohen, “Where’s the Rest of Ronald Reagan,” Esquire, March 1976, 153.
15. Reagan, “Veterans Day Address at North Albany Junior High School,” Albany, Oregon, November 11, 1967. On file at Reagan Library: “RWR—Speeches and Articles (1967),” folder, RRL, vertical files.
CHAPTER 5
1. For more on this, see the excellent research of Schweizer in his Reagan’s War, 108.
2. Allen in Schweizer, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 55–56; and Allen in Peter Hannaford, ed., Recollections of Reagan (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 6–8. Also, Allen spoke of the incident, and noted that it occurred specifically in the month of November, in an interview for the documentary, In the Face of Eviclass="underline" Reagan’s War in Word and Deed (American Vantage Films and Capital Films I, LLC, 2005).
3. Allen remarks, in Schweizer, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 55–56.
4. Ibid.
5. A superb source on Reagan’s thinking toward the Soviets during the latter 1970s is Kiron Skinner, who has studied Reagan for years, first as a doctoral candidate in foreign policy at Harvard, then later as an assistant to George Shultz, a Hoover Institution fellow, and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the individual who discovered a box containing the 670 handwritten drafts of Reagan’s radio broadcasts done between 1975–79, all researched and written entirely by Reagan. Some of these were published in the landmark volume, Reagan, In His Own Hand, coedited by Skinner and Martin and Annelise Anderson, as well as in subsequent volumes. Though hundreds of the broadcasts have been released and published, many remain unavailable. Skinner has carefully studied them all. Kiron F. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan, In His Own Hand (New York: The Free Press, 2001).