In that speech, he expressed aggressive words, telling his audience: “You are fighting for your lives. And you’re fighting against the best organized and the most capable enemy of freedom and of right and decency that has ever been abroad in the world.” He pointed to the 1930s, when he claimed that Communism came to Hollywood via a man he cryptically identified only as a technician who came to town “on direct orders from the Kremlin.” “When he quietly left our town a few years later the cells had been formed and planted in virtually all of our organizations, our guilds and unions. The framework for the Communist front organization had been established.”7
Although most of these anti-Communist statements were made as Reagan toured the country for GE, he used GE Theatre on several occasions to air his views. An example of this occurred during a February 3, 1957 broadcast, in which he played a boxing trainer. At the close of the broadcast, Reagan stepped back into his host duty to give his customary goodbye and plug for GE products. This time, however, he put in a word for Hungarian refugees, fresh off the disaster of October–November when Soviet tanks, under orders from Moscow, rolled in and killed tens of thousands of Hungarians, causing a large number to flee the country. “Ladies and gentlemen, about 160,000 Hungarian refugees have reached safety in Austria,” reported Reagan to his huge audience. “More are expected to come. These people need food, clothes, medicine, and shelter. You can help.” He told his fellow Americans to send donations to the Red Cross or to the church or synagogue of their choice.8 Those Hungarians were Reagan’s heroes: the Captive Peoples of the Communist bloc suffering the sword of Soviet repression, and this was perhaps the Great Communicator’s first use of the TV bully pulpit on behalf of Eastern Europeans.
There were other GE Theatre occasions where Reagan assumed political roles, most notably in a December 13, 1959 episode called “The House of Truth,” in which Reagan played a U.S. intelligence officer in an Asian village in which Communists burned down an American library. The officer not only helped reopen the library but countered the Communists. In yet another GE Theatre show, aired September 24, 1961, titled “The Iron Silence,” Reagan played a Soviet Major named Vasily Kirov during the occupation of Budapest. At the end of the episode, Kirov releases two Hungarians in his custody, telling them, “I never knew what freedom was until I saw you lose yours.”9 Reagan liked the line so much that he shared it years later when making a point in one of his 1970s radio broadcasts.10
Chris Matthews, a former speechwriter for Democrats and now a popular pundit and TV host, recalls tuning in to GE Theatre one night as a kid and observing Reagan saying, “This is a program I care a lot about personally.”11 Matthews was referring to a two-part finale titled, “My Dark Days,” broadcast on March 18 and 25, 1962. Reagan starred as the husband of a housewife who was asked by a friend to attend a meeting of a liberal Los Angeles group called the Alien Protection Committee, which claimed that its purpose was to promote the advancement of foreign-born Americans. The housewife and the FBI suspected the group was a Communist front. She infiltrated the group and became an informant. The script was adapted by Richard Collins from Marion Miller’s autobiography, I Was a Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife (Bobbs-Merrill, 1960).12
Indeed this episode was deeply personal to Reagan, who, a few weeks after it aired, wrote a letter to two friends in which he spoke of the difficulties he faced trying to get the show produced. He complained that it was “near impossible” to “cram five years of espionage into thirty minutes.” But that was the least of his problems: “I had to fight right down to the wire to make the Communists villains,” said Reagan. “When I say ‘fight’ I really mean that.” The problem, explained Reagan, was that there were liberals on the producing staff who believed that Communist infiltration was a fantasy “dreamed up” by “right-wingers,” and as such they attempted to sabotage the show. Reagan was especially irate over the fact that two of the producers and one director tried to cut the scene in which a little girl said her prayers. “Finally in a near knock-down, drag-out,” wrote Reagan, “they admitted their objection was because they were atheists.” While Reagan was victorious in this battle, the company remained ignorant of his struggle to get the program produced.13
EARLY 1960S—“WE ARE IN A WAR” AND “WE ARE LOSING”
During these later GE years, SAG once again became a part of Reagan’s life, as he returned to his role of union president in 1960 after an eight-year hiatus. Almost immediately after resuming this high-profile position, Reagan faced the difficult responsibility of negotiating a new general contract with the studios. Despite the complex nature of this hurdle, Reagan won. As a measure of his triumph, when he announced the strike-settlement package to a mass meeting of the membership on April 18, 1960, Reagan received a standing ovation and a landslide approval vote of 6,399 to 259.14
As SAG president, Reagan found new venues for voicing his anti-Communist cause, and while he had labored hard to stymie the spread of Communism in Hollywood, he felt that the battle was far from over. In 1960, he boycotted a 20th Century-Fox banquet for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and a few months later in May 1961 he asserted that Communists in Hollywood were “crawling out of the rocks.” To Reagan, the Communist Party had “ordered once again” a massive infiltration of TV and motion pictures. “We in Hollywood broke their power once,” Reagan rallied, “but it was only an isolated battle.”15 In the years since his absence from SAG, Reagan believed the Communists had once again gained a foothold in Hollywood and were again in the process of spreading their anti-democratic sentiment. “They are renewing in the spirit of Lenin’s maxim of two steps forward and one backward,” said the future president in July 1961. This particular Reagan clarion call was picked up by UPI in a story syndicated throughout the country.16
Trying to convey the gravity of what was happening, he contended in another July 1961 speech that the “ideological struggle with Russia” was the “number one problem in the world.” In the same talk where he shared that thought, he raised the intensity, striking the notion of “war.” Offering his view of how America should react to the hazards of Communism, Reagan criticized those who “subscribe to a theory that we are at peace, and we must make no overt move which might endanger that peace.” He declared that “the inescapable truth” is that America is “at war,” and “we are losing that war simply because we don’t, or won’t realize that we are in it.”17
Some deemed this rhetoric too bellicose, but Reagan felt that such candor was necessary. We may not, after all, think we’re at war, Reagan repeatedly told his GE Theatre soldiers, but the Communists certainly feel they’re at war with us. He assailed Communism’s aggressive and expansionary nature, and its expectation of inevitable conflict with the capitalist West:
Karl Marx established the cardinal principle that communism and capitalism cannot coexist in the world together. Our way of life, our system, must be totally destroyed; then the world Communist state will be erected on the ruins. In interpreting Marx, Lenin said, “It is inconceivable that the Soviet Republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialistic states. Ultimately, one or the other must conquer.”