Ronald Reagan: From Liberalism to the Light
James Hirsen
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
America has lost one of the greatest presidents. The nation also lost one of the greatest conservative thinkers. The Left Coast Report reflects upon the Hollywood star, the towering leader and the American icon.
A Special Edition of
THE LEFT COAST REPORT
The Dreamer
In 1937 a young radio broadcaster drove to the West Coast in pursuit of a Hollywood dream. A friend introduced him to an agent. As good fortune would have it, the 26-year-old would land a screen test.
Only in a Hollywood fantasy would a kid from the Midwest get signed to a major movie studio on his first try. But in a whimsical script-come-to-life moment, Warner Brothers signed the budding actor to a seven-year deal for $200 a week.
At the time, the studios produced hundreds of films a year. The reliable young actor would fit into the system perfectly. His first movie role was as a radio announcer in “Love Is on the Air.” During the following three years he would make about 20 more films.
The ‘Hemophiliac Liberal’
When he first signed the contract with Warner Brothers in 1937, Reagan was a New Deal Democrat and a union activist.
In his first memoir, he described himself politically as “a near-hopeless hemophiliac liberal,” adding, “I bled for ‘causes.’”
Before America’s entry into World War II, Warner Brothers cast him in a cluster of movies that had patriotic themes.
Reagan joined the Army Air Corps in 1942 and served in the motion picture unit in Hollywood, where he worked on training films and documentaries. He began to question the role of government when he was exposed to the burdensome Civil Service rules that were imposed at the time. He would later write, “I think the first crack in my staunch liberalism appeared in the last year and a half of my military career.”
Reagan became disillusioned with some of the groups he had joined over the years. He came to the conclusion many organizations that were operating in Hollywood were communist fronts.
Conference of Studio Unions, a breakaway labor group that Reagan believed was a communist front, led a series of strikes against the studios in 1946. With Reagan's backing, the Screen Actors Guild ultimately crossed the group’s picket lines.
The strike experience played a part in Reagan’s changing worldview. “I guess I was also beginning a political transformation that was born in an off-screen caldron of deceit and subversion and a personal journey of discovery that would leave me with a growing distaste for big government,” Reagan would write. “I didn't realize it, but I'd started on a path that was going to lead me a long way from Hollywood.”
Reagan’s involvement in SAG increased. He took the reins as the group’s president in 1947. He served as the leader of the union for five additional one-year terms.
“Ronald Reagan presided over the Screen Actors Guild at one of the most challenging moments in our union's history, as the rise of television significantly impacted the compensation and working conditions for the nation's screen actors,” SAG President Melissa Gilbert said in a recent statement. “He leaves behind an enduring legacy to this industry, as he does to the country as a whole.”
During the shooting of a film “The Hasty Heart,” Reagan learned additional lessons from the experience of living in the U.K. for several months. In one of his memoirs he wrote, “I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country.”
The Actor
Most people don’t realize how prolific an actor Ronald Reagan was. In a remarkable Hollywood run, he appeared in more than 55 films over two decades. Critics have not been particularly kind, though, when commenting about his acting ability and have frequently overlooked some of his most outstanding portrayals.
In “Kings Row,” Reagan played a man whose legs were amputated by a malicious, revenge-seeking surgeon. It was in this film that his character uttered the words that would eventually become the title of Reagan’s first memoir, “Where's the Rest of Me?”
He would later write that the illusion of the actor having no legs was so compelling, while he lay there performing he felt anxiety. He considered it his best role. In “Knute Rockne: All-American,” he played the dying young athlete George Gipp. Reagan had gone after the role using pictures of himself dressed in his college football uniform to try to persuade producers to give him the part.
In one of the most famous lines in cinematic history, as the dying Gipp, Reagan said, “Ask them to go in there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper.” The line would become a theme.
After a 20-year career, Reagan left film and moved to television, where he was a host of the “General Electric Theater” series from 1954 to 1962 and “Death Valley Days” from 1965 to 1966.
The Republican
As host of “General Electric Theater,” Reagan gained a high degree of visibility, with vast numbers of people tuning in each week.
He appeared at General Electric across the country on behalf of the company. He would often make more than a dozen speeches in a single day. The experience turned out to be campaign training ground for Reagan.
Although Reagan was a registered Democrat, he supported Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. And he supported Richard Nixon in 1960. His Democrat political affiliation began to make less and less sense. Finally, he switched parties at a public meeting in 1962.
In 1964 he campaigned avidly for Barry Goldwater’s run for the White House. Reagan dazzled Republican National Convention attendees with his speaking ability.
He was persuaded by a group of Republican leaders to run for governor of California in 1965. The following year he won the governorship and headed for Sacramento. He served two terms.
Reagan won the Republican nomination for president in 1980 and became the nation’s 40th president. He went on to restore America’s dignity, revitalize the economy and win the Cold War.
The Man of Faith
Ronald Reagan named the Bible as one of his favorite books. He called it “the greatest message ever written.”
While speaking to a crowd at Kansas State University in 1982, he reminded folks of “admonition of the Man from Galilee to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
On Oct. 13, 1983, then President Reagan spoke to some of the female leaders of Christian religious organizations and said, “The Founding Fathers believed that faith in God was the key to our being a good people and America’s becoming a great nation.”
In addressing the convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in January 1984, Reagan referred to the Blessed Hope: “He promised there will never be a dark night that does not end.” He added, “By dying for us, Jesus showed how far our love should be ready to go: all the way.”
Reagan’s words offended the New York Times. “You don’t have to be a secular humanist to take offense at that display of what, in America, should be private piety. It's an offense to Americans of every denomination, or no denomination, when a President speaks that way,” the paper groused.
The Times told Reagan he was “the President of a nation whose Bill of Rights enjoins Government from establishing religion, aiding one religion, even aiding all religions.” There was no mention of “free exercise.”
Immediately after the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, as comforter-in-chief Reagan soothed us with poetic grace: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”
At the dedication of his presidential library on Nov. 4, 1991, Reagan elaborated upon the attribute with which he is most often associated. He remarked that he has “been described as an undying optimist, always seeing a glass half full when some see it as half empty. And, yes, it’s true — I always see the sunny side of life. And that’s not just because I’ve been blessed by achieving so many of my dreams. My optimism comes not just from my strong faith in God, but from my strong and enduring faith in man.”
The Left Coast Report gives thanks and prays that, for your strong faith, unflagging hope and abundant love, God blesses you eternally, Ronald Reagan.
The Left Coast Report is put together by James L. Hirsen and the staff of NewsMax. |
