Reagan: The Life by H. W. Brands

local group, a citizens’ organization that supported various political and social causes. He repeated his praise of the late war effort and his defiance of fascism should it again appear. The audience lovedhim, until the closing paragraph. “I’ve talked about the continuing threat of fascism in the postwar world,” he said, “but there’s another ‘ism,’ communism, and if I ever find evidence that communism represents a threat to all that we believe in and stand for, I’ll speak out just as harshly against communism as I have fascism.”
    A heavy silence fell upon the room.
    A few days later he heard from a woman who had been there. “I have been disturbed for quite some time, suspecting there is something sinister happening in that organization that I don’t like,” she wrote. “I’m sure you noticed the reaction to your last paragraph when you mentioned communism. I hope you recognize what that means. I think the group is becoming a front for communists. I just wanted you to know that that settled it for me. I resigned from the organization the next day.”
    Looking back, Reagan considered this period a turning point in his political education. “Thanks to my minister and that lady,” he said, “I began to wake up to the real world.”
    A NOTHER LESSON OCCURRED a few months later. In the summer of 1946, Reagan was asked to join the executive council of HICCASP. He was pleased by the recognition and eager to participate. But his first council meeting proved disillusioning. Held at the home of a prominent council member, it brought out some sixty people, includingJames Roosevelt, the eldest son of Franklin Roosevelt. Like Reagan, James Roosevelt thought it proper to strike what he considered a balance between the threats to America from the right and from the left. Roosevelt told the group that HICCASP was being assailed by outsiders as a communist front; it would behoove the executive council to go on record as opposing communism as well as fascism.
    “It sounded good to me,” Reagan remarked later, “sort of like that last paragraph I had inserted in my speech.” But it didn’t sound good to many of the people at the meeting. “I was amazed at the reaction. A well-known musician sprang to his feet. He offered to recite the U.S.S.R. constitution from memory, yelling that it was a lot more democratic than that of the United States. A prominent movie writer leaped upward. He said that if there was ever a war between the United States and Russia, he would volunteer for Russia.”
    Reagan took Roosevelt’s side, thereby attracting the leftists’ ire. “I found myself waist-high in epithets such as ‘Fascist’ and ‘capitalist scum’and ‘enemy of the proletariat’ and ‘witch-hunter’ and ‘Red-baiter’ before I could say boo,” he recalled. One man, screenwriterJohn Howard Lawson, grew especially incensed. “He persisted in waving a long finger under my nose and telling me off.”
    The meeting dissolved in disorder. As Reagan left, he was approached byDore Schary, an executive with MGM. “Come up toOlivia de Havilland’s apartment,” Schary said quietly.
    Reagan did so. “I found a solid group of about a dozen gathering in glee,” he recounted. His puzzlement at their high spirits showed, and the group explained that the blowup at the HICCASP meeting hadn’t been accidental. De Havilland said she had grown suspicious of HICCASP when she had been given a speech written by author and screenwriterDalton Trumbo to deliver to a gathering in Seattle. She had decided it was too communist tinged. She had suggested toJames Roosevelt that they put the HICCASP council on the spot; Roosevelt’s proposal did just that, with the results Reagan had witnessed.
    Reagan laughed as he heard the story. De Havilland thought unmasking the communists more serious than amusing, and she asked Reagan what he found so funny. “Nothing,” he replied, “except that I thought you were one.”
    “I