Ronald Reagan: The Hollywood President (Part 1)

0:24Ronald Reagan knew how to go big and go bold. in the chest by a gunman outside the Washington Hotel. We did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages. Uncomfortable as it is to admit the 40th president inadvertently prepared the ground for the 45th. It's not Reagan's party anymore. Donald Trump destroyed Ronald Reagan. I thought he was great, his style, his attitude, but not great on trade. Will we be the party of conservatism? Or will we follow the siren song of populism? Only one man has the proven experience we need. Together, we'll make America great again. Thank you very much.

1:09For decades, this was the voice of the conservative movement. Ronald Reagan didn't just win two landslide elections. He reshaped what it meant to be an American Republican. For 40 years, his brand of conservatism dominated American politics. So in this members-only miniseries, we dig into the real Reagan story, the rise, the drama, how his world has been turned upside down in the age of Trump. So, Caddy, I wanted to do this series because I grew up with Ronald Reagan. As a lifelong Republican, he was sort of the anchor for all of us in terms of the conservative ideas with some type of compassion.

1:52And now, 40 short years later, it's like the Reagan era is long gone. And there's been a rise of populism, McCarthyism. people like Charles Lindbergh, who I thought we long extinguished, are imbued in the philosophy of Donald Trump. And I want to get into that with you in this series. So we'll trace his rise from Hollywood to the White House, from his role in ending the Cold War to reviving the American economy. But we'll also confront the scandals, Iran-Contra, his assassination attempt, and of course, the AIDS epidemic. So if you want to hear the full story, go to the restispoliticsus.com and sign up to become a founding member.

2:34Because I love you, we've thrown in a one-week free trial so you can hear the first episode for free right now. Okay, guys, so here's a clip to whet your appetite and get you started.

2:50And now here's Ronald Reagan, great on the radio. He's moving into Hollywood. And guess what the medium's going to be, Katty K? in his political life it's going to be tv film and radio and guess who represents the holy trinity of that that's ronald wilson reagan and so he gets his start his detractors call him a b-level actor yeah he's not a great he's not you know yeah hugh grant of cary grant and politicians would say well he's not he's a b-level actor but thank god for that because uh if he was a better actor he probably who never would have gotten into politics, right? Let's give our founding members a flavor of one of Reagan's performances.

3:31Here's one of his most famous lines. Randy! Randy! Randy! Where's the rest of me? Randy!

3:48Yes, Drake. It was that accident. Yes, David. Yes. But don't talk about it yet.

4:00I'm going to say I love the music. I love the melodrama of the music in the background. You can almost tell the whole story just by listening to the score. And I think the other thing that was interesting about his time in Hollywood is that Hollywood, of course, you talk about the medium changing, Anthony, but it's creating this visual, fictionalized view of a perfect America. And in a way, it parallels Reagan's own view of the country. They work in lockstep with each other. Reagan's running on hey geography. For all of you cynical Europeans out there, okay, that wasn't America. Reagan was like, man, I'm going to manifest my life.

4:38And for all of those depressed Americans who had just gone through this incredibly hard time, right? The country had been through a terrible period. And he gets to Hollywood and creates this vision of an America that he wants to exist and that the country wants to exist. This clip that you brought up, I think, is phenomenal for a number of different reasons. But let me just provide a little more context to the viewers and listeners. It's a famous line from a 1942 film called King's Row. And Ronald Reagan is playing a guy named Drake McHugh in the movie. And of course, he wakes up from a surgery to discover that his legs have been amputated.

5:16And he's critically acclaimed for this. And so if you go back through the whole log of Reagan's movies, this is the one movie where the critics say you know what he did a pretty good job acting in that role and of course that was the climax scene at the end of the movie but caddy this has a big impact on him because he writes a 1965 autobiography that's titled where's the rest of me and it's a fun little biography i read it many years ago and it just it's a breezy biography about his life and of course it's also hagiographic we don't talk about the alcoholism. We don't talk about the wandering, waywardly, a family moving from house to house.

5:57We talk about being a radio announcer. We talk about having a Hollywood career, and we talk about eventually heading for the governorship of California. But where is the rest of me? Forgotten book from 1965 by Ronald Reagan. So let's talk a bit about his romantic life. You mentioned that, of course, he's surrounded by starlets, and it's at this point in Hollywood that he meets and marries the actress Jane Wyman. They're both on a par at the stage that they meet in their careers. They're kind of matchmaked together by a Hollywood socialite and gossip columnist. But Jane actually becomes an Oscar-winning actress.

6:38She's a good actress. Reagan's career never gets that far. But she is a Republican. And I think it's in this relationship that he was the liberal and she was the conservative. She went on to vote for him as president. But it's not just their politics that divide them. They're actually very ill-suited. Reagan becomes obsessed at this point with the Reader's Digest. Is it Weekly Magazine? Weekly Magazine is full of, was it monthly? Let me tell you, every middle class, and again, for the UK listeners, that would be working class, but every working class family had a subscription to Reader's Digest.

7:18And so what was it? It was a summary of articles. It was very simplistically written. It was sort of like a fourth or fifth grade vernacular. There were like quotations in there, aspirational quotations. And I probably read every Reader's Digest that came out once a week. I probably read every single one of them from 1972 to maybe, let's say, 1982. I've read 10 years where the Reader's Digest at the insistence of my mom and dad, because these were uplifting stories, but they were also facts about what was going on in the society. It's interesting because Jane Wyman is bored by Ronald Reagan, but you know what Ronald Reagan's bored by?

8:02He's bored by Hollywood. He has an interest in the current events, and he has an interest in the political events. And he sees himself again as the lifeguard who's somebody that can jump into the political pool and save aspects of America. And of course, Jane Wyman doesn't want any of that, Kat. She's like, oh my God, I'm so bored with this guy. I'm either going to kill him or kill myself. It's literally an exact quote. And of course, she goes on to vote for him years later. You may remember this from Back to the Future, but there's a great line in Back to the future, the 1985 movie, when they fast forward from 1955 to 1985, someone says, Ronald Reagan, the actor?

8:47Meaning, how did Ronald Reagan become president of the United States? He was a B-level actor back in the 50s. But there you go. And then World War II breaks out. There's a lull in his career. He appears in a lot of propaganda films. He joins the Air Corps. He's always conscious the fact that he doesn't see the front lines in World War II, but that's partly because of his eyesight. So he can't go to the front lines, but he has this role kind of making, you know, cheerful movies and things, propaganda films to cheer up the troops. Then the war ends and parts start drying up for him. Although he does, Anthony, get one more part that takes him, guess where, to London, England to make a film called The Hasty Heart in 1948.

9:29It's about a group of soldiers who are in wartime Burma, British soldiers, and he plays the token American. He sails off from Canada and he thinks this is going to be a great adventure. Little does he realize he's landing in post-war England and it's very different from California and Hollywood. He finds life there very tough. There's not a lot of good food. He thinks the food is disastrous. I don't know how he could possibly have thought that. He was wealthy by then by the standards of Brits and actually had steaks flown into him to be cooked in the Savoy Hotel where he was staying in London.

10:03Quite a lot of the steaks apparently disappeared into the mouths of other Brits who were staying there. He spent four months in England, but he really came away from that experience. There was England post-war under a Labour government, a lot of restrictions, a lot of rationing, not much light in the streets. There were no billboards. Things were very dim and gloomy and pretty depressing. And I think, again, that kind of influences his view of life in Europe and of left-wing governments. He doesn't come away with a favorable impression in England, but I wanted to mention it because his little foray outside of California takes him to gloomy London.

10:38But his parts are drying up and he throws himself really into the politics of American movie industry because he becomes more and more involved in Screen Actors Guild, SAG. This is a time when there is a lot of turmoil in the industry, a lot of politics in the industry, with the bosses being more on the right of the political divide, the actors being more on the left of the political divide. And Ronald Reagan gets fully involved at a time when we start hearing this phrase, the Red Scare, in American politics. And I think it's worth spending a little bit of time explaining, Anthony, what that means and what it meant to him in the context of his role in the movie industry as a union leader.

11:24Yeah, listen, I mean, this is the stuff that upsets his first wife. He wants to get politically active. He's a little bit bored. His movie career is in decline. And so he gets involved with all this stuff. And of course, this is also at the time of the rise of Joe McCarthy. And so he's dealing with the studio heads. They're moving further to the right, all the studio heads. Any strike is being called communist, which is obviously a big bad word in the 1950s. And the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is really the Red Scare, if you will, Caddy. This is really, to me, I think it was one of the more oppressive times.

12:01We've had some weird things happen in the US. America First, 1939, that's Charles Lindbergh. The Red Scare is Joe McCarthy. These guys don't get the power, that Donald Trump gets, but there's a thread between Lindbergh, McCarthy, and Donald Trump. Back in the 1950s, here's Ronald Reagan. He's initially skeptical of the Red Hunters, and he's supportive of an idealistic foreign policy to foster world peace. But as he gets towards the end of this part of his life, he becomes someone that the FBI describes as extremely anti-communist. It's a weird time in Reagan's life. This is where he's making the transition from being a liberal and being very, very pro-union to be a, wait a minute, we can't have America adopt socialism or communism.

12:53And again, it would go against all of this philosophy that he develops as a young man about the free markets and the opportunity society that he learns about in Dixon, Illinois. So this is the precursor of his political morphing. And it's interesting stuff. Of course, he meets his second wife as a result of this too. His relationship with the FBI is interesting because he gets visited in 1946. He gets visited by three FBI agents at home and they're asking for names because this is the period where everybody's being asked to rat on each other in Hollywood. And you're being asked to label other actors that you might know as being communists or communist sympathizers.

13:33And Reagan says when these FBI agents come to his home, now, look, I don't go in for red baiting, but he does become an FBI informant. He's known as Informant T-10. And then on October 23rd, 1947, he actually appears before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He's alongside Gary Cooper, much more famous actor. He's a friendly witness. He's appearing as a friendly witness. But he does refuse to give names at that committee hearing or to say that the Communist Party should be outlawed. And he even at the end in a closing speech expresses concern that the Red Scare could impinge on civil liberties in America, which wins him.

14:13The next day, he gets kind of glowing reviews from the more liberal press saying Ronald Reagan stood up for civil liberties and didn't name names and refused to say that the Communist Party should be outlawed, which Gary Cooper had said that they should be outlawed. And little did the press know that a few months earlier, back in April of 1947, he had given names to the FBI. He had named at least 10 actors and said that he thought they were communists. And those actors didn't manage to work against some of them for another 20 years because they were blacklisted. So he kind of had one image externally and was doing something a little different behind the scenes.

14:54And he was accused of that later on in his career of being too sympathetic to the McCarthyites. But here's what I would say. It was a very tough time in Hollywood and people were going on different blacklists. You know, McCarthy was the type of guy, and this is very interesting because it compares to Trump, he was the type of guy that everybody feared until they didn't. once the bubble burst on McCarthy, everyone was like walking around saying, oh, no, I didn't really support him and blah, blah, blah, blah. But the truth of the matter is Reagan was fearful of McCarthy. And so it resulted in which he was also fearful of the FBI.

15:32And so he got in the middle of this stuff. By 1949, he ends up getting a divorce. Which he didn't want to get, by the way. He didn't want to divorce Jane Wyman. No, he was a Christian. Again, that's the tradition. You know, I always tell people my parents were married 67 years, Caddy. They put 500 years of fighting into a 67-year marriage, okay? They were beating each other's brains out my entire life. That was the tradition. You just didn't get divorced, you know? And so Reagan wanted to go in for one of those marriages. Jane Wyman wasn't having it. If you want to hear the full episode, head to therestispoliticsus.com and sign up today.