Review
"Peter Schweizer has written a profound and important book which is also compulsive reading. The Ronald Reagan he depicts is a man utterly consistent in his beliefs and analysis from his earliest forays into politics. While others were distracted by short-term considerations, President Reagan single-mindedly pursued his vast strategic goals--and he succeeded. Was there ever a better example of statesmanship in action?"
--Lady Margaret Thatcher
"Ronald Reagan played an invaluable role in bringing about the fall of communism and ending the Cold War without resorting to military solutions. Without his great political sense and prudence, instead of the popping of champagne corks, the world would have heard real artillery shots. We [in the Solidarity movement] sensed President Reagan's support and understanding and never had to ask for or demand it. This is not something easily found in the world of politics."
--Lech Walesa, former president of Poland
"In Reagan's War, Peter Schweizer has given us a timely and skilled history of Ronald Reagan's 40-year struggle against Communism that brings home the twin beacons he followed: we must be guided not by fear but by courage and moral clarity. This is a superb history that demonstrates why Reagan won the Cold War, and why it never would have been won without him."
--Caspar W. Weinberger, Chairman, Forbes, Inc.
"A masterstroke. Schweizer uses the secret archives of the Soviet Union and its satellites to outline with amazing detail the seriousness of the Soviet threat, the failures of the American establishment, and the brilliance of Reagan's strategy for victory. If you want to understand how we can win the war against Islamic extremists, study how Reagan achieved victory over communism in Reagan's War."
--Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House
From the Inside Flap
A meticulously researched and penetrating analysis of the Cold War, and the man who ended it. Peter Schweizer delves into the origins of Ronald Reagans vision of America, and documents his consistent, aggressive belief in confronting the Soviet Union diplomatically, economically, and militarily.
Ronald Reagan is often dismissed as an amiable dunce, a genial actor who simply mouthed whatever slogans his right-wing puppet masters put in front of him. Reagans War brilliantly overturns this myth. Drawing on private diaries dating from Reagans days as an actor and extending through his presidency, Peter Schweizer, a well-known historian of the Cold War, shows that Reagans fervent anticommunism marked every era of his life and was the driving force behind his policies as president.
Schweizer explores Reagans involvement with anticommunist liberals in Hollywood and his role as a secret informer for the FBI. Reagans outspoken criticism of d?tente in the late 1960s and his forceful advocacy for the overthrow of the USSR drew the attention of Soviet officials, who began a KGB file on him when he was still governor of California. By the time he was elected president, they viewed him as a serious threat to their interests. Reagans War shows just how right they were, presenting compelling evidence that Reagan personally mapped out and directed a campaign to bankrupt the Soviet Union and wage an economic and political war against Moscow.
In telling the story of Reagans ultimate triumph, Schweizer also brings to light dozens of previously unknown facts about the Cold War, based on secret documents obtained from archives in Russia, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the United States. Among his many startling revelations are Kissingers private deals with Soviet leaders that protected his own political viability while allowing the Soviets to pursue their goals within their own sphere; a North Korean and East German plot to assassinate Reagan in 1983; Reagans secret funding of Solidarity in Poland; and the behind-the-scenes support Soviets and East Germans provided for European and American peace movements, as well as their clandestine contacts with U.S. government officials.
A fresh, often startling look at Ronald Reagan and his central role in winning the war for global dominance in the 1980s, Reagans War is a major work of twentieth-century history.
From the Back Cover
"Peter Schweizer has written a profound and important book which is also compulsive reading. The Ronald Reagan he depicts is a man utterly consistent in his beliefs and analysis from his earliest forays into politics. While others were distracted by short-term considerations, President Reagan single-mindedly pursued his vast strategic goals--and he succeeded. Was there ever a better example of statesmanship in action?"
--Lady Margaret Thatcher
"Ronald Reagan played an invaluable role in bringing about the fall of communism and ending the Cold War without resorting to military solutions. Without his great political sense and prudence, instead of the popping of champagne corks, the world would have heard real artillery shots. We [in the Solidarity movement] sensed President Reagan's support and understanding and never had to ask for or demand it. This is not something easily found in the world of politics."
--Lech Walesa, former president of Poland
"In Reagan's War, Peter Schweizer has given us a timely and skilled history of Ronald Reagan's 40-year struggle against Communism that brings home the twin beacons he followed: we must be guided not by fear but by courage and moral clarity. This is a superb history that demonstrates why Reagan won the Cold War, and why it never would have been won without him."
--Caspar W. Weinberger, Chairman, Forbes, Inc.
"A masterstroke. Schweizer uses the secret archives of the Soviet Union and its satellites to outline with amazing detail the seriousness of the Soviet threat, the failures of the American establishment, and the brilliance of Reagan's strategy for victory. If you want to understand how we can win the war against Islamic extremists, study how Reagan achieved victory over communism in Reagan's War."
--Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House
About the Author
Peter Schweizer is a fellow at the Hoover Institute and the author of several books on the history of the Cold War. He is currently at work on a biography of the Bush dynasty. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
chapter I
ONE-MAN BATTALION
Tall, tanned, and dark-haired, Ronald Reagan was often seen driving his Cadillac convertible on the open boulevards of Hollywood in late September 1946. He had been in pictures for almost ten years now. Superstardom had eluded him, but he was a star nonetheless. Only a few years earlier, a Gallup poll had ranked him with Laurence Olivier in terms of popularity among filmgoers.
Reagan knew that superstardom would probably never come, openly admitting to friends, "I'm no [Errol] Flynn or [Charles] Boyer." But life was comfortable. In August of 1945 he had signed a long-term, million-dollar contract with Warner Brothers. He was making more than $52,000 a picture and would take home the princely sum of $169,000 in 1946--and there were inviting projects on the horizon. Jack Warner, the pugnacious studio head, had offered him the lead in a film adaptation of John Van Druten's successful play The Voice of the Turtle. It was Reagan's first chance to play the romantic lead in a major A picture, and Warner was paying the playwright the unheard-of sum of $500,000 plus 15 percent of the gross for the story, so he clearly cared about the project. Reagan was also about to begin production on Night Unto Night, a dramatization of a successful Philip Wylie book.
In addition, Reagan had a wife and two little kids to go home to. Jane Wyman was a beautiful blonde from the Midwest whose own acting career was beginning to take off. Along with their children Michael and Maureen, Ron and Jane lived in a beautiful home with a pool on Cordell Drive. He owned a splendid ranch near Riverside, and when he and Jane weren't at the studio lot, they could be found playing golf at the prestigious Hillcrest Country Club with Jack Benny and George Burns. At night they often dined at the trendy Beverly Club.
It was without a doubt far more than the son of a salesman from Dixon, Illinois, had ever expected out of life. But on September 27, 1946, Reagan's celluloid dreamland would be disrupted forever.
In the early-morning hours, even before the sun peeked over the east hills, thousands of picketers showed up at Warner Brothers. They were vocal and angry. Hollywood had seen strikes before, but nothing quite like this.
The strike had been called by a ruddy-faced ex-boxer named Herb Sorrell, head of the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), who was prepared to get rough. "There may be men hurt, there may be men killed before this is over, but we are in no mood to be pushed around anymore," he warned. For good measure, he had brought dozens of tough guys ("sluggers," he called them) in from San Francisco, just in case.
Herb Sorrell had come up the hard way, beginning work at the age of twelve, laboring in an Oakland sewer pipe factory for eleven hours a day. He had cut his teeth in the Bay Area labor movement under the leadership of Harry Bridges, the wiry leader of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. Bridges, according to Soviet archives, was also a secret member of the Communist Party and a regular contact for Soviet intelligence.
Sorrell had joined the party in the 1930s, and under Bridges's guidance he had led two violent strikes in the Bay Area. Both strikes, he later admitted, were secretly funded by the Communists, and this time he was secretly receiving money from the National Executive Council of the Communist Party. Sorrell was a member of more than twenty Communist Party front organizations and had pushed hard for the American Federation of Labor to affiliate with the Soviet-run World Federation of Trade Unions. (AFL leaders refused on the grounds that it was simply a front group.2)
The studio strike Sorrell organized in 1946 was no ordinary labor action. It was ostensibly called because of worker concerns, but Sorrell saw it as an opportunity to gain control over all the major unions in Hollywood. As he bragged in the early days of the action, "When it ends up, there'll be only one man running labor in Hollywood, and that man will be me!"
The stakes were high. If Sorrell succeeded, the Communists believed, they could run Hollywood. As the party newspaper the People's Daily World put it candidly, "Hollywood is often called the land of Make-Believe, but there is nothing make believe about the Battle of Hollywood being waged today. In the front lines of this battle, at the studio gates, stand the thousands of locked out film workers; behind the studio gates sit the overlords of Hollywood, who refuse even to negotiate with the workers. . . . The prize will be the complete control of the greatest medium of communication in history." To underscore the value of this victory, the paper quoted Lenin: "Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important."
The Communist Party had been active in Hollywood since 1935, when a secret directive was issued by CPUSA (Communist Party of the U.S.A.) headquarters in New York calling for the capture of Hollywood's labor unions. The party believed that by doing so they could influence the type of pictures being produced. The directive also instructed party members to take leadership positions in the so-called intellectual groups in Hollywood, which were composed of directors, writers, and performers.
To carry out the plan, CPUSA sent party activist Stanley Lawrence, a tall, bespectacled ex-cabdriver. Quietly and methodically he began developing secret cells that included Hollywood performers, writers, and technicians. His actions were handled with great sensitivity. Lawrence reported directly to party headquarters in New York, which in turn reported its activities to officials in Moscow. There, Comintern boss Willie Muenzenberg declared, "One of the most pressing tasks confronting the Communist Party in the field of propaganda is the conquest of this supremely important propaganda unit, until now the monopoly of the ruling class. We must wrest it from them and turn it against them."
By the end of the Second World War, party membership in Hollywood was close to six hundred and boasted several industry heavyweights. Actors Lloyd Bridges, Edward G. Robinson, and Fredric March were members, as were half a dozen producers and about as many directors. Some had joined the party because they thought it might be fun. Actor Lionel Stander encouraged his friends to become members because "you will make out more with the dames." Others who were perhaps interested in the ideas of Marx and Lenin were nonetheless gentle in their advocacy.
"Please explain Marxism to me," Sam Goldwyn once asked Communist Ella Winter at a dinner party.
"Oh, not over this lovely steak."
But many of the party members were militants, and through hard work they had managed to take over leadership positions in the Screenwriters Guild, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and various intellectual and cultural groups. Their level of control and influence far outweighed their numbers. It was a classic case of hard work and determined organizing.
"All over town the industrious Communist tail wagged the lazy liberal dog," declared director Philip Dunne, whose credits included Count of Monte Cristo, Last of the Mohicans, and Three Brave Men.
That industriousness came out of a militancy that stunned many in Hollywood. Screenwriter John Howard Lawson had a booming voice and could often be seen berating those who might oppose the party by smashing his fist into his open palm. The natural reaction of many was to simply be quiet and avoid being throttled.
"The important thing is that you should not argue with them," said writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent time in Hollywood writing for movies such as Winter Carnival. "Whatever you say they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, 'Fascist,' 'Liberal,' 'Trotskyist,' and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process."
Reagan had his first taste of this a few months before the strike, when he was serving on the executive committee of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP), which he had joined in 1944. The group boasted a membership roll including Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles, and Katharine Hepburn. It was what they called a "brainy group," too, with Albert Einstein and Max Weber lending their name to the organization. It was the usual liberal/left Hollywood cultural group, concerned about atomic weapons, the resurgence of fascism, and the burgeoning Cold War. But some were concerned by what they saw as its regular and consistent support for the Soviet position on international issues. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared in Life magazine that he believed it was a communist front, an organization in which "its celebrities maintained their membership but not their vigilance."
Stung by this criticism, a small group within HICCASP, including RKO executive Dore Schary, actress Olivia de Havilland, and FDR's son James Roosevelt, decided to put their fellow members to the test. At the July 2, 1946, meeting, Roosevelt noted that HICCASP had many times issued statements denouncing fascism. Why not issue a statement repudiating communism? Surely that would demonstrate that the organization was wholly liberal and not at all communist.
Reagan rose quickly and offered his support for the resolution, and a furious verbal battle quickly erupted. Musician Artie Shaw stood up and declared that the Soviet Union was more democratic than the United States and offered to recite the Soviet constitution to prove it. Writer Dalton Trumbo stood up and denounced the resolution as wicked. When Reagan tried to respond, John Howard Lawson waved a menacing finger in his face and told him to watch it. Reagan and the others in his group resigned from the organization.
Sorrell gathered his resources for the fight. Along with financial support from the Communist Party, he also could count on help from Vincente Lom...
