Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology

University of California Press

"The neatest Christmas gift of all!" says Ronald Reagan. You can twist it. . . . You can twirl it. . . . You can bend it. . . . You can curl it. . . . The new revolutionary collar on Van Heusen Century shirts won't wrinkle . . . ever!
Caption accompanying a picture of "Ronald Reagan starring in Universal International's Law and Order, Color by Technicolor"

The year is 1940, Stalin and Hitler have signed their pact, and Europe is at war. Saboteurs are operating inside America as well, blowing up bridges and trains. The House Un-American Activities Committee, investigating sabotage and sedition, subpoenas Joe Garvey, the chairman of the Society of Loyal Naturalized Americans. Garvey speaks with a foreign accent; he insists that the purpose of his organization is simply to preserve American neutrality and keep the country out of war. When asked by HUAC's chairman if his organization's labor racketeering, unlawful assembly, and sabotage are the activities of loyal Americans, Garvey responds that such accusations are "capitalistic" lies. In truth, however, Garvey heads a ring of foreign spies.

One of Garvey's saboteurs has been killed in a train wreck; the Secret Service sends an agent to impersonate him. To test the agent's identity, Garvey's toughs masquerade as policemen and knock him around; they accuse him of being a Wobbly and a Red. When they are satisfied that he is what they have charged him with being, an anti-American subversive, Garvey's men take him to their boss.

America has invented a miraculous defensive weapon that paralyzes electric currents at their source. The inertia projector, as it is called, stops and destroys anything that moves. According to an American admiral, it will "make America invincible in war and therefore be the greatest force for peace ever invented." When Garvey and another foreign spy fly off with the plans for the weapon, the secret agent follows.

He turns the inertia projector on the spy plane; the plane stops in midair, catches fire, and plummets to the ground.

The American agent has an assistant, Gabby Waters. While the fate of the country hangs in the balance, Gabby's girlfriend has been nagging him to marry her. Where the spies have failed, she is about to succeed in capturing her man when the secret agent and his boss turn the inertia projector on the car taking the couple to the altar. The secret weapon stops the car. As his girlfriend fumes helplessly, Gabby is rescued from female entrapment and "save[d] for the service."

Murder in the Air (1940), the movie I have been describing, is a minor piece in the 1940s politicization of Hollywood. It illustrates several tendencies that emerge in the course of that decade. Murder in the Air begins as if its theme is counterfeit money; the movie then shifts to spying and counterfeit identity, initiating the move from crime to countersubversion that characterizes 1940s Hollywood. Collapsing Communists into Fascists, Murder in the Air presages the turn from the anti-Nazi films of World War II to the anti-Communist films of the cold war. Male freedom in this movie is threatened by both a nagging woman and a foreign power; merging those dangers and then zapping the woman and the subversives, Murder in the Air also looks forward to the sexual politics of cold war movies.

But Murder in the Air would remain forgotten, as it has until now, if the man who played the secret agent, Brass Bancroft, were not Ronald Reagan (see Fig. 1.1). The attack on subversion; the merging of Communism and Fascism; the flippancy about matters of life and death, peace and war; the obsession with intelligence agents as the means to national security; and, most striking, the existence of an airborne defensive superweapon that will make America invulnerableall these look forward beyond World War II to the Star Wars militarization of space and the Reagan presidency. Reagan's explanation for the unfinished security arrangements that allowed terrorists to kill American troops in Beirut"Anyone that's ever had their kitchen done over knows that it's never done as soon as you wish it would"could be a quip from the movie. Reagan explained the terrorist success by the "near destruction of our intelligence capacity . . . before we came here," thereby distinguishing the CIA under Carter from the wartime Secret Service. Believing there has never been a time in history "when there wasn't a defense against some kind of threat," President Reagan intervened against his own scientific consultants and normal bureaucratic processes to write out in longhand the paragraphs of his March 1983

speech advocating a ballistic missile defense system that "holds the promise of changing the course of history." "The Strategic Defense Initiative has been labelled Star Wars," the president said two years later. "But it isn't about war. It is about peace. . . . If you will pardon my stealing a film linethe force is with us." In quoting a contemporary movie, was Reagan paying homage to its predecessor? Are we now being ruled by the fantasies of a 1940s countersubversive B movie?1

This chapter investigates the making of Ronald Reagan in 1940s Hollywood. The presidential character, I shall argue, was produced from the convergence of two substitutions that generated cold war countersubversion in the 1940s and underlie its 1980s revivalthe political replacement of Nazism by Communism, from which the national-security state was born, and the psychological shift from an embodied self to its simulacrum on film. Reagan, I shall suggest, found out who he was through the roles he played on film. By responding to typecasting that either attracted or repelled him, by making active efforts to obtain certain roles and to escape others, Reagan merged his on- and offscreen identities. The confusion between life and film produced Ronald Reagan , the image that has fixed our gaze. In a deliberate imitation of the Reagan process, this chapter explores that confusion between life and film to bring the making of this president into view.

"Movies are forever" was the theme of the 1981 Academy Awards. President Ronald Reagan, the first Hollywood actor elevated to the presidency, was scheduled to welcome the academy from the White House. "Film is forever," the president was to tell the academy. "It is the motion picture that shows all of us not only how we look and sound butmore importanthow we feel." Hollywood movies, Reagan was suggesting, mirror back to us the feelings on the screen as if they were our own, as if we were not given those feelings by the movies themselves. As confirming evidence of the power of film, John W. Hinckley, Jr., imitating the plot of the movie Taxi Driver , deliberately shot the president on the day of the Academy Awards. Obsessed with Taxi Driver , Hinckley had seen it again and again and had cast himself in the role of its isolated, deranged, and violent protagonist. Like the character played by Robert De Niro, Hinckley became a gun freak. Like him, he determined to win the woman he lovedJody Foster in Hinckley's fantasy, the character she played in the movieby assassinating a political leader. Hinckley,

like the De Niro character, failed as a political assassin. But he preempted the Academy Awards and postponed them for an evening. De Niro, nominated for an Oscar in 1976 for his performance in Taxi Driver , had been nominated again five years later. He had planned to absent himself from the 1981 ceremonies, but he appeared the night following the attempted assassination, accepted an award for his performance in Raging Bull , and told the audience that he loved everybody. De Niro was testifying that he was not really the character he and Hinckley had played.2

In spite of De Niro's attempt to distance himself from his Taxi Driver role, Hinckley's act reinforced the president's interpretation of the power of film. Millions of Americans experienced the assassination attempt by watching it over and over again on television. The power of the film image confirmed the shooting; it also allowed Reagan to speak to the academy the next night as if the shooting had never happened. The television audience watching a screen saw a Hollywood audience watch another screen. One audience saw the other applaud a taped image of a healthy Reagan, while the real president lay in a hospital bed. Reagan was president because of film, hospitalized because of film, and present as an undamaged image because of film. The shooting climaxed film's ingestion of reality. In so doing, it climaxed, in an uncanny way, Reagan's personal project: the creation of a disembodied self that, by rising above real inner conflicts, would reflect back to the president and all the rest of us not only how he looked and sounded butmore importanthow he felt and who he was.

At the same time that the assassination attempt dissolved the boundaries between film and real life, it allowed Reagan to exploit another boundary confusion. "I have come to speak to you tonight about our economic recovery program," the president told a joint session of Congress several weeks after he was shot. But first he digressed "for a moment" to thank the millions of Americans who had offered him their "expression of friendship and, yes, love" after the assassination attempt. "Now let's talk about getting spending and inflation under control and cutting your tax rates," Reagan continued. "Thanks to some very fine people, my health is much improved. I'd like to be able to say that with regard to the health of the economy." The president was identifying the recovery of his mortal body with the health of the body politic, his own convalescence with his program to restore health to the nation. Reagan was presenting himself as the healer, laying his hands on the sick social

body. He was employing a very old symbolism, one that merges the body of a political leader and the body of his realm.3

The doctrine of the king's two bodies, as we shall see in chapter 3, developed in the sixteenth century to address the relationship between a ruler's mortal body and his body politic. That doctrine, which marked a shift in the locus of sacred power from the church to the state, derived from the two bodies of Christ. Theologically, the death of Christ's mortal body created a mystic body, the regenerate Christian community. Sixteenth-century political leaders sought, like divine kings, to reabsorb that mystic community into their own personal bodies. American presidents and their publics have also identified the president's welfare with the health of the body politic and have attributed magical, healing power to the presidential touch.4 But during Reagan's lifetime the locus of sacred value shifted from the church not to the state but to Hollywood. Reagan was born again to embody America through his sacrifice and rebirth on the screen.

It was D. W. Griffith who made Reagan possible as a presence who feels real to himself and his audience because he is seen. As I shall argue in chapter 7, Griffith wanted to collapse the world into film. Heand the mass culture he foundedshifted the locus of the real in America from mythicized history to image by crystallizing demonological images and placing them on film. But Griffith's project was the inverse of the one in Reagan's Hollywood. Griffith saw film as a visionary alternative to the mundane. He was possessed by the newness of film technique, by his own inventive power, and then, in the 1920s, by the artificiality of his movies. Griffith called attention to the filmmaker and his instruments, to the camera eye and the film cut. By contrast, in Kevin Brownlow's words, "the Hollywood aim was to perfect technique and thus render it imperceptible." The Hollywood movie in its classic yearsthe late 1930s through the 1950s, the years of Reagan's Hollywood careerblended the storyteller with the narrative and disguised the artfulness of film cuts. Dialogue and the moving camera made movies seem mimetic of quotidian reality. Hiding technique naturalized the fantasy nature of film content. For both filmgoers and participants in the making of films, reality lay neither in the process by which the movie was constructed nor in the outtakes on the cutting room floor, but rather in the final cut that eliminated all those shots, scenes, and versions of the plot where something had gone wrong.5

Early cinema, whether in Eisenstein's social or in German expres-

sionism's psychological mode (Griffith fathered them both), opened up an interiorized world. Hollywood naturalism, in which depth of focus gave the illusion of ordinary three-dimensionality, kept viewers on the surface of the image. The audience knew it was at a motion picture theater but was not led to ask whether what it was seeing was real.

The classic Hollywood movie was overdone and improbable and, at the same time, continuous with ordinary life. Michael Wood has suggested that such films, with their overblown lines of dialogue and their references to one another, constituted a larger-than-life world of their own. Hollywood did not relax mundane constraints to obliterate daily life, however, but to allow its daydreams to take over. The stories and the methods of these movies broke down the barriers between fantasy and reality, heroes and ordinary people. Classic Hollywood films put realism in the service of fantasy, as if movies were mirroring the mundane. They encouraged confusion between "day-dreams," as Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites call these films, and daily life. For many people, movies functioned as arenas for role playing, and they were the place where the role player who was to become president of the United States discovered his identity.6

Griffith had contrasted the masses who worshiped stars to the thinking classes who preferred the artistic standard imposed by a great director. He prophesied the director-artist as the hero of the future, but he was wrong.7 The mass viewer would take as hero his or her ideal self, bigger than life, reflected in the star. And an actor who never reached the pinnacle of Hollywood stardom would use his confusion between "day-dreams" and reality to mediate between the mass public and the image of the ideal.

"It has taken me many years to get used to seeing myself as others see me," Reagan writes in his autobiography. "Very few of us ever see ourselves except as we look directly at ourselves in a mirror. Thus we don't know how we look from behind, from the side, walking, standing, moving normally through a room. It's quite a jolt." But the actor, says Reagan, learns to see himself from the outside in as others see him, not from the inside out. He gives up the "mental picture" of the character he plays as separate from himself and becomes at once the viewer of the object and the object seen.8

A mirror requires both a referent and its reflection; it is dependent on outside standards to supply a reality check. Movies have frequently used a mirror image to create a double of the self, a split of the ideal self from its dark reflection. But the screen also takes the place of a

mirror. It obliterates the referent: a self who sees himself from all angles fragments and disappears into his image. Self-sufficient, the screen dispenses both with external history and with the historically formed human interior (for which the mirror reflection was often a symbol). When the camera brought Reagan's self inside the screen, to exist as an observed outside, it shattered the distinction between inside and outside to produce "quite a jolt."9

"There are not two Ronald Reagans," Nancy Reagan assures us. In her words, "There is a certain cynicism in politics. You look in back of a statement for what the man really means. But it takes people a while to realize that with Ronnie you don't have to look in back of anything." She is describing a man whose most spontaneous moments"Where do we find such men?" about the American D-day dead; "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green," during the 1980 New Hampshire primary debateare not only preserved and projected on film but also turn out to be lines from old movies. The president knows, in the words of a member of his staff, that "all of us are deeply affected by a uniquely American art form: the movies." Responding to the charge that Reagan confuses the world depicted in movies with the world outside it, the presidential aide explained that cinema heightens reality instead of lessening it. Unwilling to acknowledge the conflation of movies and reality as a uniquely American contribution, the aide insisted that the president knew the difference between cinema and reality because he normally credited the lines he used.10

Reagan has, to be sure, deliberately quoted movie lines to make himself the hero of American cultural myths. "Go ahead. Make my day," the president told Congress, promising to veto a tax increase. He was repeating Clint Eastwood's dare in Sudden Impact that a hoodlum murder a woman hostage to free Eastwood to shoot the criminal. "Boy, I saw Rambo last night," the president said in July 1985 after the thirty-nine hostages held in Lebanon had been released. "Now I know what to do the next time this happens." At other times, however, Reagan has not only hidden from his audience the filmic origins of his words to create the appearance of spontaneity but concealed those origins from himself as well. CBS's "Sixty Minutes" has traced the process by which Reagan first credited the line "Where do we find such men?" to the movie admiral in Bridges at Toko-Ri , then assigned that line to a real admiral, and finally quoted it as if he had thought of it himself. The president has inadvertently called his dog "Lassie" in front of reporters. He has told a mass audience about the captain of a bomber who chose

to go down with his plane rather than abandon a wounded crew member"Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumous," concluded Reagan with tears in his eyesonly to have it revealed by a sailor who had seen the film aboard a World War II aircraft carrier that the episode was taken from Dana Andrews's A Wing and a Prayer . Reagan knew the Holocaust had happened, he told a gathering of survivors, because he had seen films of the camps. If there are not two Ronald Reagans, we owe his integration to film.11

Like earlier countersubversives, Reagan has divided the world between the forces of good and an empire of evil and traced all troubles at home and abroad to a conspiratorial center. Unlike them, however, he seems neither internally driven nor possessed. As many commentators have noted, he combines political punitiveness with personal charm, right-wing principle, and political salesmanship. Speaking like a radio announcer or talk show host (Reagan has been both), he presents political events of his own making as if he were somehow not responsible for them. He represents valued qualities rather than acting on them. Reagan suggests not the producer self who makes things happen but the celebrity who shows them off.12

Robert Dallek has explained the disjunction between the form and content of Reagan's politics by invoking the shift in the course of the twentieth century from idols of production to idols of consumption. The hero of production was a hard-working figure, admired for his achievements. The idol of consumption is a celebrity; his (or her) appeal comes from looks, not action. The idol of production made durable goods. The idol of consumption is a salesman or the object he sells. The former idol, like Reagan's rhetoric, acted on the supply side. The latter, like Reagan's tax cut, stimulates demand. The one flourishes in a manufacturing economy, the other in an economy based on service and information. Ordinary Americans can identify with the idol of consumption because he does not exercise authority over them or (like the traditional captain of industry) over employees at the workplace.13

The idol of production rose on his merits; the idol of consumption rises through good fortune, from being in the right place at the right time. "A miracle happened," Reagan has said of his first success in broadcasting; it could have happened to anyone. The idol of consumption is the chosen not the chooser, the product not the producer. He inhabits "a world of dependency," writes Leo Lowenthal in his classic study of the heroes of popular biography, "in which the average man is never alone and never wants to be alone." The president who urges a

return to a time before Americans were "robbed of their independence" plays on the values of production but does not live them, for he was formed as an idol of consumption.14

The idol of production was inner-directed, aggressive, and driven. He valued character, possessing a self-controlled ego that was divided between duty and desire, a superego, and an id. The celebrity displays personality. He pleases others; intimate before the mass audience, he plays at privacy in public. Neither a repressed interior nor an intractable reality exercise claims over the celebrity, for he exists in the eye of the beholder. Since he replaces reality by fantasy, his pleasure and reality principles do not collide. Freed from the reproaches of either the conscience or the unconscious, he gains a reassuring serenity.

But the model of production and consumption is ambiguous. On the one hand, it contrasts superficial appearance with deeper source, a procedure endorsed by my concern with the production of Ronald Reagan . From that perspective the consumption idol is a fetish that can be demystified when we examine the process that produced it. On the other hand, the opposition of production to consumption implies a historical displacement of the former by the latter, so that distinctions between the way something looks and the way it really is are increasingly difficult to draw. From that perspective value is created not by work in production but by desire in exchange. The oppositions that traditionally organized both social life and social critiqueoppositions between surface and depth, the authentic and the inauthentic, the imaginary and the real, signifier and signifiedseem to have broken down. The dispersal of the subject in space, as Fredric Jameson has put it, replaces the alienation of the subject in time, and nostalgia for imitating historical surfaces replaces concern with the actual character of private and public history. From this point of view, Reagan's easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.15

Ronald Reagan has a synchronic presence whose power is not reducible to its origins, but it has a history as well. Since people are not images, neither Reagan nor any other human being comes into the world as a pure idol of consumption. The category represents an ideal type, an aspiration. Consumption idols respond in part to economic and social imperatives. But they also mark the convergence of the personal and the political, which came together for this president on the movie screen.

The desire to have one's identity scripted on film is not unmotivated.

In this instance, movies allowed Reagan to disown aggression and to enact it at the same time. Called to violence in his films, Reagan acted out movie violence in offhand and derealized forms. His roles taught the actor how to insulate himself from experiencing aggression as his own. He played characters who buried anger in wisecracks, suffered from external attack, and employed violence in self-defense. The actor was directed to show the emotional effects of violence only when he was its victim. Otherwise, watching himself play one of the boys on-screen, Reagan observed a figure with no distinctive, individuating, inward-pointing signs. Buried, disturbing feelingsif there were anydissolved in the reassurance that Ronald Reagan was like everyone else.

Reagan's detachment marks an important departure in the history of American countersubversion. Puritans deliberately twinned themselves with their Indian enemies, for savages were signs of their own fallen natures. War not only punished Indians; it also exorcised the devils within.16 Subsequent countersubversivesThe Birth of a Nation and cold war movies will be among our textsdenied the identity between themselves and their shadow sides. Nevertheless, the frenzied doubling in such documents revealed the connections that ideology tried to hide. The monster-hunter repressed his attachment to his prey. The repressed bond resurfaced in countersubversive hysteria. Repressive politics in these classic forms of countersubversion invited the analyst to psychoanalyze repression.

But Reagan's affability, by insulating him from the subversive, seems to exclude the investigator as well. He seems not to register, even in a return of the repressed, the consequences of his wishes and politics. When Governor Reagan refused to visit a mental hospital to see the effects of his cuts in state aid, a psychiatrist suggested that he was under strain. "If I get on that couch, it will be to take a nap," Reagan responded.17 He seems to have fulfilled Freud's lament (a lament that The Birth of a Nation should have dispelled until now) that Americans have no unconscious.

When The Birth of a Nation was shown during the 1920s Klan revival, Reagan's father would not let him see it. As a Catholic Jack Reagan was a target of the revived Klan, and he also condemned the racism shown on the screen. Reagan recalled, "In our household my father simply announced that no member of our family could see that picture because it was based on the Ku Klux Klan. And to this day I have never seen that great motion picture classic."18 The reminiscence praises both

his father's humanitarianism and the racist film Reagan has not had to see.

The difference between making The Birth of a Nation and shutting it out marks the shift from racial domination to avoidance. As Joel Kovel has written, "The dominative racist, when threatened by the black, resorts to direct violence; the aversive racist, in the same situation turns away and walls himself off." Asked at the Great Wall of China if he would like a great wall of his own, President Reagan responded, "Around the White House." The joke (and the wall it portended, with antitank barricades, ground-to-air missiles, and American flags) points beyond the president's desire for physical safety to his wish for insulation. Traditional countersubversives consciously or unconsciously doubled their political demons. Reagan aspires to a self in which, to recall Nancy Reagan's words, there would not be two Ronald Reagans, since the disowned, subversive part would have been lopped off. That wish for an amputated self was granted in Hollywood."19

An uncanny slippage between life and film marked Ronald Reagan's entry into the movies. Other aspiring stars were rebaptized in Hollywood, receiving stage names to replace their own. Reagan had been baptized Ronald, his mother's choice, but he was always called by the nickname his father gave him, Dutch. Dutch Reagan came to Hollywood and proposed Ronald Reagan as his stage name. "Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan," repeated the head man, and the others around the table said it after him. "I like it," the boss decided, and gave Ronald Reagan back his own name. That Hollywood ceremony freed Reagan from the name of his father and restored his mother's desire. "That's my boy," Reagan's mother cried when she saw him in his first movie, Love Is on the Air (1937). "That's the way he is at home. He's no Robert Taylor. He's just himself." Reagan was playing the role he had left behind to come to Hollywood, that of a popular sports announcer (cf. Figs. 1.2 and 1.3). His real radio station had fired him under sponsor pressure and then rehired him; his movie station followed suit. In life, the sports reporter Reagan invented play-by-play baseball games from minimal, ticker-tape reports. He made up the sports events for his listeners. Movie audiences could confirm Reagan's filmed on-the-spot reporting because they watched the staged sports events along with him.20

Reagan met Jane Wyman on the set of another of his early movies, Brother Rat (1938). He dated her in the movie, married her in life, the studio cast them as husband and wife in An Angel from Texas (1940), and Warner Brothers and Louella Parsons publicized their romance and happy marriage (cf. Figs. 1.4 and 1.5). "The Reagans' home life is probably just like yours, or yours, or yours," the studio quoted Reagan as saying. "Mr. Norm is my alias," the actor wrote in a 1940s movie magazine, presenting himself as the average American. On camera even when he was offscreen, Reagan seemed to have nothing to hide, no self tucked away from public inspection. Asked what the electorate saw in him on the eve of his 1980 victory, Reagan replied, "I think maybe they see themselves and that I'm one of them."21

But, as he hinted in his allusion to "Mr. Norm" as his "alias," Reagan's seamless merging of life and the movies in his first Hollywood years shut out an unacknowledged part of his past. The easy slippage between life and his early films meant, in William James's terminology, that in Hollywood Reagan was only once-born. James's once-born, healthy-minded individual has a happy consciousness. He turns into a divided self, torn between an ideal image and a dark, aggressive side, when he uncovers the loathsomeness within him and the destruction in the world. Reagan suffered death and violence, as we shall see, in his crucial, transformative movies; his film experience paralleled but did not duplicate the jamesian evolution from a once-born character to a divided self. By keeping his sense of evil doubly removed from his sense of selfremoved to the screen and removed from his roles on the screenReagan acquired an amputated self rather than a divided one. James's divided, sick soul is born again by recognizing that evil is not paralyzing and all-pervasive and by struggling against sin in the world.22 Reagan parodied that rebirth by imposing screen fantasies on the world in his battle with Hollywood Communism. We turn now where the president has invited us and trace his self-division and reunification through his roles on the screen.

Murder in the Air anticipates the persona and worldview of the president. It is a long way, nonetheless, from the 1940s to the 1980s, from a B movie actor to the president of the United States. Even as Murder in the Air seems to collapse that distance, it exposes it. Ronald Reagan as Brass Bancroft is too brash, too aggressive, too hard-edged. He does not convey reassurance, and he is not a convincing actor. Distorted facial expressions and wooden gestures mar Reagan's performance in Love Is on the Air . He is less awkward in Murder in the Air , but even

though he approaches a naturalistic performance, his cockiness is still exaggerated. Nothing seems to touch him. The shift from the air of radio to that of planes, the shift from love to war, was not sufficient to turn the actor into commander-in-chief. To acquire presidential stature, Reagan had to combine independence and dependence, power and loss, aggression and receptivity. He could not simply do damage to others; he had to appear to have damage done to him. As the hero he played opposite in The Hasty Heart (1950) would put it, he "had to be hurt to learn." He had to learn to be seen not simply as the man who sent American boys to die in Lebanon but, like the image in the film clip shown at the 1984 Republican convention, as the mourner identified with those boys, who stands beside their coffins.

Reagan's persona as a B movie crime fighter climaxed in a World War II film, Desperate Journey (1942). The movie perfectly exemplifies Bla Balzs's characterization of American World War II films "in which the bloodiest catastrophe in world history is portrayed like an amusing rawhumored manly adventure."23 Although Reagan, as Johnny Hammond, is trapped behind enemy lines for most of the movie, the war has no internal impact on him. Reagan and the other members of his bombing crew, shot down over eastern Germany, perform miraculous acts of sabotage and escape as they work their way west. Although some crew members are killed, the characters portrayed by Reagan, Erroll Flynn, and Arthur Kennedy remain unharmed. In the climactic scene of mass destruction they steal a German plane, and Reagan, swiveling a machine gun in the bubble of the nose, mows down row after row of Germans as they rush to stop the aircraft from taking off. The slaughter is at once horrifying and painless, because the Germans have been portrayed as buffoons throughout the film. No one really gets hurt in Desperate Journey , since by not taking war seriously, the film turns war into a movie.

But even when the rugged individualists that Reagan played in such films were organization men, they were not protective, reassuring figures. Although Brass Bancroft is knocked out and left to drown during his adventures, both he and Johnny Hammond remain emotionally untouched by what they have been through. Since they communicate so little feeling, the viewer does not feel cared for by them. For Reagan to gain presidential stature, he had to acquire a falsely vulnerable objectified self to stand in for the self missing in action. To become a successful idol of consumption, he had to move beyond the rugged individualist American past with which he wished to be identified. He did so by reconnecting through his film roles to the dependence in his personal

history in order, finally, to find a substitute for that dependence and play at freedom.

Warner Brothers was quick to spot the dependent side of Ronald Reagan. The studio allowed him to win in B movies, but it made him lose in the feature. Reagan was Bette Davis's playboy boyfriend in Dark Victory (1939) (Fig. 1.6). He is mostly drunk on-screen and is never seen without a glass in his hand. Davis is aggressive, Reagan is passive. She begins the movie as his girl and turns to him again in her refusal to face both her imminent death and her love for the fatherly doctor who operated (unsuccessfully) on her. Davis is a wired, cigarette-smoking projectile, a spoiled, independent young woman. Her destiny is to turn into a good girl-wife and to die. Although the film is all too clear about what it wants from women, Reagan is not the beneficiary. Glass in hand, he relinquishes Davis to George Brent (Dr. Steele). Reagan hated playing that scene and refused to do so in the effeminate manner called for by the director.24 But although his performance is stilted, Reagan's character is not unsympathetic. Dark Victory foreshadowed a future in which Reagan could acquire heroic stature not simply by playing a tough guy but by first enacting and then shedding his playboy persona.

Worried that he would be stuck in B movies, Reagan introduced Warner Brothers to the idea of a film about Knute Rockne. Reagan had played football all through his youth; he got his first radio job, he reports, by simulating the end of a game his college had won in the last twenty seconds by using "the old Rockne special." Reagan missed his block in the actual game, as he tells the story, and made it in the radio reconstruction. By pointing to the difference between real game failure and fictional success, the movie actor invoked the daydream in which the ordinary man replays events in his own life to turn failure into success. Reagan was a hero not on the real football field, but first in the radio and then in the Hollywood reenactments.25

Reagan had been a real football player, to be sure, but for the movie of Knute Rockne he aspired higher than his college position on the line. He suggested Pat O'Brien for Rockne and himself for the legendary Notre Dame halfback, George Gipp. The studio cast O'Brien willingly but did not think Reagan looked like a football player. He only got the part, with O'Brien's help, after ten other actors failed screen tests and after he showed the studio pictures of himself in his college football uniform. A journeyman actor like Reagan normally had little to say

about his parts, but Reagan initiated Knute Rockne because he wanted to play the Gipper. It is his favorite role, and the president invokes it again and again.26

The part of the Gipper is a small one; Reagan is on-screen for barely fifteen minutes. "I would give my right arm for a halfback who could run, pass, and kick," says Rockne, and he trips over the Gipper's feet. Reagan plays a rangy, good-looking, wisecracking young man who scores a touchdown on his first run from scrimmage and makes long gains rushing or passing in game after game. But the football star is an enigma. "I don't like people to get too close to me" on the field or off, he tells Rockne's wife. That admission comes in a moment of self-revelation when, in Rockne's absence and with his wife as mediator, the father-son love between the coach and his star is declared. As if the insulated, male, American hero cannot survive that self-revelation, the Gipper immediately gets a sore throat, Rockne sends him to the hospital, and he dies of viral pneumonia.

But the Gipper lives onas every American now knowsan inspiration for Notre Dame and the country. Stricken by phlebitis years after Gipp's death, Rockne also faces defeatism on his team. He is wheeled to the annual ArmyNotre Dame game in a wheelchair; at halftime, with his players beaten and behind, Rockne repeats the Gipper's dying words. "Someday when the team is in trouble," Gipp had told Rockne, "tell them to win one for the Gipper." The inspired team members leap up and rush onto the field. "That's for you, Gipp!" says the player who scores the first of the many touchdowns that bring victory to Notre Dame.

At the 1981 Notre Dame commencement, in his first public appearance after he was shot, President Reagan insisted that the movie line "Win one for the Gipper!" not be spoken "in a humorous vein." "Do it for the Gipper," Reagan told the U.S. Olympic athletes in the summer of 1984. "Win those races for the Gipper!" was how Reagan urged crowds to vote the straight Republican ticket during the fall campaign. But the Gipper (as played by Reagan) was dead when those words were spoken in the movie. If you elect Republicans, Reagan told the crowds, "Wherever I am, I'll know about it, and it'll make me happy." The president spoke as if, playing the Gipper, he was witness to his own death and ascension.27

After his defeat at the 1976 Republican convention, Reagan quoted lines he'd memorized as a child: "Lay me down and bleed a while.

Though I am wounded, I am not slain. I shall rise and fight again." Slain as George Gipp, Reagan rose to fight again, to invoke the spirit of the dead hero into whom he had dissolved.28

Knute Rockne doubles the theme of regenerative sacrifice by having Rockne catch Gipp's martyrdom. The coach risks his life to attend the football game when he has phlebitis, speaks the Gipper's line from a wheelchair with a blanket over his legs, and dies in a plane crash soon after. A priest tells the mourners at Rockne's funeral, "The spirit of Knute Rockne is reborn in the youth of today."

"It's like seeing a younger son I never knew I had," Reagan jokes when he watches reruns of Knute Rockne .29 The sacrifice of that son knit first the team and then the country together. But whereas Gipp's sacrifice preceded the sacrifice of the film father, Knute Rockne, it gave birth to the actor father, now president, Ronald Reagan. In real history fathers come before sons; in Reagan's film-mediated history the son (George Gipp) produced the father (President Reagan), a father who has replaced his real father by the image of his own younger self.

The sacrifice of Reagan-Gipp, moreover, broke down the boundary not only between son and father, Gipp and Rockne, but also between human body and body politic. By shifting the source of personal identity from the living body of George Gipp to his spirit, Gipp's sacrifice turned the body mortal into the corpus mysticum . The Gipper's sacrifice, however, was mediated through film and not religious ceremony. Invoking the Gipper after he was shot, Reagan identified his own recovery with his economic recovery program for the nation. He could claim to embody the nation, exploiting the boundary confusion between the president's body and the body politic, because he had risen from the confusion between life and film.

At the South Bend premiere of Knute Rockne in 1940, trainloads of celebrities joined a hundred thousand other visitors to the town. The governors of eight states declared a national Knute Rockne week, and a week of radio broadcasts climaxed with Kate Smith singing "God Bless America" and with Roosevelt's son delivering a personal message from his father. Reagan had played a radio announcer in Boy Meets Girl (1938) who broadcast movie premieres from Hollywood theaters. Two years later the actor joined the Knute Rockne premiere as one of the stars.30

When Reagan and Pat O'Brien attended Knute Rockne 's opening at Notre Dame, Nelle Reagan asked her son to take his father with them. Reagan recalls the "chilling fear" he felt at that request, for Jack Reagan

was an alcoholic. Reagan had brought his father to Hollywood to handle his fan mail, but that father-son role reversal did not suffice to keep the father under control. Although Nelle assured her son he could trust his father, Jack Reagan and Pat O'Brien went on an all-night drinking binge nonetheless. O'Brien thought Reagan's father hilarious, but Reagan's anxiety about how his father would behave at lunch the next day was not dispelled until the mother superior who had sat next to Jack "informed me that my father was the most charming man she had ever met."31 Reagan's father and mother introduced anxiety; Pat O'Brien and the mother superior dispelled it. The story points to the personal sources of Reagan's need to move from home to Hollywood and also reveals the failure of Knute Rockne to enforce the break.

Knute Rockne inverted Reagan's familial past, replacing an unreliable, dependent father with an idealized, strong one (Fig. 1.7) and transforming forbidden anger at the historical father into the filmed son's sacrifice. That sacrifice was a gift to the father, and Reagan's need to deny the conflicts in his personal history attracted him to the idealized father in Rockne . Idealization buried anger, and even though the idealized father was also sacrificed, Knute Rockne gave no room for negative feelings against authority. The film in which Reagan reinhabited his past to emancipate himself from it is King's Row (1942), the movie that made him a star, which he places at the center of his autobiography and which he has singled out as the film with the deepest personal significance for his life.

"My face was blue from screaming, my bottom was red from whacking, and my father claimed afterward that he was white when he said shakily, 'For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise. . . .' 'I think he's perfectly wonderful,' said my mother weakly. 'Ronald Wilson Reagan.'"

Blue face, red bottom, white father: "I have been particularly fond of the colors that were exhibited," announces the author, wrapping himself at birth in the American flag. We are on the first page of Ronald Reagan's autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me? "In those early days I was sure I was living the whole life of Reagan," Reagan continues. "It was not until thirty years later that I found that part of my existence was missing."

The missing part of Reagan's existence was his legs, and he lost them

in King's Row . Some people might find that loss troublesome, but it was the making of the actor's career. In his words, "I took the part of Drake McHugh, the gay young blade who cut a swathe among the ladies." Drake romanced the town surgeon's daughter. When a railroad accident knocked him unconscious, the "sadistic doctor" took his revenge. He "amputated both my legs at the hips." Reagan woke in a hospital bed to speak the line that made him a star: "Where's the rest of me?" (See Fig. 1.8.)

Those five words, Reagan reports, presented him with the most challenging acting problem of his career. He had to become a legless man, or the line would not carry conviction. "I rehearsed the scene before mirrors, in corners of the studio, while driving home, in the men's rooms of restaurants, before selected friends. At night I would wake up staring at the ceiling and automatically mutter the lines before I went back to sleep. I consulted physicians and psychologists; I even talked to people who were so disabled, trying to brew in myself the cauldron of emotions a man must feel who wakes up one sunny morning to find half of himself gone." When at last Reagan climbed into bed to shoot the scene, "In some weird way, I felt that something horrible had happened to my body." Trying "to reach for where my legs should be" and twisting in panic, Reagan delivered in a single take the finest shot of his career. "The reason was that I had put myself, as best I could, in the body of another fellow." But Drake McHugh was not simply "another fellow," for Reagan made a discovery about himself in King's Row . Reagan learned by playing Drake McHugh "that part of my existence was missing," and so he called his autobiography Where's the Rest of Me? King's Row taught Reagan that he was only "half a man" and made him search for what he lacked. But the film that pointed to something missing in the actor also made him a star. Why should the body of a legless man have possessed Reagan so personally and raised him to stardom?32

Reagan begins Where's the Rest of Me? with his birth, switches to his rebirth in King's Row , and then returns to his father. Jack Reagan was a shoe salesman. "He loved shoes. He sold them as a clerk . . . and spent many hours analyzing the bones of the foot." But Jack Reagan failed as a shoe salesman, and his son remembers, at age eleven, coming upon his father "flat on his back on the front porch," "his arms spread out as if he were crucified," passed out from drink. Jack Reagan had lost "another bout with the dark demon of the bottle," and the son had to overcome "the sharp odor of whiskey" to drag his father into the house. Jack Reagan "never lost the conviction that the individual must stand

on his own feet," but he could not do so himself. He survived the depression by distributing relief checks for the WPA.33

Like many another self-made man, this son who celebrates family had first to escape his own. How, if your father is a failed shoe salesman, do you avoid stepping into his shoes? The answer King's Row provided was this: by cutting off your legs. The Christian loses himself as body to find himself as spirit. Reagan was born again in Hollywood by relinquishing "part of myself" in King's Row .

King's Row was set, a sign announces at the opening of the film, in "a good clean town. A good town to live in, a good place to raise your children," like Tampico, Illinois, where Reagan was born, or Dixon, where he grew up. "We all have spots we dream of and want to go home to," says the character Reagan plays in The Hasty Heart . "For me it's a little place on the Duck River, Dixon, Illinois." But the American family in King's Row turns out to consist of sadistic fathers, demonic mothers, and daughters whose dangerous sexual desires place young men in jeopardy.

"The story begins with a closeup of a bottom," writes Reagan, introducing his birth in the first sentence of Where's the Rest of Me? King's Row opens on a country idyll, as a young girl and boy disrobe to swim in a pond. "It's not so warm on the bottom," the boy tells the girl, and in the next shot the outline of her naked bottom is visible beneath the water. In the scenes that follow, the girl is given a birthday party to which no one comes; the boy and his best friend swing on the rings of an icehouse with a working-class girl so they can see her underpants; and the boy hears the cries of another friend's father, screaming because a doctor is operating on his legs. Preadolescent sexuality, punctuated by violence to destroy its innocence, introduces and concludes childhood in King's Row .

This prologue defines the character of the film that made Reagan a star. King's Row is a classic in the American gothic form. The gothic sensibility has Christian roots (to which the label, gothic, points), and it reveals the dark underside of born-again Christianity. American gothic depicts a titanic struggle between the forces of good and evil, in which the world is under the devil's sway. American gothic art is an art of dualism, of haunted characters, violence, and horror. Although it claims to stand for good, it is fascinated by evil. Rebirth carries less conviction in the gothic imagination than the power of blackness does, and the regenerate remain filled with vengefulness against the world that has damaged them. King's Row illustrates the shift from the wisecrack-

ing surface of 1930s Hollywood movies to 1940s psychological nightmares (and its director, Sam Wood, would become obsessed with the Communist penetration of Hollywood in the years after World War II).34

The main portion of King's Row more than fulfills the gothic promise of the opening scenes. The film's protagonists, played by Reagan and Robert Cummings, are doubles in a movie of doubles. Both boys are wealthy orphans, in the course of the movie both lose the relatives who replace their parents, and both fall in love with doctors' daughters. Parris Mitchell (Cummings) is drawn (in the Tower family) into maternal insanity, implied father-daughter incest (explicit in the book), and the power of a father (Claude Rains) who kills his daughter and himself. Drake McHugh confronts (in the Gordon family) a monstrous mother (Judith Anderson), a sexually sadistic father, and the loss of his legs. Wolfenstein and Leites describe the hero and heroine of the typical 1940s movie romance as unbound by family ties. The young protagonists are homeless in such romances and jauntily self-sufficient. Menacing surrogate parents appear only in gothic melodramas, set far from the familiar world. King's Row collapses melodrama into romance. The boys may be orphans, but (to quote Wolfenstein and Leites) there is no "escape of children from protracted involvement with their parents." The children in King's Row are trapped in the American family.35

The classic American family in King's Row , with working father, housewife mother, and child, is a horror. There is incest in one doctor's family, sadism in the other. The Family Protection Act, sponsored by the born-again New Right, would punish departures from the classic American family. King's Row locates the desire and necessity for punishment within that family itself.

Both doctor fathers take vengeance (murder and amputation) for their daughters' sexual desire. In the movie's iconography, however, mothers are to blame. The monstrous mothers drive their husbands to violence or embrace it themselves. They derange fathers and contaminate daughters. Because mature women in this movie endanger men, the young women Drake and Parris finally marry have benign, aged fathers and no mothers. Daughters who unite love with sexual desire are punished (Louise Gordon) or destroyed (Cassandra Tower). Randy Monaghan, the woman Drake marries, can survive because her lover becomes, as Parris says about Drake and Reagan about himself, "half a man."36 The protection men need in King's Row is not the protection of family but protection from women.

Brothers are rivals in the typical American movie romances Wolfenstein and Leites describe.37 There is no overt antagonism between Parris and Drake, yet the physical youth, Drake, is sacrificed so that his spiritual brother can become whole. The happiness of the intact young man is bought at the price of the legs of his double.

Reagan underscores the connection between King's Row and his own youth. He calls the film "a slightly sordid but moving yarn about antics in a small town, something that I had more than a slight acquaintance with." Then he describes the movie's "accident in the railroad yards," in which a moving train that was supposed to be stationary cost Drake McHugh his legs, and a few pages later he reports an escapade in which his brother and he crawled under a train stopped at the town station, getting to the other side just before the train pulled out. Reagan's mother punished him for risking the bodily harm that he was to suffer as Drake. Using the word "antics" to connect his own childhood to King's Row , Reagan places himself within the movie by shutting out its horror. He is engaging in acknowledgment by denial.38

The Towers and Gordons were hardly replicas of the Reagans. In spite of poverty, paternal alcoholism, and several moves from one town and one shoe salesman's job to another, Reagan remembers a happy childhood. That must be part of the story; yet the son who, influenced by his mother, "could feel no resentment against" his passed-out father39 is dissociated from his feelings. King's Row supplied a target for anger that could be placed outside the self. It provided the negative family from which Reagan had cut himself off. The movie reunited him to his problematic history in order, by amputation, to free him from it.

Why did Reagan need to be free of his father? In her psychological study of the president, Betty Glad addresses the anger young Reagan was not allowed to feel; in his study Robert Dallek emphasizes Reagan's fear of helplessness. Dallek locates the president's political hostility to dependence in his need to separate himself from his dependent father. Reagan himself blames one of his father's drinking bouts on Jack Reagan's indignation over the "narcotic" of welfare; Dallek's analysis illuminates Reagan's resistance to playing the alcoholic role in Dark Victory . But Jack Reagan's "dark demon" pointed to both the father's helplessness and the son's in the face of the father. Reagan recalls that his father once "lifted me a foot in the air with the flat side of his boot" when he caught the boy fighting. The boy associated anger with dependence, Where's the Rest of Me? suggests, since dependence simultaneously filled him with anger and made him a target. Jack Reagan used

his leg to punish the helpless son. Dr. Gordon became the punishing father, amputating the legs of a helpless young man.40

By moving from King's Row to his father and connecting his youth to Drake McHugh's, Reagan made himself the victim. But Jack Reagan died between the filmings of Knute Rockne and King's Row . Reagan had married in January 1940, and his first child was born a year later. Within a few months of becoming a father, he lost his own father, who had kicked him but was himself a beaten man. King's Row mutilated the actor for any death wishes against his father or feelings of triumph over him. The president has trouble drawing hands and feet; in a doodle of himself in a football jersey, the limbs are missing (as if to merge the Gipper and Drake McHugh).41 King's Row did not end with mutilation, however. By both punishing the actor and giving him a target for anger, the movie allowed him to reexperience and conquer his helplessness.

Drake McHugh feels defeated after his legs are cut off until he discovers who is to blame. "Where did Doctor Gordon think I lived, in my legs?" scoffs Drake when he learns that the doctor amputated his legs not to save his life but to turn him into "a lifelong cripple." Drake's anger at Gordon frees him from self-pity, and he and his wife make their fortune in real estate. At the film's end they move into one of their new houses, in a suburb outside King's Row. In the final image on the screen, Drake, his wife, and his best friend approach their white house on the hill. The two films that made Reagan a star supplied him with an idealized authority he could sacrifice and a sadistic one he could be punished by and then overcome. Freed from the gothic small town, Reagan would reinhabit, as fantasy life for millions, an ideal version of the American past.

Reagan appeals to an American dream past where, in his misquotation of Tom Paine, "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." Drake McHugh resolves the struggle between good and evil by rising above the rooted body; upward mobility, in Reagan's images, saves us from the gothic nightmare of being trapped down below. This nightmare has personal resonance for Reagan, since he suffers from the American pioneer's disease, "a lifelong tendency toward claustrophobia." The boy at the bottom of the football pile, he tells us in his autobiography, "got frightened to the point of hysteria in the darkness under the mass of writhing, shouting bodies." To protect himself from claustrophobia during the filming of Hellcats of the Navy (1957), in which Reagan played a submarine commander, he rushed to the periscope between takes to watch the activity in the harbor. Upward mobility moved

the actor from the bodies to the spectacle, from the bottom of the pile to the top, and he insists on the need to "restore a . . . vertical structuring of society." Communism, Reagan charges, is "the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars." His own long anti-Communist climb reached both movie stardom and the outer space of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars). In the president's words, "There is no left or right, only an up or down. Up to the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law or order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism."42

Upward mobility, in rugged individualist rhetoric, frees the self-made man from dependence. Filmed amputation did not, however, emancipate Reagan from his dependent father. It made Drake McHugh helpless and dependent, cared for by a maternal woman as Nelle Reagan had cared for Jack. That result may have constituted a happy ending in film and childhood fantasy, but it came at the price of manhood. Drake has a sexual romance with Randy Monaghan, his working-class Irish girlfriend, before he loses his money and his legs. Drake's poverty, which sends him to the railway station job and places him within an Irish family, brings him closer to Reagan's childhood. But when Drake marries Randy, as the movie makes explicit, he has lost his sexuality. King's Row freed Reagan from the father by placing him under female power.

The happy family announced at the beginning of King's Row is promised again at the end. But Drake has been swallowed up by the gothic nightmare in between. He will raise no children. Drake's happy family, cut off from the past and the future, can only exist as a dream.

Reagan still inhabits King's Row . He made it the center of his autobiography, he watched it again and again with Jane Wyman and their guests, he watches it with Nancy Reagan, and he chose its music as the fanfare for his 1980 inauguration. But the King's Row solution created a problem that plagued Reagan (he says in Where's the Rest of Me? ) for the remainder of his Hollywood career.43

Reagan was in the army when King's Row appeared. Stationed in Hollywood, he made training, morale, and reenlistment movies for soldiers, defense workers, and the mass public. These movies, whatever their audience, confused entertainment with war. In This Is the Army (1943), Reagan played a corporal who stages an army variety show during World War II. His father, portrayed by George Murphy, had put on a

soldier's show during the First World War and then lost the use of a leg. Reagan, who had played a legless hero the year before and who would follow Murphy into California politics two decades later, inherits the master of ceremonies role from his film father. Murphy's performers had marched off the stage into the trucks taking them to embark for France. By World War II war itself, as mass, militarized formations, had taken over the stage. The movie ends with a command performance of Reagan's show before the president of the United States.

This Is the Army made war into entertainment; Reagan also made entertainment into war. Although never close to combat, Reagan reports that he participated in "one of the better-kept secrets of the war, ranking up with the atom bomb project." "Everyone who has ever seen a picture based on World War II," writes Reagan, will recognize the briefing in which he played a role. To prepare pilots to bomb Tokyo, Hollywood special effects men built a complete miniature of the city. They "intercut their movies of the model with real scenes taken from flights over Tokyo," thereby creating a series of movies that enacted bombing runs. Reagan narrated the films, and each one concluded "when my voice said, 'Bombs away.'" Reagan's account of his wartime service slips from the Manhattan project to the moving picture theater, from real war to a mock-up of war. To make himself a participant, Reagan breaks down the distinction between real bombs and simulated bombing runs. As a result, none of the explosives in his account, from the bombs he narrates to the atom bomb, fall on real targets. When Reagan told crowds in his first campaign for governor that he served as an adjutant at an Air Force base, he did not mention that it was in the film community.44

As if to compensate for taking care of Reagan during the war, Hollywood cast him in a series of postwar films that placed him in the wrong kind of danger. Before King's Row Reagan had played the young Custer in Santa Fe Trail (1940) and, in International Squadron (1941), a carefree RAF pilot who atones for his costly nonchalance by dying on a heroic mission. These roles, which he got from his success as the Gipper,45 joined heroism to sacrifice. But King's Row typecast the actor as a figure vulnerable not in combat but in romantic entanglements. The American playboy cannot be truly manly because his involvements are with women and masculinity is realized in relations among men. Reagan hoped that the trajectory from Dark Victory through King's Row would free him from female entanglements and prepare him to play a

cowboy. But Warner Brothers drew a different box office lesson from the actor's Hollywood career. The characters Reagan played after the war were invaded by illness and by women.

Reagan wanted a big-budget Western for his first postwar film. The studio cast him instead in the black-and-white Stallion Road (1947). The movie "opened the door to finding another part of me," writes Reagan. He bought the horse he rode in the movie, changed its name to the name it bore in Stallion Road (Tarbaby), and imitating the character he played, acquired a horse ranch. But Reagan did not portray a western hero in Stallion Road . A veterinarian instead, he develops a serum that saves cattle from an anthrax epidemic and then catches the disease himself. Given up for dead, he is nursed back to health by Rory Teller (Alexis Smith). In Night unto Night (1949) the Reagan character, John, has epilepsy. He has lost the will to live and plans suicide but is saved by Ann's (Viveca Lindfors's) love. In The Hasty Heart (1950) (was it better or worse?) Richard Todd played the soldier dying of a fatal disease and Reagan was reduced to feigning illness in order to remain at his side; Todd won the Academy Award nomination. As Grover Cleveland Alexander in The Winning Team (1952), his last Warner Brothers film, Reagan makes a comeback from epilepsy. In Tennessee's Partner (1955), his penultimate Hollywood movie, Reagan's character is an unworldly cowboy humiliated by a woman, who dies saving the life of his best friend.46

Reagan did not always sicken or die in his postwar films, but women invariably gave him trouble. He and Shirley Temple fall in love in That Hagen Girl (1947). The Reagan character is old enough to be the girl's father and, rumor has it, is. Reagan is harassed in Louisa (1950) by his mother's romances with two elderly men. To simulate a home for a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo (1951), he hires a nurse to masquerade as his wife. Reagan plays a professor of psychology whose father was a criminal and who wants to prove (as if he were the chimp) that environment can triumph over heredity. Reagan also plays a professor in She's Working Her Way Through College (1952); this time his wife suspects him of being infatuated with the show-girl in his class (see Fig. 1.9). In The Voice of the Turtle (1947) and John Loves Mary (1949), Reagan plays a World War II veteran innocently caught between two women. Only in The Girl from Jones Beach (1949), where Reagan is a magazine illustrator who cuts up the bodies of twelve girls to make one perfect figure, does his character take charge of women. But he broke

his tailbone on the set of that movie; he blames Eddie Arnold for bumping into him and knocking him down while Arnold was ogling the girls.47

These romantic comedies, with their erratic women and emasculated leading man, exemplify the domestic anxieties on the postwar Hollywood screen. The films alsoto recall the president's wordstell us something not simply about how Reagan looked to casting directors but about how he felt as well. Resenting accusations that he "never got the girl" in his movies, Reagan once listed all the heroines he got. "I always got the girl," he insisted, but as he knew at the time, the issue was not whether he got the girl but how. His list included girls he got by losing his legs, by nearly dying of epilepsy and anthrax, and by undergoing other forms of humiliation. He got the girl, like his father, by being dependent. Reagan did not like making these movies and left Warner Brothers because of them. "I . . . put my foot down. Then the studio put its foot downon top of mine" is the way he put it. Reagan found the roles particularly disturbing because they mirrored his private life.48

Soon after he caught anthrax in Stallion Road , Reagan came down with viral pneumonia. That disease, which killed George Gipp, almost killed him, and Reagan reports lying in his hospital bed and wanting to die. Jane Wyman was several months pregnant and, under the strain from Reagan's illness, she gave premature birth to a stillborn baby. The next year, 1948, she filed for divorce. "I was notified I was going to be a bachelor again," writes Reagan, and "I came home from England and broke my leg in half a dozen places." As he had with viral pneumonia, Reagan spent weeks in bed. "Free of any responsibility," in "my warm cocoon," Reagan was imitating Drake McHugh. Even when he was on his feet again, the actor did not enjoy his bachelor years. "I was footloose and fancy-free," Reagan recalls, "and I guess down underneath miserable."49

Reagan wanted domesticity, but Wyman preferred a more glamorous life. She "couldn't stand," she complained, "to watch that damn King's Row one more time."50 Wyman's career was rising while Reagan's was in decline. When she won an Academy Award for her role in Johnny Belinda (1948), Reagan quipped, "I think I'll name Johnny Belinda as the co-respondent." Their separate careers, as Reagan saw it, had taken his wife from him. Reagan's career diverged from Wyman's, however, not because they both made movies butand this is the reason other than watching King's Row she gave for leaving himbecause he was turning from movies to anti-Communist politics.51

"An actor spends half his waking hours in fantasy," Reagan writes in his autobiography. "If he is only an actor, I feel, he is much like I was in King's Row , only half a man." No line better speaks to an actor's condition, writes Reagan, than "Where's the rest of me?" It explains why he left Hollywood. As an actor Reagan had lost his "freedom." He was "a semi-automaton, 'creating' a character another had written." Deciding to "find the rest of me . . . I came out of the monastery of movies into the world."52 Warner Brothers would not let Reagan play the traditional hero on-screen. The studio deprived him of the idealized self he wanted to enact and gave him parts that exposed his weakness instead. When Reagan shifted from film to reality, however, he cast reality in terms of make-believe. By standing up for America in another Hollywood drama, he sought to end Communist influence in the movies.

In 1946, five years after Drake McHugh asked, "Where's the rest of me?" writes Reagan, "under different circumstances than make-believe, I had to ask myself the same question." Reagan answered it by leading the fight against "the Communist plan . . . to take over the motion picture business." "We had a weekly audience of about 500,000 souls. Takeover of this enormous plant and its gradual transformation into a Communist grist mill was a grandiose idea. It would have been a magnificent coup for our enemies." The actor emerged from his hospital bed and his filmed humiliations to enter the cold war. Reagan, as he tells it, recovered his legs in the struggle to prevent a Communist takeover of Hollywood.53

"Russ Imperialism Seen by Veteran," ran the headline over a 1950 story in the Los Angeles Times . "A former captain of the Army Air Force," as the story identified him, "Reagan portrayed the screen as the great purveyor of information about the American way of life. He said it was this that Red Russia cannot match, so it tried to take over. When it failed, he said, it tried various schemes to ruin the industry. 'The Russians sent their first team, their ace string, here to take us over,' he said. 'We were up against hard-core organizers.'"54

The fantasy of Communists taking over Hollywood was delusional, the stuff of a Hollywood movie. But two factors gave credence to that delusion and made it continuous with mundane life. The first was the presence of significant numbers of Communists in the motion picture

business in the 1930s and 1940s. They influenced no movies, but they were not imaginary. The second was the widely shared belief in their conspiratorial power.55

From 1935 to 1950, Hollywood may have been the most politicized community in America. Communists, other leftists, and liberals worked together in the popular front; they were united by the depression, by their hatred of Fascism, and by their loyalty to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Warner Brothers, known as the working man's studio, was the most pro-Roosevelt place to work in the industry. Reagan participated in progressive politics, and FDR was his hero. He joined the American Veterans Committee and HICCASP (The Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions), popular-front organizations in which Communists were active.56

Communists influenced no movies. Most Hollywood Communists were screenwriters, and their rare efforts to infiltrate progressive lines of dialogue were pathetic and futile. Warner Brothers produced a pro-Soviet film during World War II to give Roosevelt a movie that created sympathy for his Russian ally. Jack Warner made Mission to Moscow because of his ties to FDR, not because of the hidden influence of the screenwriter, Howard Koch. But Jack Warner led the search for hidden Communists when anti-Fascism turned into anti-Communism, and he blacklisted Koch.57

Although Communists had no power over motion pictures, they were active in the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), which battled with the studios and with the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) from 1945 to 1947 for control of the studio crafts. When the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating Communist influence in Hollywood in 1947, fears of a Communist takeover spread throughout the industry. In part those fears rationalized management's position in the industrial conflict. In part anti-Communist hysteria displaced anxiety over political interference from the proximate source, Washington, to Moscow. In part Hollywood was taken over by the cold war. But whatever the sources of the anti-Communist obsession, it was normalized by being so widely shared.58

Roy Brewer, president of IATSE, told HUAC in 1947, "The one potent force that stood between complete control of the industry by the Communists and their defeat at the crucial point in 1945 were the A.F. of L. unions" (Brewer was Reagan's close friend in the late 1940s; after Reagan became president, he appointed Brewer to a federal job). Sam Wood, who had directed King's Row , formed the Motion Picture As-

sociation for the Preservation of American ideals to fight Communist subversion. Wood carried a black book everywhere to write down the names of Communists whenever he found out about them. Wood's obsession deranged him, his daughter thinks, and contributed to his early death. The director internalized trouble that other anti-Communistsliberals and conservatives, management and laborsuccessfully extruded onto Reds.59

Reagan remained a New Deal liberal when he turned against the Communists. He was a founder and national board member of Americans for Democratic Action, formed in 1947 as a liberal, anti-Communist organization. He campaigned for Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey in 1948 by attacking Wall Street as well as the Soviet Union.60 Reagan's cold war liberalism did not, however, make him soft on Communism, for liberals shared the universal hysteria. The actor was not pressured either to see his fear of subversion as one perspective among many or to repress acceptable political alternatives; his was the only legitimate point of view. Reagan's demonology was not marginal, a sign of personal disturbance. It was the norm.

It was a norm, moreover, that spread from Hollywood around the country. HUAC's investigation of the motion picture industry, along with the Truman doctrine and the Hiss case, formed the consciousness of cold war America before the Rosenbergs and Joe McCarthy were household names. The hot war against Hitler and Japan slid easily into the cold war against Stalin and Asian Communism in the consciousness that formed Reagan's politics in the 1940s and that he brought to Washington. "The real fight with this new totalitarianism belongs to the forces of liberal democracy," he wrote in 1951, "just as did the battle with Hitler's totalitarianism."61 World War II signifies for Reagan more the first act in the struggle against Communism than the extermination of the Jews. Hence he used the fortieth anniversary of V-E day in 1985 to shore up the German-American anti-Soviet alliance by visiting Bitburg cemetery and equating Jewish victims of the Holocaust with the German soldiers buried there. Both, said Reagan, were "victims" of "the awful evil started by one man."62

Reagan's enlightenment about Communism in postwar Hollywood defines the founding moment of the politics in which we now all live. The president brought with him to Washington other men who had participated in intelligence work during World War II and then shifted to the anti-Soviet fight. There was a romance of World War II in 1940s America, denied to countries on whose soil the war was fought. Presi-

dent Reagan has revived that romance, filtered it through Hollywood, and frozen it at the moment when Nazis turned into Communists (in theorywhile real ones went to work for American intelligence). Reagan learned that Communists were "monsters," he told Robert Scheer in 1980, "when they were trying to take over Hollywood." He learned then what he still believes, that "the Soviet Union was the mother lode, the center, which controlled subversives around the world."63

Isolationist Republicans shared Reagan's view of Soviet influence, but while they tried to withdraw from the alien world (at least in Europe), Reagan wanted to transform it. As a cold war Democrat, he never shared the parochial conservative opposition to increased military spending and a global, interventionist foreign policy. Reagan, unlike provincial conservatives, was and remains a statist. To combat Communist penetration, from 1940s Hollywood to 1980s Washington, Reagan has supported a militarized surveillance state.

Hollywood anti-Communism, as Reagan understood it, restored his independence by freeing him from make-believe. But Communist influence was not the only fantasy Reagan took with him from the movies; he took the fantasy of independence as well. Reagan wore a gun during his battle against the Communists to protect himself from Red reprisals. As he put it, "I mounted the holstered gun religiously every morning and took it off the last thing at night." Pioneer heroism and Indian war had moved from American history into Hollywood fantasy. "We are for the free enterprise system," Reagan told the Los Angeles Rotary Club in 1948. "We have fought our little Red brothers all along the line." Reagan meant Communists, but his phrase evoked Indians. Shifting from one red enemy to another, Reagan brought frontier individualism back into history again.64

Reagan is fond of quoting Sterling Hayden's testimony before HUAC that the Communists were taking over Hollywood until "we ran into a one-man battalion named Ronnie Reagan." But the lone man in Hollywood was actually a victim of corporate, countersubversive cooperation. HUAC, the motion picture industry, the unions, and private agencies like the American Legion all worked together, blacklisting those people who refused to name names. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, the one-man battalion joined a surveillance network that, as we shall see in chapter 2, imitated the enemy it was designed to destroy.65

Reagan was drawn to the Screen Actor's Guild, he writes in his autobiography, because it was an avenue to the stars. When he walked into the union boardroom, he "saw it crowded with the famous men of

the business. I knew that I was beginning to find the rest of me." The statement unwittingly replaces the legs that rooted him to his failed father with the support of famous men. Reagan rejected the Left, he told Tom Hayden, when he discovered that it operated through secret caucuses in large, popular-front organizations. He had given the same testimony before HUAC decades earlier. Reagan innocently lent his name to a charitable cause, he told the committee, only to find out that the Communists were using him. The discovery that he was being "spoonfed and steered" transformed him from innocent victim to one-man battalion.66

But Reagan prefers playing the one-man battalion to living it. "He simply looks to someone to tell him what to do," says his former campaign manager, John Sears. "He can be guided." Reagan agrees. When press spokesman Larry Speakes stepped in front of him to ward off a reporter's question about the reappointment of Anne Burford, the president quipped, "My guardian says I can't talk." Asked on another occasion if he thought of Michael Deaver, the aide closest to him, as a son, Reagan replied, "Gee, I always thought of him more as a father figure." Reagan has found the support his father had received but not given him at home.67

The process of relying on behind-the-scenes support, which he made part of himself, climaxed during the Hollywood inquisition. Refusing to be manipulated as a front for the Communists, Reagan fronted instead for the powerful men in Hollywood who led the fight against Communist influence. He found the rest of him by playing a one-man battalion and hiding the rest of him, which guided that battalion, behind the scenes. Replacing the personal with the political, Reagan helped orchestrate a blacklist whose existence he denied.

"There was no blacklist in Hollywood. The blacklist in Hollywood, if there was one, was provided by the Communists," Reagan told Robert Scheer in 1980. But as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and member (and president for one year) of the Motion Picture Industry Council, Reagan enforced the blacklist. He supported a provision in the guild constitution barring Communists from membership. He acted as an informant for the FBI, naming actors and actresses who "follow the Communist party line." Reagan told the actress Gail Sondergaard, after she took the Fifth Amendment before HUAC, that the union opposed a blacklist. "On the other hand, if any actor by his actions outside of union activities has so offended public opinion that he has made himself unemployable at the box office, the Guild cannot and

would not force any employer to hire him." Reagan refused to defend Sondergaard because she would not become an informer. But he met with repentant ex-radicals to help them cooperate with HUAC, name names, rehabilitate themselves, and continue to work in the movies.68

When he joined the fight against Communism, Reagan put the Reds in Drake McHugh's place, for they became the sacrificial victims. By casting Communists from the body politic, Reagan directed his violence away from authority and outside the family circle. But whereas he presented the shift from Drake McHugh to anti-Communism as restoring his personal legs, he actually acquired institutional support to substitute for his family of origin. Reagan displaced his dependence onto othersthose ruled by the monstrous "mother lode"and punished them for his desire.

Anti-Communism gave Reagan an explanation for and an alternative to his declining Hollywood career. It also, he tells us, supplied him with a new wife. Reagan met Nancy Davis when, as president of the Screen Actor's Guild, he established that she was not the Nancy Davis on a list of Communist sympathizers. "That's the girl I've decided to marry," Drake McHugh says of the surgeon's daughter. But the surgeon cuts off his legs, and he ends up with a working-class woman instead. Reagan learned on their first date that Nancy's father "was one of the world's truly great surgeons"; the actor was on crutches because he had broken his leg. Reagan had lost Bette Davis in Dark Victory to a neurological surgeon old enough to be her father. He married the daughter of a neurological surgeon, a woman who, unlike Jane Wyman, would subordinate her career to his. As a board member of the Screen Actors Guild, Wyman had introduced Reagan to the union. Guild president Reagan appointed and reappointed Nancy Davis to the board. "My life began when I got married. My life began with Ronnie," says Nancy Reagan. "If Ronnie were a shoe salesman, I'd be out selling shoes." A 1950s photograph shows Reagan in his new, all-electric home, his wife seated on the floor at his feet.69 Reagan had traded in subordination to Knute Rockne as the Gipper for humiliation by the showgirl as the professor. Now his wife was the lower half of him (cf. Figs. 1.7, 1.9, and 1.10).

Reagan had once been, as he put it, "a near-hemophiliac liberal. I bled for 'causes': I had voted Democratic, following my father, in every election." He left behind Jack Reagan's politics when he married Loyal

Davis's daughter, and he adopted the punitive, right-wing politics of the surgeon. Backed by the Movie Corporation of America (MCA), Reagan hosted the GE Television Theater in the 1950s, and TV Guide called him "the ambassador of the convenience of things mechanical" to America. Reagan spoke for General Electric around the country against "the most dangerous enemy ever known to man," whose advance guard inside America was FDR's welfare state. As he attacked state socialism, Reagan profited from his ties to MCA, GE, and Twentieth-Century Fox to (like Drake McHugh) make his fortune in real estate. Together his new politics, his new wealth, and his new family made him whole. His autobiography ends with Clark Gable's reminder, "The most important thing a man can know is that, as he approaches his own door, someone on the other side is listening for the sound of his footsteps." No passed-out father is in front of this doorstep, blocking access to mother and home. The actor has his legs back; his last sentence is "I have found the rest of me."70

Reagan's integration was not complete, however, for he had reentered the real world as the enemy of his own and his father's political past. Reagan had often ended his speeches for GE with the phrase Roosevelt had made famous, "rendezvous with destiny." He used those words again in the 1964 speech for Goldwater that catapulted him onto the national political stage. But Reagan failed to acknowledge his indebtedness to Roosevelt in the 1950s and 1960s. To recover all the rest of him, he discovered as he approached the White House, he had to incorporate FDR as well. "We have to be willing to be Roosevelt," asserted Reagan's adviser Richard Whalen during the 1980 primary campaign. Quoting FDR twice in his speech accepting the presidential nomination, Reagan cloaked himself in Roosevelt's mantle. At a time of economic and spiritual crisis comparable to the Great Depression, Reagan promised to restore the old Roosevelt coalition of middle-class, blue-collar, ethnic, and southern white Protestant voters and renew confidence in America.71

Reagan's election in 1980 was the first defeat of an elected presidential incumbent since Roosevelt beat Hoover, and by a comparable landslide. Carter and Hoover were the two engineer presidents, out of touch with the country's political coalitions and with its emotional life. Carrying his party into power with him, Reagan promised to end the paralysis of American life. Like Roosevelt, he won landslide reelection to a second term, in a contest that not only confirmed the new directions in which the president was taking the country but may also have con-

summated the first lasting electoral realignment since FDR's second term.

Reagan had prepared himself to follow Roosevelt, for FDR was the young Reagan's first political hero. He learned passages of FDR's First Inaugural by heart, developed a convincing impersonation of the president, and began to use Roosevelt's words and gestures in the 1950s in his political presentation of himself. "Roosevelt gave back to the people of this country their courage," said President Reagan. He was "an American giant," "one of history's truly monumental figures." Like Roosevelt, said Reagan in 1982, he was trying to save our system, not destroy it. But Roosevelt had merely offered government relief to middle- and working-class "forgotten Americans" like Jack Reagan. Ronald Reagan promised these same "forgotten Americans" "the ladder of opportunity." The patrician Roosevelt did not offer that ladder, did not need it, and could not climb it. FDR had no legs.72

Roosevelt, like Reagan, lost his legs on the road to the White House. His biographers picture him before he got polio as a rich playboy who did not take life seriously. He acquired presidential stature in the struggle against his affliction. The figure of the brave, crippled president entered popular culture in the 1930s, surely influencing the images of Knute Rockne in a wheelchair and Drake McHugh. But FDR-as-cripple was also a stock figure of right-wing caricature, for Roosevelt never got back the use of his legs. Reagan promises not merely to imitate his father's hero but to surpass him.

Reagan did not slay his father and rise above him, however. Rather, by identifying with his father's wound and his mother's denial, he inherited both the father's need for support and the mother's cheerful blindness to internal trouble. Reagan's first marriage and his postwar movie roles had called attention to his dependency needs without gratifying them. His new marriage and new politics provided upward mobility based neither on the rugged independence of the self-made hero nor on ties to an actual past but based rather on corporate and domestic support. Even though he was fearful that dependence exposed the self to aggression, Reagan did not relinquish the need for care; he became an idol of consumption by finding caretakers he could trust. The president was silent in response to a reporter's question on arms control until he repeated aloud his wife's whisper, "Doing all we can."73 Reagan has realized the dream of the American male, to be taken care of in the name of independence, to be supported while playing the man in charge.

The president would have us believe that, having recovered his legs,

he rules as the healed Drake McHugh. Reagan used the image of his own healing body to promote his economic recovery program. "Vote against me and you will cut me off at the knees," he often tells Congress. He bought a new pair of boots after his 1981 Congressional budget victory, and he signed the bill sitting at his desk with his leg held high in the air. Asked what he would do after the signing ceremony, the president replied, "Go out and cut the brush!" "Well, don't cut your leg off," joked a reporter. "Where's the Rest of Me? " interjected the president's wife. "You shouldn't have mentioned that," said the president.74

But Reagan is more than Drake McHugh with his legs back. He embodies national fears of helplessness and dependence in order to overcome them by punishing the enemies responsible for American weakness. It was by taking vengeance for evil that he found the rest of him, according to his autobiography. The man who married the surgeon's daughter as he recovered the rest of him combines Drake McHugh with Dr. Gordon.

New Deal liberals like Thurman Arnold invoked political doctors to legitimate the welfare state. Dr. New Deal was Roosevelt's term for a government that cared for its people. But Dr. New Deal, complains Reagan, addicts the patient instead of curing him: "President Roosevelt started administering medicine to a sick patient, but those people who then gathered around and became the structure of government had no intention of letting the patient get well and cut[ting] him off the medicine." Reagan wants to cut the patient off. He presents himself not as a pill doctor but as a surgeon.75

Reagan compares "cutting back on the runaway growth of government" to "performing surgery on a patient to save his life." (Surgeons find it hard, by contrast, to operate on Democrats and "separate demagogic from solid tissue, without causing the death of the patient.") To stop the "spreading cancer" of welfare, Reagan applies the "welfare ax." "Reagan readies the ax," Newsweek proclaimed early in the president's first term; Time put the ax on its cover. "The howls of pain will be heard from coast to coast," Reagan promised, as Time praised his ability to "inflict pain . . . with nerve and verve." Reagan and Budget Director David Stockman, operating against what Stockman called the "fiscal hemorrhage," plunged an ax into the 1981 budget in front of the television camera. Four years later Reagan and Alabama senator Jeremiah Denton posed holding aloft a "tax ax." Reagan also promised to "amputate" unnecessary government programs. The president would wield the ax and not be its victim, he insisted. Being a lame duck would not

hinder his efforts to cut government spending, he told cabinet members at their first meeting after his reelection. "I'll put a cast on that lame leg, and that will make a heck of a kicking leg." To prove independence, not so easy in a corporate world, Reagan punishes those dependent on him.76

Reagan's surgical metaphors capitalize on the slippage between personal bodies and the body politic. The president wants that slippage to go in both directions, so that he can embody punishment and still claim that his programs have hurt no one. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, by contrast, complained that the Democratic substitute for the 1981 budget was like "cutting your legs off at the knees instead of the hips." "It's like being told to amputate your own leg," agreed a House Education and Labor Committee aide. Although the Democrats want to call attention to the ordinary human beings hurt by Reagan's budget cuts, by adopting Reagan's metaphor they turn themselves into the victims. They thereby reinforce Reagan's self-image as the surgeon who causes symbolic pain and not real suffering.77

Reagan's glorification of American life goes with his refusal to inhabit it. The people in his celluloid worldlike the Van Heusen shirt collar in the advertisement that introduced this chaptercan be twisted and twirled, bent and curled, without suffering damage, and since no real harm comes to anyone, the president appears benign. He is cut off from the effects of his political programs. To represent toughness it is best to operate in a symbolic universe protected from the real-world obstacles that might threaten that toughness or expose its punitive character. Symbolizing toughness and staying out of touch, far from being contradictory, are mutually reinforcing. But Reagan's dream of law and perfect order, deforming the world as it is to preserve it as a wrinkle-free ideal, has punishing consequences for sensate human beings down below.

The president's uncanny mixture of invoked and derealized violence reaches a climax in his thoughts on Armageddon. The gothic sensibility looks forward to Christ's second coming but is obsessed by judgment day. It dwells less on the peaceable kingdom than on divine vengeance. Asked if he were concerned to preserve the wilderness for future generations, then-Secretary of the Interior James Watt replied, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." Watt's version of born-again Christianity, radically splitting our sojourn on earth from eternal life, justifies destroying the natural world. Reagan himself has said more than once that he believes literally

in scriptural forecasts of a climactic struggle between the forces of light and darkness, that he expects that showdown to occur "in our generation," that such events as the Communist takeover of Libya fulfill biblical prophecies, and that he expects the final conflict to break out in the Middle East.78

These musings take operational force from the administration's belief in a winnable nuclear war. "Reagan Enjoys Doomsday Ride" was the headline when the president rose above the earth, participating in the planning to survive nuclear combat by defeating Soviet efforts to "decapitate" C3 I (the American center of command, control, communication, and intelligence). Although Reagan has imagined the coming of the biblical Armageddon and "kind of thinks the Soviets are going to be involved in it," he insists that "I have never seriously warned and said that we must plan according to Armageddon." But he acknowledges conversations with "theologians" for whom the American-Soviet struggle is evidence "that the prophecies are coming together that portend" judgment day. Reagan's cheerfulness collapses the last judgment into the millennium. By musing on world destruction and then denying he has done so seriously, the president is normalizing the end of the world.79

Jerry Falwell, one of the theologians to whom Reagan referred, told his television audience in 1980 that the apocalypse prophesied in Revelations and the Book of Daniel was at hand. The Jews have returned to Israel, Falwell explained, as foretold in the Bible. A war will break out in the Middle East, and the Russian beast will invade. (To make the last judgment real to his audience, Falwell showed movies of himself inspecting the projected battlefield.) The Antichrist will unleash a nuclear war, Falwell went on to say, and 400 million people will die. The saved will not suffer, however. Uprooted from the earth, they will escape the violence that is to be visited on those down below "and meet Christ in the air."80

When D. W. Griffith lost his hold on film, as we shall see, his movies came back to haunt him. Reagan rose above film by taking his Hollywood identity to Washington. The Communists failed to capture Hollywood, he writes in his autobiography, but they initiated a series of costly studio strikes that caused the decline of Hollywood as the entertainment capital of the world. Reagan does not regret that decline for himself, he implies, for he writes that he only became whole when he

stopped making movies. But the autobiography's final chapters comprise an elegy for a vanished Hollywood, suggesting that Reagan rescued the movie set by transferring it to Washington. Reagan's presidential identity did not develop completely outside film, in anti-Communism, remarriage, and the attack on the welfare state. After he left Warner Brothers the actor starred in several movies that form a bridge to the president.81

These films were not box office successes, and they did not save his movie career. Perhaps that career ended because Reagan made World War II and cold war films in the 1950s when the country wanted relief from politics. Perhaps Reagan faced tougher competition from Hollywood stars than he did from political leaders, once the New Deal political system broke down. Perhaps Americans want something different from politicians than from stars, something more reassuring and more like themselves. Does failure in Hollywood succeed in politics by breaking down the disjunction between image and life more effectively than the bigger-than-life stars of the classic Hollywood movie can do? However we account for the disjunction between Hollywood decline and political triumph, we can watch Reagan become president in his final films.

Reagan left Warner Brothers so he could choose his own roles. He wanted to make Westerns, and his first post-Warner Brothers film was The Last Outpost (1951). While fighting Communists offscreen, he fought Indians in front of the camera. Just as the Communist threat, Truman supporters hoped, would unite Democrats and Republicans, so the Apache danger in Last Outpost makes allies out of Union and Confederate soldiers. In Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) Reagan saves Barbara Stanwyck from Indians (see Fig. 1.11); the local reds are being manipulated by a white outlaw. Reagan plays a gunslinging sheriff in Law and Order (1953) who brings peace to a western town. He also made a Western set in Central America; an adventure movie with an anti-Communist backdrop set in Hong Kong; and the cold war parable Storm Warning (1951; see chapter 8), in which the Ku Klux Klan stands in for the Communist party.82

Recalling his lawman persona, Reagan told an audience, "I once played a sheriff who thought he could do the job without a gun. I was dead in twenty-seven minutes of a thirty-minute show." The president also quotes Dirty Harry and Rambo. But when he invokes his own movie roles, he wants to be seen as the Gipper. Reagan mimed a cowboy

firing his six-shooters after American planes shot down Libyan jets in 1981, but he did so in front of his aides and not the television cameras.83

None of the movie stills chosen for Where's the Rest of Me? place Reagan on horseback; all three photographs put him in bed. He is without legs in King's Row , in the company of his wife and his best friend (Fig. 1.12). He had died in Knute Rockne and is being blessed by a priest and the Rocknes (Fig. 1.13). He is sitting back-to-back with Richard Todd, who will soon die of a fatal disease in The Hasty Heart (Fig. 1.14). These stills evoke redemptive suffering. They connect Reagan to victimhood, not aggression, and the merging of the two will bring his movie career to a close.

Reagan plays Web Sloane, an army intelligence officer, in Prisoner of War (1954). He allows himself to be captured by the North Koreans to expose the brainwashing and torture in Communist POW camps. But after volunteering for danger, Web avoids it. He pretends to cooperate with the Communists to gather evidence against them. Although the movie audience is in on the secret (that Web is a loyal American), it nevertheless watches other Americans starved and hideously tortured while Web grows fat. Extended masochistic scenes of torture establish the Americans as victims, but Web is not one of them. Sinister, dehumanized Asian torturers, stereotypes that merge racism and anti-Communism, recur in movies from World War II on. But the Korean War never enjoyed the filmic popularity of its predecessor, and the peace treaty had been signed by the time Prisoner of War was released. No one went to see it. Reagan defends Prisoner's documentary accuracy, wishes the film were more widely viewed, and blames liberals for its bad box office.84 But the disturbing images of torture and identity confusion unsettle Reagan's aura of innocence more than the film intended.

Reagan's movies played with hidden identity from the beginning (Accidents Will Happen [1938] and Murder in the Air ) to the end of his career (Cattle Queen of Montana and Prisoner of War ). He portrayed characters who joined criminal or subversive organizations in order to expose them, allowing the innocent actor to participate in forbidden activities. Although the theme of identity confusion was appropriate for an actor who found his identity through film, the process threatened to raise doubts about who Reagan actually was.

Cold war ideology, as we shall see, required America simultaneously to imitate practices attributed to the enemy and to demonize the subversive in order to defend against the resulting breakdown of difference.

But looked at from outside the demonological system, the mirroring process blended the subversive into his countersubversive reflection. President Reagan defends the motion picture itself for an analogous blurring process, for mirroring back our identities and telling us who we are. The desired self in that transfer is the one on the screen, for it is the self one wants to be, the commodity that acquires value from the viewers' desire. Therefore, the movie self, like the countersubversive, points to the definition of identity in doubling and to the absorption of identity in exchange.

Throughout his entire Hollywood career, in over fifty movies, Ronald Reagan was never cast as the heavy. Reagan's image was so secure that he could play a foreign spy (Steve Svenko, alias Fred Coe) in Murder in the Air or the American turncoat in Prisoner of War and still seem Ronald Reagan, the innocent. There is, however, a danger of slippage between good and evil in such masquerades. As I will argue in chapter 8, cold war science fiction addressed anxieties about the loss of the self to its simulacrum, in contrast to cold war political films, which inadvertently undercut the distinction between subversive and countersubversive. Appropriately, it was a director of science fiction films who imagined the takeover of Reagan's identity. In 1964, the year Reagan entered national prominence in his Goldwater speech, Don Siegel cast him in The Killers as a criminal masquerading as a respectable businessman. Siegel had directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956. In that movie pods possess innocent townspeople; since the viewer cannot tell the person from his or her pod, Body Snatchers questions whether the original character was really benign. In Reagan's previous masquerades, the good Reagan was always visible beneath the bad; in The Killers Siegel turned that image inside out. Reagan masterminds a robbery, uses Angie Dickinson as bait to lure an innocent racing car driver into the plot, and secretly had the driver killed. In what would become the movie's most lasting image because of the actor's emerging political career, Reagan dons a police uniform to rob a payroll truck.

The Killers was Reagan's last film. Strictly speaking it was not a Hollywood movie, since Siegel made it for television. When it was judged too violent for family living rooms, it was shown in motion picture theaters instead. The Killers may have been only a movie. But Reagan regrets making it,85 for he does not want to be seen as orchestrating killings while wearing an all-American mask.

Seven years before The Killers , in his final Hollywood motion picture, Reagan also played a man who comes under suspicion of murder.

He portrayed a submarine commander accused of making military decisions for personal motives. This time the doubts about the actor's innocence are resolved by making him a victim. In Hellcats of the Navy (1957) Reagan successfully turned Dr. Gordon into Drake McHugh. I shall end where I began, with a World War II film.

Hellcats opens with frogmen leaving a sub to bring back Japanese mines. Reagan (as the captain, Casey Abbott) submerges his vessel to escape a Japanese destroyer, thereby abandoning one frogman who has not yet returned. The frogman was romancing Abbott's former girlfriend, and the ship's lieutenant, Don Landon, thinks that is why the captain left him behind to die. Nurse Helen Blair, the woman in question, is played by Nancy Reagan (Fig. 1.15).

Abbott won't risk the sub to save his rival. He risks it instead to chart a path through the underwater mines. The ship is sunk and sixty men die, riddled with bullets or trapped below. Landon accuses his captain of endangering the submarine for personal glory. But it is Landon not Abbott, the film tells us, who is confusing personal needs with military necessity.

Abbott is trapped in a cable outside the sub in the movie's climactic scene. A Japanese destroyer is approaching, and Landon must decide whether to submerge the vessel. The men on the ship are your responsibility, Abbott tells Landon, advocating his own death. Like Abbott before him, Landon must be mature enough to sacrifice a rival for reasons not of personal hostility but national security. Miraculously, however, when the ship resurfaces Abbott is still alive. He has freed himself from the cable at the last minute. Although the conscious mind knows that Abbott survived by not submerging with the sub, the imagery suggests death and resurrection.

Abbott had broken off his romance with Helen Blair to protect her from the risks of war. But she never stopped loving him, remaining loyal in the face of the suspicion that he deliberately killed the man who took his place. By reenacting his rival's sacrifice, Abbott frees himself from the charge of bad motives; he is now united with the men who died under his command. Since Abbott is above suspicion, he can have a personal life. At the movie's end he and Helen Blair prepare to wed. Reagan's final Hollywood movie, mixing life and film to the end, supplied him with the perfect marriage of military and familial authority. It is not the commander-in-chief (Fig. 1.16) who is contaminated by bad motives, says the film, but subordinates (Landon the junior officer, Rogin the critic) who cannot accept his authority.86

The Nancy Reagan film shown at the 1984 Republican convention cut from shots of her among children and drug abusers to a scene from Hellcats of the Navy . Nancy Reagan, who had cried real tears while filming that scene, repeats her faith in the commander as he leaves on his climactic voyage. In cutting from life to the movie, the Republican National Committee may seem to have exposed the manufactured nature of its real-life image of the president's wife. But another film event suggests that the media men deliberately dissolved the boundary between life and image to offer us the reassurance of film. The president reelected in 1984 does not promote the telescreen as an instrument of surveillance and personal invasion on which big brother is watching you. Instead he offers freedom from public and private anxieties by allowing you to watch big brother. When Nancy Reagan spoke at the convention following the film of her life, Ronald Reagan watched her on television from their hotel suite. "Make it one more for the Gipper," she urged, and the mass television audience (including him) saw her tiny figure turn with arms raised in support of an enormous image on the screen behind her, larger than her and larger than life (see Fig. 1.17). On camera in the hotel room, the image watched itself wave back, forming the truncated head and shoulders of her husband, the president of the United States.87

Talks were stalled at the 1985 Geneva Summit, as the White House tells the story, because of staff interference between the two heads of state. Reagan was particularly irritated with Georgi Arbatov, the leading Soviet Americanist, for describing him as a B-movie actor. "Do one thing for me," Reagan told Gorbachev as the two men walked alone. "Tell Arbatov they weren't all B movies." Gorbachev was prepared. "The one I liked was the young man without the legs," he responded, and he asked Reagan what it was like to see himself in his old films. Reagan, now on familiar ground, used the line he had used so often before, "It's like seeing the son you never had"the imaginary son who had grown up to be president.88

That colloquy, according to the White House, broke the ice between the two world leaders. Thanks to the personal relationship Reagan and Gorbachev established, the Russians agreed to a joint Soviet-American statement that did not repudiate Star Wars. One old movie, King's Row , had paved the way for SDI (named for another movie) to go into pro-

duction. But George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars , insisted that the title was his private property. A group calling itself High Frontier was airing television commercials promoting Star Wars. "I asked my daddy what this Star Wars stuff is all about," says a little girl's voice, as red-colored missiles fly toward and bounce off an invisible shield. "My daddy's smart," says the little girl. The commercial associates the girl's daddy with the American president, us citizens with children in need of reassurance. The president of the United States is virtually alone, however, in claiming that Star Wars could actually provide a perfect defense like the one pictured on the television screen. Lucas, unwilling to be credited with Reagan's political fantasy, sued to remove his name from the product. But Judge Gerhard Gesell, sitting in federal court, decided the case against the filmmaker. Star Wars was a trademark, ruled the judge. It did not belong to its producer but to any consumer who wanted to use it. Star Wars was in the public domain.89

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1.1.
Reagan as Brass Bancroft, Murder in the Air (1940)

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1.2.
Reagan as a radio announcer, WHO

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1.3.
Reagan as a radio announcer, Love Is on the Air (1937)

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1.4.
Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, Brother Rat (1938)

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1.5.
Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman at home

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1.6.
Reagan and Bette Davis, Dark Victory (1939)

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1.7.
Ronald Reagan and Pat O'Brien, Knute Rockne,
All American (1940)

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1.8.
"Where's the rest of me?"

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1.9.
Reagan and the show-girl, She's Working Her Way
Through College (1952)

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1.10.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan at home

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1.11.
Cattle Queen of Montana (1954)

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1.12.
Ronald Reagan, Robert Cummings, and Ann Sheridan in King's Row (1942)

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1.13.
The Gipper's death scene, Knute Rockne

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1.14.
Reagan and Richard Todd, The Hasty Heart (1950)

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1.15.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Hellcats of the Navy (1957)

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1.16.
Ronald Reagan as commander-in-chief, Hellcats of the Navy

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1.17.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan, the Republican National Convention, 1984