Word: hollywoodism
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Throughout virtually his whole life, Reagan seemed to cling to an unchanging vision of an America that the Hollywood of his youth tried both to express and create. It was a Norman Rockwell vision of elm-shaded village life, of freckle-faced boys going fishing, of parading on July 4; it was a Horatio Alger vision of hard work and thrift and virtue rewarded. If the Gipper died young, he nonetheless died a hero. That was the America in which Reagan wanted Americans to believe, and in which many Americans themselves wanted to believe. And to a surprising extent, they...
...gone no farther than Des Moines, which is a long way from Hollywood, but he persuaded radio station WHO to send him to California to cover the spring training of the Chicago Cubs. A Des Moines friend who was working as a singer sent him to see her agent, who called the casting director at Warner Bros. and said, "I have another Robert Taylor sitting in my office." Warner gave him a screen test, then signed him for $200 a week...
...examined by a doctor who concluded, "If we sent you overseas you'd shoot a general." Another added, "Yes, and you'd miss him." Barred from combat, Reagan spent the war years making training films at "Fort Roach," the old Hal Roach Studios, just six miles from Hollywood...
What occupied Reagan in the postwar years was Hollywood union politics. "I was a near hopeless hemophilic liberal," Reagan said later. "I bled for causes. I had voted Democratic, following my father, in every election. I had followed F.D.R. blindly ... " By 1947 he was president of the Screen Actors Guild and found himself embroiled in the union wars ravaging Hollywood. Reagan came to believe that the bitter strikes in 1945 and 1946 by stagehands of the Conference of Studio Unions represented a communist attempt to take over Hollywood, and that belief changed his political views forever. In the subsequent...
...first prominent Hollywood actors to defect to the much scorned new medium of TV, Reagan revived his acting career. The General Electric Theater, with Reagan as host from 1954 to 1962, dominated the Sunday-night ratings. But what changed Reagan was his tours of the GE plants. Later, Reagan's opponents often underestimated him, dismissing him as "just an actor," an amateur lacking political experience. What they failed to see was that although Reagan had not spent much time in conventional politics, he had gained both skill and experience in what was to become the politics...