weeks into its debut, and attracting the very best actors: Ethel Barrymore, Joseph Cotten, Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, James Dean, Natalie Wood, Alan Ladd, Jack Benny, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Angie Dickinson, Vincent Price, Walter Matthau, Charlton Heston, Donna Reed, Greer Garson, David Janssen, to name a few.3 These were megastars at the height of their careers. Reagan often acted alongside them, since he not only hosted GE Theatre but starred in more of its 200 episodes than any actor. The show also attracted top musical talent, like Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, Harry Belafonte, and Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians.4
According to Reagan, who was also supervisor of GE Theatre and involved in episode creation and development, it was the top show in the 9:00 pm slot for eight years.5 If it was not consistently number one each week, it was always near the top, and all of this exposure combined to make Reagan so popular that his face graced the cover of TV Guide twice—the November 22, 1958 and May 27, 1961 issues.
GE’S ANTI-COMMUNIST SPOKESMAN
Of course, Reagan was not about to let this TV experience interfere with politics. Like his movie career, he insisted that there be time for both the camera and anti-Communism, and throughout the latter 1950s and early 1960s, Reagan traveled the country as a spokesman for General Electric—part of his duties as GE Theatre host. During these travels, he toured GE plants around the country, where he visited with executives and employees and gave lunchtime and dinner speeches. While these speeches usually contained innocent, humorous anecdotes about Hollywood, they often became quite ideological, as Reagan laid out a litany of attacks against big government at home and abroad—especially in Moscow.
Despite this exciting new forum for his political ideas, not all of his political remarks at this time were made on GE tours. For instance, in a June 1957 speech at Eureka College, his first of many at his alma mater, Reagan’s battlefield rhetoric was on display, as was his sureness of an American responsibility to fight the bad guys in the red hats. Citing a possibly apocryphal story about the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, he quoted an unidentified man in the state house on that day. “Were my soul trembling on the verge of eternity, my hand freezing in death,” said the stranger allegedly, “I would still implore you to remember this truth: God has given America to be free.” Here, said Reagan, “was the first challenge to the people of this new land, the charging of this nation with a responsibility to all mankind. And down through the years with but few lapses the people of America have fulfilled their destiny.”6 Here again was a common Reagan refrain that God not only chose America to be free, but gave the nation that freedom with a larger responsibility to all mankind.
In that speech, he expressed aggressive words, telling his audience: “You are fighting for your lives. And you’re fighting against the best organized and the most capable enemy of freedom and of right and decency that has ever been abroad in the world.” He pointed to the 1930s, when he claimed that Communism came to Hollywood via a man he cryptically identified only as a technician who came to town “on direct orders from the Kremlin.” “When he quietly left our town a few years later the cells had been formed and planted in virtually all of our organizations, our guilds and unions. The framework for the Communist front organization had been established.”7
Although most of these anti-Communist statements were made as Reagan toured the country for GE, he used GE Theatre on several occasions to air his views. An example of this occurred during a February 3, 1957 broadcast, in which he played a boxing trainer. At the close of the broadcast, Reagan stepped back into his host duty to give his customary goodbye and plug for GE products. This time, however, he put in a word for Hungarian refugees, fresh off the disaster of October–November when Soviet tanks, under orders from Moscow, rolled in and killed tens of thousands of Hungarians, causing a large number to flee the country. “Ladies and gentlemen, about 160,000 Hungarian refugees have reached safety in Austria,” reported Reagan to his huge audience. “More are expected to come. These people need food, clothes, medicine, and shelter. You can help.” He told his fellow Americans to send donations to the Red Cross or to the church or synagogue of their choice.8 Those Hungarians were Reagan’s heroes: the Captive Peoples of the Communist bloc suffering the sword of Soviet repression, and this was perhaps the Great Communicator’s first use of the TV bully pulpit on behalf of Eastern Europeans.
There were other GE Theatre occasions where Reagan assumed political roles, most notably in a December 13, 1959 episode called “The House of Truth,” in which Reagan played a U.S. intelligence officer in an Asian village in which Communists burned down an American library. The officer not only helped reopen the library but countered the Communists. In yet another GE Theatre show, aired September 24, 1961, titled “The Iron Silence,” Reagan played a Soviet Major named Vasily Kirov during the occupation of Budapest. At the end of the episode, Kirov releases two Hungarians in his custody, telling them, “I never knew what freedom was until I saw you lose yours.”9 Reagan liked the line so much that he shared it years later when making a point in one of his 1970s radio broadcasts.10
Chris Matthews, a former speechwriter for Democrats and now a popular pundit and TV host, recalls tuning in to GE Theatre one night as a kid and observing Reagan saying, “This is a program I care a lot about personally.”11 Matthews was referring to a two-part finale titled, “My Dark Days,” broadcast on March 18 and 25, 1962. Reagan starred as the husband of a housewife who was asked by a friend to attend a meeting of a liberal Los Angeles group called the Alien Protection Committee, which claimed that its purpose was to promote the advancement of foreign-born Americans. The housewife and the FBI suspected the group was a Communist front. She infiltrated the group and became an informant. The script was adapted by Richard Collins from Marion Miller’s autobiography,
Indeed this episode was deeply personal to Reagan, who, a few weeks after it aired, wrote a letter to two friends in which he spoke of the difficulties he faced trying to get the show produced. He complained that it was “near impossible” to “cram five years of espionage into thirty minutes.” But that was the least of his problems: “I had to fight right down to the wire to make the Communists villains,” said Reagan. “When I say ‘fight’ I really mean that.” The problem, explained Reagan, was that there were liberals on the producing staff who believed that Communist infiltration was a fantasy “dreamed up” by “right-wingers,” and as such they attempted to sabotage the show. Reagan was especially irate over the fact that two of the producers and one director tried to cut the scene in which a little girl said her prayers. “Finally in a near knock-down, drag-out,” wrote Reagan, “they admitted their objection was because they were atheists.” While Reagan was victorious in this battle, the company remained ignorant of his struggle to get the program produced.13
EARLY 1960S—“WE ARE IN A WAR” AND “WE ARE LOSING”
During these later GE years, SAG once again became a part of Reagan’s life, as he returned to his role of union president in 1960 after an eight-year hiatus. Almost immediately after resuming this high-profile position, Reagan faced the difficult responsibility of negotiating a new general contract with the studios. Despite the complex nature of this hurdle, Reagan won. As a measure of his triumph, when he announced the strike-settlement package to a mass meeting of the membership on April 18, 1960, Reagan received a standing ovation and a landslide approval vote of 6,399 to 259.14
As SAG president, Reagan found new venues for voicing his anti-Communist cause, and while he had labored hard to stymie the spread of Communism in Hollywood, he felt that the battle was far from over. In 1960, he boycotted a 20th Century-Fox banquet for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and a few months later in May 1961 he asserted that Communists in Hollywood were “crawling out of the rocks.” To Reagan, the Communist Party had “ordered once again” a massive infiltration of TV and motion pictures. “We in Hollywood broke their power once,” Reagan rallied, “but it was only an isolated battle.”15 In the years since his absence from SAG, Reagan believed the Communists had once again gained a foothold in Hollywood and were again in the process of spreading their anti-democratic sentiment. “They are renewing in the spirit of Lenin’s maxim of two steps forward and one backward,” said the future president in July 1961. This particular Reagan clarion call was
