It is too late for the politburo to gloat, but Ronald Reagan, slayer of the "evil empire," tried to join the Communist party as a young man and was rejected for being too dim.
The revelation is made in the authorized biography done by friends who knew the former president when he was an actor.
One of them, Howard Fast, the writer, said Saturday that Reagan "was passionate" about enlisting with the American Communist party in 1938.
"They thought he was a feather brain and turned him down," Fast told The Sunday Times.
Reagan always portrayed himself as a former left-leaning Democrat who moved to the political right after seeing the communists in action in Hollywood. It now emerges that some of his closest friends were communists. "He felt if it was right for them, it was right for him," said Fast.
In 1938, the 27-year-old actor announced he wanted to sign up. The party conducted an investigation, said Fast, and "word came back he was a flake ... who couldn't be trusted with a political opinion for more than 20 minutes."
Fast said the party sent Reagan a delegation who "convinced him he could do more for the various causes that the party represented in Hollywood as an outsider, as a friend of the party, than as a member.
"It took hours to talk him out of it."
The former president's flirtation with Marxism was an unlikely prelude to a political career that was largely spent battling the threat of Soviet communism.
At the time, the United States was still in the grip of economic depression and many Hollywood actors were starved of work. According to Edmund Morris, the biographer, Reagan applied to become a member of the Californian branch of the American CP but was rejected by leading figures in the party.
As the anti-communist witch-hunt intensified, he was president of the Hollywood Screen Actors' Guild and supplied the FBI with at least six names of communist sympathizers.
Among its other revelations, the biography discloses that Reagan had little respect for George Bush, his vice-president for eight years, and viewed him as a "downstairs person" who lacked political courage.
The revelation of his disdain for Bush, the loyal deputy who became his successor, throws new light on the tensions within the White House as the vice-president struggled to get his own presidential campaign off the ground.
According to Morris, who devoted 14 years' work to the book, Reagan formed a dim view of Bush while they were both candidates for the Republicans' presidential nomination in 1980 -- a contest that Reagan won.
After agreeing to a one-to-one debate with Bush in New Hampshire, the scene of the crucial first primary election, Reagan invited other candidates to join in. Instead of objecting, Bush allowed his rival to change the rules and dominate the event.
"Reagan was a man who admired strength," said Morris. "I think he perceived Bush, when Bush wimped out, as a man who gave into pressure. I sensed very strongly that Reagan thought Bush was not all man."
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, the 864-page book to be published by Random House, was commissioned in the 1980s when Reagan was president. Morris was given unprecedented access to White House meetings and had monthly conversations with his subject.
-- Michael Pugliese