During his first decade in Hollywood, Reagan was, if we accept his own description, a “hemophiliac” liberal and supporter of Roosevelt. He never offered a credible explanation for the dramatic change in his political views, but it seems to have developed as something of a visceral and angry reaction to the decline of his acting career in the late 1940s. The rightward-shifting winds of the period gave him an opportunity to strike back at high-brow “Reds” among directors and screenwriters who had failed to provide him with the roles to which he felt entitled. This was the real emotional background to Reagan’s involvement in the anti-communist Hollywood witchhunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Though he publicly denied naming names of suspected members of the Communist Party, it has since been established conclusively that he secretly provided information to the FBI. To Reagan’s anger over the failure of his acting career was added resentment over claims made by the Internal Revenue Service on his personal income. These emotions were genuine and deeply felt, and this enabled Reagan to articulate, with a sincerity lacking in all his screen roles, the frustrations and resentments of broader sections of the middle class in the California of the early 1960s. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040609/342da4d4/attachment.htm>