This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor on his book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more.
Big Peace: Professor Kengor, in these interviews, you’ve disclosed some shocking things: the Soviet material on Ted Kennedy; the FBI file on Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. But we haven’t addressed your remarkable information on Ronald Reagan, which we’re covering now because February 6 is the centennial of Reagan’s birth. You say Ronald Reagan was once a dupe. You cover that in your chapter on Hollywood in the 1940s.
Kengor: Yes. The dupes in that chapter range from Gene Kelly to Katharine Hepburn, Danny Kaye, Judy Garland, Gregory Peck, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. It’s a long list of liberals. They were exploited by secret CPUSA members like John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, mostly Hollywood screenwriters. There was also, among others, playwright Arthur Miller, the scowling Lillian Hellman, and Lillian’s “mystery lover,” Dashiell Hammett, all who were at least pro-communist, if not CPUSA members.
Well, into this political zoo stepped a young Ronald Reagan, another victim of Hollywood’s conniving communists, although Reagan learned quickly and would become the ultimate anti-dupe, the pre-eminent anti-communist.
Big Peace: It’s a remarkable transformation. When was Reagan duped?
Kengor: Roughly 1945-46, after World War II. He was suckered by several communist front-groups. As he later regretted, he was “an active (though unconscious) partisan in what now and then turned out to be communist causes.”
Among the front groups was the benignly named American Veterans Committee (AVC), which sought out Reagan, as a liberal Democrat, for its speaking circuit. The speaking material provided to Reagan was, Reagan later noted, “steered more than a little bit.”
This was likewise true for the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. “HICCASP” sounded innocent enough. In fact, it was another group Reagan admitted being very “naïve” about.
The duped Reagan saw the folks at these organizations as “liberals, and being liberals ourselves, [we] bedded down with them.”
Big Peace: You write that, “Reagan learned the Reds were not under the bed, but in the bed.”
Kengor: That’s right. All this leftist nonsense about our “hysterical” or “paranoid” anti-communism is pure ignorance. It’s liberal whitewashing of the very real attempts to hijack the motion-picture industry. Lenin himself and Comintern head Grigori Zinoviev began targeting cinema way back in the 1920s.
Big Peace: You say that Reagan’s “wake-up call” came at a July 1946 HICCASP meeting.
Kengor: Yes. The comrades underestimated Reagan. He had been asked to serve on the group’s board. He teamed up with James Roosevelt, FDR’s son, likewise a non-communist liberal. Reagan and Roosevelt suggested a group statement repudiating communism. What they witnessed next was a fusillade. As Reagan described it, “a Kilkenny brawl” erupted. One screenwriter barked that if war broke out between America and Russia he would take up arms for Stalin. Artie Shaw saluted the Red flag, offering, on the spot, to recite the Bolshevik “constitution” from memory, which he claimed was “a lot more democratic” than our Constitution.
Big Peace: That’s Artie Shaw, the great Big Band leader.
Kengor: Yes, and great Soviet Constitution leader.
Big Peace: What happened next is telling. It reminds of an earlier Big Dupes (click here) focusing on how the Left denounces accusers as “fascists.”
Kengor: The Left smears those who catch on. Reagan spent the 1940s fighting Nazis and fascists, a liberal in good standing. Now that he was figuring out that certain “liberals” and “progressives” were actually pro-Stalin communists–and shameless liars masquerading as liberals and progressives–he was suddenly vilified as a Nazi and fascist.
That’s how they attacked Reagan for daring to suggest a statement repudiating totalitarian communism. Leading the assault were the interminably angry John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, both Hollywood Ten figures who liberals still portray as innocents. In fact, both were loyal Soviet patriots. In Dupes, I provide their CPUSA numbers.
Lawson and Trumbo tore into Reagan, leading the peanut gallery: “enemy of the proletariat,” “capitalist scum,” “witch-hunter,” “red-baiter,” and, naturally, “fascist!” Lawson got in Reagan’s face, leveling his finger, screaming. The atmosphere was so charged that one woman had a heart attack. Reagan braved the onslaught from his fellow “liberals.”
Big Peace: You also bring into this the actress Olivia de Havilland, who played the saintly “Melanie” in Gone With the Wind. You say she found herself “a pretty face and mouthpiece for the comrades.”
Kengor: Yes, the comrades, who scripted major films, also scripted political speeches for liberal movie stars they hoped to use to advance the Stalinist line. One speech they scripted for Katharine Hepburn was reprinted in People’s Daily World, a communist favorite.
Big Peace: The communists actually wrote political speeches for these celebrities?
Kengor: Why not? They wrote movie lines for them. Why not political lines? And the liberal celebrities saw no reason not to trust them. The writers promised the liberals that they were likewise liberals, when, in truth, they were dues-paying CPUSA members. They lied to the liberals. And amazingly, liberals today still defend them. Who are the liberals’ bad guys? Naturally, the anti-communists who dared to expose the Stalinists–the same Stalinists who made fools of the liberals, nearly sabotaging the liberals’ careers.
It’s amazing. Liberals continue to be the communists’ dupes.
Big Peace: Let’s get back to Olivia de Havilland. She wised up, right?
Kengor: Yes, a few days before the HICCASP blow-up with Reagan, Roosevelt, Trumbo, and Lawson, de Havilland was handed a speech by Trumbo for a “progressive” political rally in Seattle. The text was blatantly pro-Soviet. It vilified the Truman administration (Truman was a Democrat, remember) as anti-Semitic, racist, union-busting, war-mongering, imperialist, ready for aggression against an angelic USSR. It was the party line–precisely the line toed by Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, incidentally.
Big Peace: Olivia de Havilland smelled a rat.
Kengor: She refused to be a stooge for Stalin’s American cronies. Not only did she ditch Trumbo’s text, but delivered a stern rejection of communism and warned liberals about being deceived by communists.
Big Peace: She warned liberals about being duped.
Kengor: Precisely. And when Hollywood’s Bolsheviks saw what de Havilland had done, they were enraged. True to form, they launched into their childish fits of hellacious name-calling. If the commissars had their own gulag somewhere between Seattle and Los Angeles, Olivia de Havilland would have been there, shaved head, shivering in a dark cell, by morning.
Big Peace: And so, de Havilland teamed up with Reagan and Jimmy Roosevelt, and they made their move?
Kengor: Here’s what happened: When Reagan and Roosevelt experienced the Lawson-Trumbo tirade at the HICCASP board meeting, Dore Schary, a non-communist liberal and RKO executive, quietly approached them and invited them to a small gathering at de Havilland’s apartment. When they arrived at the apartment, they got the scoop. A relieved Reagan smiled and told de Havilland he had figured she was one of “them.”
All three were ready to resign from HICCASP, but Reagan went back once more a few nights later. He offered a group statement affirming American free enterprise. John Howard Lawson went ballistic. Reagan stepped down that evening.
Big Peace: You write that this was a “serious awakening” for Reagan.
Kengor: The road from duped FDR Democrat to conservative Cold Warrior, to crusading anti-communist, to the man committed to taking down the Evil Empire, had begun.
Big Peace: You have much more on this in Dupes. You cover a moment in church, when Reagan’s minister shook him up.
Kengor: That happened at the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church, a profound moment Reagan would see as Providential. You’ll need to buy the book for that one. Also, there’s a wonderful incident where Reagan and William Holden crashed a major meeting by Hollywood communists. It was quite a showdown.
Big Peace: Most people don’t realize how dangerous this was for Reagan, especially once he headed up the Screen Actors Guild and battled communists in the unions.
Kengor: Reagan slept with a Smith & Wesson. In one instance, the bus Reagan was scheduled to ride through studio picket-lines was bombed and burned.
Big Peace: Professor Kengor, for our next Big Dupes, let’s discuss the liberal dupes Reagan overcame during his presidency, including some who did the bidding of the Soviets, intentionally or unintentionally.
Kengor: That’s a long list: Helen Thomas, Walter Cronkite, Mary McGrory, Carl Sagan, Barbara Boxer–just for starters. Of course, there was Senator Ted Kennedy, who made a shocking private offer to Yuri Andropov in May 1983. We can discuss all of that next week.
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