‘My Dark Days’: Ronald Reagan and the Anti-Communist Film Festival

    As I have noted in a series of articles for Hot Air, next year we are planning an Anti-Communist Film Festival. It’s a great way to platform films such as Trial, I Married a Communist and The Lives of Others while at the same time having a big, fun l pro-freedom party in the belly of the beast – Washington, D.C.

    As you might expect, people have recommended that we honor Ronald Reagan at the festival. Reagan, of course, was America’s 40th president and one of the great anti-communists of the 20th century. He narrated a documentary about the evils of communism, and wrote and spoke widely on the topic. His command in Berlin that Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall” is an iconic moment in the history of human freedom.

    It is President Reagan’s early role in his life as a researcher, writer and speaker on the topic of communism that I’d like to emphasize in the Anti-Communist Film Festival. In my view the 2024 biopic Reagan, while a solid movie featuring a great performance by Dennis Quaid, tried to do too much. It sought to dramatize Reagan’s entire life, when a more effective approach would have been to focus on a particular period in the present’s life. This was the approach so effectively used in Lincoln (2012), which depicted a relatively short but powerfully dramatic time period in President Lincoln’s life.

    One of my favorite books about Reagan is The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism by Thomas Evans. Evans focuses on the eight years, 1954-63, when Reagan worked for General Electric, both hosting the GE Theater show and working for the company as a public relations envoy and liaison to employees. It was during this time that Reagan converted from liberal to conservative and became a powerful anti-communist. Reagan also starred in several episodes of the GE Theater, including “My Dark Days,” in which a woman reveals her past as a communist then goes to work for the FBI. It is based on the book I Was a Spy by Marion Miller. I have reached out to the Reagan Library to see if any copies of the production exist. We’d love to show it at the festival. A sharp, tight theater production about communism starring Reagan may reveal more than a three-hour movie. 

    From his work in Hollywood as President of the Screen Actors Guild and dealing with the labor unions at GE, Regan knew communism up close. From The Education of Ronald Reagan:

One of GE’s informants had reported that one member at a Communist Party meeting had asked, “What the hell are we going to do about that son-of-a-bitching bastard Reagan?” The actor received an anonymous phone call, threatening, “Your face will never be in pictures again.” He understood that they planned to throw acid in his face. The Burbank police put a twenty-four-hour guard on his house and insisted that he carry a gun in a shoulder holster. “I know from the experience of hand-to-hand combat that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of Communism,” Reagan said.

    One of the things that The Education of Ronald Reagan makes clear is that Reagan was a brilliant and well-read man and a first-rate writer. “His education stretched well beyond the bargaining table,” notes  Evans. “Reagan became familiar with such diverse thinkers as von Mises, Lenin, Hayek, and the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. He read and reread the practical economics of Henry Hazlitt. He quoted Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton.” One of the essential books in Reagan’s conversion was Witness by Whittaker Chambers, a writer and journalist of tremendous education and learning. 

    I’ve often thought that the reason why filmmakers often get the life of Reagan wrong is that they have the genre wrong. Reagan was a great leader and politician. Yet if you drill down there’s something even more intriguing – Reagan was a crusading journalist. A film that captures him will have more in common with All the President’s Men, Shattered Glass, and especially Mr. Jones than a standard biopic of a political life. Mr Jones (2020) focuses on the work of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who in the early 1930s revealed the lies told by Stalin and the Soviet propaganda machine about the Ukraine famine, in which millions of people were starved to death in the name of “modernizing” Russia.

    Reagan’s years at General Electric were spent writing, reading, speaking and spending long hours on the road meeting the American people. Ironically Ronald Reagan, the man who once called journalists “sons of bitches,” was himself a great journalist. His speeches were not just bromides, but reports from the real America. Reagan even wrote a syndicated column in the 1970s. At the anti-Communist Film Festival we hope to have a speaker or a panel who can explore Reagan’s research and writing. After all, it  was Reagan’s reading, thinking, field research and writing that led up to the fateful moment October 1964, when Reagan gave a televised speech in support of Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. “A Time for Choosing,” or ”The Speech” as it has come to be known, launched Ronald Reagan as a leading force in the American conservative movement. 

    One idea we hope to dispel, although it’s probably not taken seriously anymore, is that Reagan was not a deep thinker. In The Education of Ronald Reagan, Tom Evans explores the idea of there being “multiple intelligences.” This was an idea first offered by David Gergen, who served under a few presidents, including Reagan. Gergen “began with the premise that exceptional verbal skills indicate a certain kind of intelligence.” Gergen believed that Reagan ranked high in “inter-personal intelligence,” which is different than the “logical-mathematical intelligence” that you find in lawyers and professors. Gergen quotes from the book Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership: “Effective leaders of institutions and nations lead directly, through the stories and acts they address to an audience.” Gergen said that Reagan was off-the-chart high in “emotional intelligence.”

    That emotional intelligence helped Reagan as a movie star, politician, and journalist. He also fought to so what the Anti-Communist Film Festival is attempting – make Hollywood safe for conservatives. From The Education of Ronald Reagan: “In the course of his remarks, Reagan observes that the Kremlin had focused on American films as ‘the worst enemy’ of communism. He proudly states that ‘we now have [the Communists] licked; in their attempt to invade the motion picture industry. He sees Hollywood as a bastion of free enterprise, where the heights one can climb are ‘unlimited,’ and success based only on ‘your ability and your talent.’ This, he proclaims, is ‘the American way.’”

Addendum (Ed): I reviewed the film ‘Mr. Jones” shortly after its release. I heartily concur with Mark.

Note: You can contribute support for the festival by donating at the GoFundMe page for the project.

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