1966 and the Presidency
It is 1966 and at the point where Ronald Reagan has just officially announced that he is running for Governor of California. Due to the continuing self-destruction of Lyndon Baines Johnson just two years out from the next election, the subject of using the Governor’s office as a springboard to the White House naturally comes up. Into the mouth of his fictional fiancé the fictional narrator gives the job of reminding those present about the Nixon potential. It is into his own mouth that the narrator gives the bitter rum of irony:
“Nixon? He’s politically dead.”
1976 and the Presidency
Fast forward ten years and Nixon is finally politically dead once and for all, but a shadow unseen and even unconsidered a decade before looms over Reagan’s dreams of Oval Office occupation. A bitterly contested race for the GOP nomination ends with a last-minute maneuver that fails miserably and Gerald Ford goes on to become the party’s nominee. The narrator once again is willing to swallow irony in his dim forecast for the political future of Dutch:
“So we are unlikely ever to know what, exactly, the Shining City meant to him. At least Ronald Reagan has held it in steady prospect, and the reason Americans are already starting to miss him is that they fear neither candidate in this election has any such vision.”
The Accidental Anti-Communist
That Reagan began his political activity as a New Deal liberal Democrat supporting FDR who became the father of the neo-conservative movement in the post-Vietnam world is ironic enough. But what is truly ironic is the mechanism by which Reagan grabbed the conservative throne: rabid anti-communism of a type not seen since the days of Joseph McCarthy. The irony is that this mechanism did not evolve full-scale; in fact, early in the process of his conservative radicalization, communists were barely on his rader:
"I think we have the right as free men to refuse any work for just grievances: the strike is an unalienable weapon of any citizen. I knew little and cared less about the rumors about Communists.”
The Anonymous Source Known as T-10
Once he was radicalized, however, Reagan became fully radicalized. He drank the Kool-Aid, as the saying goes. As another staying goes: he named names. And he also took notes. And he became one of the FBI’s most important sources in compiling their files on so-called communist subversion in Hollywood. As an anonymous source mentioned in FBI files only as T-10, Reagan was responsible for directing law enforcement authorities to investigate and potentially disrupt the careers and lives of a number of people who had all done something perfectly legal: registered as members of the Communist Party or attended meetings as non-registered interested guests. This unalterable and documented historical fact is placed in severely ironic juxtaposition with something Reagan wrote in his capacity as President of the Screen Actors Guild on January 22, 1951:
“Democracy does guarantee the right of every man to think as he pleases, to speak freely and to advocate his beliefs.”
The Great Irony
Ronald Reagan’s entry point into the world of politics was his seven terms as President of the Screen Actors Guild. There is irony enough in the former leader of a labor union getting elected President as Republican, but in Reagan’s case the irony skyrockets into the stratosphere. Even the narrator can’t help from commenting upon it;
“The President, buoyed by Congress’s recent enactment of his tax cut, had just fired more than twelve thousand air-traffic controllers for striking the government in defiance of law. It was an ironic reversal for a former labor leader who prided himself on having led the first strike in the history of the Screen Actors Guild.”
