Volume 30, Number 18 · November 24, 1983
The Man Who Stayed the Course
By John Kenneth Galbraith
Thirty-six years ago, a third of a century and rather more, American liberals, broadly the American left, gathered in Washington to regroup after the war and to heal the schisms occasioned by communism and Joseph Stalin. The result was one of the more durable of liberal organizations—Americans for Democratic Action. We—for I was one—looked for allies wherever they might be discovered, and especially we looked in those days to Hollywood, where, more than anywhere else in the republic, liberalism was associated with money—not just money but easy money, as then it was called. And there, from 1947 to 1952, one of our notable allies was the youthful head of the Screen Actors Guild, a committed trade unionist, a solid Roosevelt man, and a financial contributor to our cause. This was the talented actor Ronald Reagan. He was, geographically and in other ways, a somewhat distant figure. But he was one of us nonetheless.
Feature, 3430 words
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