I was on my way to Hollywood. I was playing in my first movie within a few days. It was a fantasy come true. On a Monday morning in the first week of June in 1937, I drove my convertible through the gates of the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, ready for work, and with a hole in my stomach as deep as an oil well. I asked myself, what am I doing here? Once again, I felt like the new kid in school. My first role at Warner Brothers sure seemed like typecasting: I was assigned to play a radio announcer in a movie initially called Inside Story, then renamed Love Is on the Air. It was a typical B movie - made in a hurry and forgettable.

Nothing I'd ever experienced - no stage fright before a college show or steeplechase jump or dive from a high platform, nothing I'd been through, had ever produced in me the kind of jitters I felt when I stepped onto Stage Eight at Warner Brothers that morning. They sponged some makeup on my face, I took my place on the set, the lights went on, and the director, Nick Grinde, said: "Camera - Action!" Suddenly, my jitters were gone. The old character actor had been right. As soon as I heard the director's words, I forgot all about the camera and the lights and the crew and concentrated on delivering my lines in a way that I hoped would make B.J. Frazer proud.

Although we finished Love Is on the Air in three weeks, it wouldn't be released for four months so I had a long time to worry about whether Warner Brothers was going to renew my option. But they kept me busy. A few days after finishing this picture, I drew an assignment to play a cavalryman (more typecasting). Four months later, Love Is on the Air was released and I raced around town searching for reviews of my first movie. For the most party, they were kind. The Hollywood Reporter, one of the most important trade papers, said "Love Is on the Air presents a new leading man, Ronald Reagan, who is a natural, giving one of the best first picture performances Hollywood has offered in many a day."

A few days later, Warner Brothers picked up my option for another six months and gave me a raise. I called Nelle and Jack and asked them to come to California. Within a few weeks, they were on their way. And in a way, I suppose I was too, although now I faced the same kind of problem I faced during my first year at Eureka College when Mac McKinzie relegated me to the fifth string of the football squad: I had made the team; now I had to make the first string. When I arrived in Hollywood, actors and actresses had just won a tough five-year battle with studios for the union shop and recognition of the Screen Actors Guild as the exclusive bargaining agent for actors. Like all contract players, I'd had to join the union and wasn't very happy about it. Make me join the union, whether I wanted to or not, I thought, was an infringement on my rights. I guess I also was a little uncertain as to why actors needed to have a union.

But as I spoke to some of the older career actors I met at Warners and discovered how much they'd been exploited in the past, I began to change my mind. Major stars had no trouble negotiating good contracts and working conditions for themselves but that wasn't the case for the supporting players, many of whom had been blacklisted by the studios and deprived of work after they'd tried to form a union. Once I'd become a believer in the union, I was appointed to the Screen Actors Guild's board of directors. I wasn't asked; I was drafted to represent the industry's younger contract players.

My first directors' meeting wasn't at all what I expected. I thought the union would be run by the lesser actors who'd been exploited by the studios, but instead a lot of Hollywood's top stars, like Cary Grant and Jimmy Cagney, were on the board. Most were big box-office draws who could easily command huge salaries and didn't need the Guild's help to negotiate their wages. But they enthusiastically gave their time and prestige to assure that lesser players like me got a fair shake. That night I told myself that if I ever became a star, I'd do as much as I could to help the actors and actresses at the bottom of the ladder. I was proud of some of the B pictures we made, but a lot of them were pretty poor. They were movies the studio didn't want good, they wanted 'em Thursday.

Until I got the part of George Gipp in Knute Rockne - All American, I was the Errol Flynn of the B pictures. I usually played a jet-propelled newspaperman who solved more crimes than a polygraph machine. My one unvarying line, which I always snapped into a telephone, was: "Give me the city desk. I've got a story that will crack this town wide open!" I was fascinated with the life story of Knute Rockne, the legendary Norwegian-born coach at Notre Dame who died in a plane crash in 1931 after revolutionizing the game of football. I began talking up the idea of a movie based on his life and asked some of our writers for pointers on how to write a screenplay about him. I began working on a script and over lunch one day suggested to Pat O'Brien, a fellow Irishman who had become a good friend, that he'd make the perfect Rockne.

Of course, I'd already cast my own part in the movie: George Gipp, who casually wandered onto Rockne's practice field one day and as his greatest star became almost as legendary as the coach himself before dying two weeks after his final game. Then one day I saw an article in Variety: Warner Brothers was going to make a movie based on the life of Knute Rockne starring Pat O'Brien. When I asked some friends how this had happened they told me I talked too much, that it was a good idea so Warners bought the rights to Rockne's life story. But then they told me Warners had already tested ten actors for the part of Gipp. I ran all the way to the producer's office and asked for a shot at the role. He turned me down because he said I didn't look like the greatest football player of our time. "You mean Gipp has to weigh about two hundred pounds?" I asked. "Would it surprise you that I'm five pounds heavier than George Gipp was when he played at Notre Dame?"

He held out for an actor who was a giant. A lot of players don't look like players when they are out of uniform. I remembered the cameraman who had once told me that the people in the front office believed only what they saw on film. I got in my car and drove home as fast as I could and dug into my trunk I had brought from Dixon. I found a yearbook photo of myself in my college football uniform, raced back to the studio, and put it on the producer's desk. He studied the picture, looked up at me, and said, "Can I keep this for a while?" I hadn't been home more than an hour when the phone rang. It was a call telling me to be at the studio at eight in the morning to test for the role of George Gipp. Pat O'Brien volunteered to play Rockne in my test. The next day, the producer called and said: "Reagan, you're playing the Gipper."

A few weeks after we finished filming Knute Rockne - All American, I sat in the back row of a small movie theater in Pasadena where Warner Brothers often sneak-previewed its new pictures. Pat was there too, along with a number of studio executives. We were waiting to sample an audience's reaction to the movie for the first time. As the picture began to unreel in the dark theater, I sensed a glow radiating from the audience like a warm fire. I was in the picture only a few minutes, but it contained a very emotional scene. Just before Gipp died, I said to Rockne: "Some day when things are tough and the breaks are going against the boys, ask them to go in there and win one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be but I'll know about and I'll be happy." As I spoke these words, men and women in the audience started pulling out their handkerchiefs. Then, from the back to the front of the theater, I heard sniffles, making me wonder if this was the breakthrough I'd been waiting for.

After the Rockne movie, I began to be cast regularly in A pictures in leading roles. I was able to buy a home for my parents, the first anyone in our family had ever owned, and I think I helped Jack, who hadn't been able to work much since the first of his heart attacks, get back some of his pride. Negotiations for my new contract were going on when I received a telephone call from my brother on a Sunday morning telling me that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Very shortly I started another picture costarring with Errol Flynn. It was called Desperate Journey and we played RAF pilots shot down behind the German lines.

My agent at the time was Lew Wasserman, now head of MCA Inc. He persuaded me to accept the studio's offer, pointing out that I was a reserve officer and soon could be called to active duty, so why not get the added money for whatever time was left? I have to confess I hadn't given a thought to possible active duty, probably because the army had designated me for "Limited Service" because of my poor eyesight. Three months after Pearl Harbor, I received a letter from the War Department. I was ordered to report in fourteen days to Fort Mason, the port of embarkation in San Francisco.

At the time, General Hap Arnold was moving toward achieving his dream of creating an independent air force. He'd established the intelligence unit to make air force training films and documentaries, train camera crews, and accompany our planes on combat missions. I was sent to the unit because of my experience in motion pictures. My first assignment was to recruit technicians and artists from the movie business for the new unit who were ineligible for the draft, and pretty soon, even though I was wearing the bars of a second lieutenant, I was offering majors' insignias to half-million-dollar-a-year movie directors. We also had first call on draftees from the industry. I wound up as adjutant and personnel officer for the unit. Our combat camera crews went to every war zone in the world and our training films were used throughout the army air corps. In a way, we'd become the Signal Corps for Hap Arnold's new air force.

My assignment as the post's adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn't take long for me to decide I didn't think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn't want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it. We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply - permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed.

During the early postwar years I found myself becoming increasingly involved with contract negotiations and other activities for the Screen Actors Guild. As I look back now, I guess I was also beginning a political transformation that was born in an off-screen cauldron of deceit and subversion and a personal journey of discovery that would leave me with a growing distaste for big government. I didn't realize it, but I'd started on a path that was going to lead me a long way from Hollywood. But that was a long way off and I sure never suspected it at the time. At the end of World War II, scores of new veterans' groups had sprouted up around the country and were trying to peddle some of the same venom of fascist bigotry that we had just defeated in the war.

In Hollywood, as I've often said, if you don't sing or dance, you end up as an after-dinner speaker. And almost before I knew it, I was speaking out against the rise of neofascism in America. I joined just about any organization I could find that guaranteed to save the world, like the United World Federalists and American Veterans Committee, which got me with their slogan: "A Citizen First, a Veteran Afterward." One day after giving one of my speeches to the men's club at the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church where I worshipped, our pastor came up to me and said he agreed with what I'd said about the rise of neofascism. But he said: "I think your speech would be even better if you also mentioned that if Communism ever looked like a threat, you'd be just as opposed to it as you are to fascism." I told the minister I hadn't given much thought to the threat of Communism but the suggestion seemed like a good one and that I'd begin saying if the day came when it also posed a threat to American values, I'd be just as strongly opposed to it as I was to fascism.

Not long afterward, I was asked to give a speech to a local citizens' organization. I made my usual speech defending American values against the new fascism that seemed to be abroad in the land and was applauded after almost every paragraph. I was a smash. Then I finished up with my new line at the end: "I've talked about the continuing threat of fascism in the postwar world, but there's another 'ism,' Communism, and if I ever find evidence that Communism represents a threat to all that we believe in and stand for, I'll speak out just as harshly against Communism as I have fascism." Then I walked off the stage - to a dead silence. A few days later, I received a letter from a woman who said she'd been in the audience that night. "I have been disturbed for quite some time," she said, "suspecting there is something sinister happening in that organization that I don't like." Then she added: "I'm sure you noticed the reaction to your last paragraph when you mentioned Communism. I hope you recognize what that means. I think the group is becoming a front for Communists. I just wanted you to know that that settled it for me. I resigned from the organization the next day." Thanks to my minister and that lady, I began to wake up to the real world and what was going on in my own business, the motion picture industry.

There were then forty-three labor unions in the picture business. A few were independents but most were affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The Screen Actors Guild was one of the latter, as was the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees - better known as the stagehands' union or by its initials, IATSE. During the absence of so many of us during the war something new had come into being. Some of the unions had gotten together to organize what they called the "Conference of Studio Unions," also known as CSU. The rump CSU group was run by a man named Herb Sorrell, head of the studio painters' union, who set out with a plan to gain jurisdictional control over a group of workers within an IATSE branch called the Set Erectors. There were only about 350 set erectors in the whole industry but the CSU called a strike demanding that the studios recognize it as their exclusive bargaining agent. The IATSE told its members to cross the CSU picket lines and war broke out. Naturally, actors and actresses came to the officers of the Guild, asking us what they should do. When we held the meeting, it was obvious that the CSU strike was a phony. It wasn't meant to improve the wages and working conditions of its members, but to grab something from another union that was rightfully theirs.

The gates of the studios soon became a bloody battleground of daily clashes between the people who wanted to work and the strikers and outside agitators brought in to help them. A union of waterfront workers headquartered in San Francisco suspected of having Communist affiliations sent mass pickets to aid the CSU strikers. Homes and cars were bombed and many people were seriously injured on the picket lines; workers trying to drive into a studio would be surrounded by pickets who'd pull open their car door or roll down a window and yank the worker's arm until they broke it, then say, "Go on, go to work, see how much you get done today." In the end, we beat 'em. The strike collapsed in February 1947. The decision by the Guild and several other unions to ignore the picket lines ultimately destroyed not only the strike but the Conference of Studio Unions.

Later, several members of the Communist Party in Hollywood who had been involved in the attempted takeover went public and described in intimate detail how Moscow was trying to take over the picture business. The California Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, after a lengthy inquiry, confirmed that the strike was part of a Soviet effort to gain control over Hollywood and the content of its films. Although the principal leader of the strike told Congress that he had never been a Communist, investigators produced evidence that they said proved he was a secret member of the party, and a year later, national leaders of his union concluded he had "willfully and knowingly associated with groups subservient to the Communist Party."

Not long after that, I accepted an invitation to fill a vacancy on the board of directors of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. The group, known to everybody by its initials, HICCASP, had come into being as a support group for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was a respected and prestigious liberal organization that had attracted some of the best-known names in Hollywood. There were about sixty board members at the meeting, many of whom I didn't recognize, particularly the members of the executive committee, who were seated at a table facing the board members.

Dore Schary, the head of MGM, was sitting next to me and I nudged him and said: "Where are all the people that used to be here, the heads of the other studios and so forth?" He looked at me and then leaned over and whispered: "Stop by Olivia de Havilland's apartment after the meeting." Olivia was a member of the executive committee of HICCASP. Ten of us met later that night at her apartment and I was amazed when she and others in the room said they suspected Communists were trying to take over the organization. I'd previously decided that as a new board member I should keep my mouth shut and listen to the others. But knowing a little about Communist tactics from my dealings with the FBI, I suggested that we propose a resolution to the executive committee with language that we knew a Communist couldn't accept and have Olivia submit it in the next meeting the following week and see what happened.

We wrote out what was essentially an innocuous declaration of principles ending with a phrase in which HICCASP's executive board reaffirmed its "belief in free enterprise and the Democratic system and repudiates Communism as desirable for the United States." The next week, we got together while Olivia attended the executive committee meeting. After an hour or so, the phone rang. It was Olivia. "They voted it down," she said. She joined us later and said she'd been the only one in favor of our resolution. It was all the proof we needed: HICCASP had become a Communist front organization hiding behind a few well-intentioned Hollywood celebrities to give it credibility. The next day, the twelve of us resigned, not only from the board, but the entire organization. We were the last front of respectability for HICCASP and within a week it was out of business - but not the people running it. They erased the name of HICCASP from the office door but put up the title of a new group - it was the same people with the same objectives behind a new front group.

The strike and the efforts to gain control over HICCASP and other organizations had a profound effect on me. More than anything else, it was the Communists' attempted takeover of Hollywood and its worldwide weekly audience of more than five hundred million people that led me to accept a nomination to serve as president of the Screen Actors Guild and, indirectly at least, set me on the road that would lead me into politics. One of the best reviews I ever got didn't involve a movie but came from a fellow actor testifying in court. Sterling Hayden, who'd been among those flirting with Communism before later renouncing it, said: "Ronald Reagan was a one-man battalion of opposition" to the attempted Communist takeover of Hollywood during the 1946 strike. Now I knew from firsthand experience how Communists used lies, deceit, violence, or any other tactic that suited them to advance the cause of Soviet expansionism. I knew from the experience of hand-to-hand combat that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of Communism.

During the late 1940s, one side effect of the attempted Communist infiltration of our industry was a kind of national backlash against Hollywood. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, I began speaking out to defend the industry. By now, I guess I was beginning to undergo a political transformation. As I've said, I'd emerged from the war a liberal. I think my political transformation began with my exposure to the business-as-usual attitude of many civil service bureaucrats during the war; then came the attempted Communist take-over of the picture business, which a lot of my liberal friends refused to admit ever happened; next, I had a brief experience living in a country that promised the kind of womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence a lot of these liberal friends wanted to bring to America. In 1949, I spent four months in England filming The Hasty Heart while the Labor Party was in power. I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country.

Probably because of my dad's influence and my experiences during the Depression, I had loved the Democratic Party. I agreed with Thomas Jefferson, its founder, who said: "Democrats consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them, therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent - the equal rights of every man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government." But the party had begun to change drastically in the thirties. Jefferson repeatedly said that the best government was the smallest government, that "governments are not the masters of the people, but the servants of the people governed." Abe Lincoln once said, "The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and the axioms of a free society." But during the Depression, the Democrats began to repudiate many of these principles while creating a government that grew ever larger and increasingly demanded the right to regulate and plan the social and economic life of the country and move into arenas best left to private enterprise.

Our federal bureaucracy expanded relentlessly during the post-war years and, almost always with the best of intentions, it began leading America along the path to a silent form of socialism. Our government wasn't nationalizing the railroads or the banks, but it was confiscating a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth through excessive taxes, and indirectly seizing control of the day-to-day management of our businesses with rules and regulations that often gave Washington bureaucrats the power of life and death over them. Well, pretty soon my speeches in defense of Hollywood were beginning to take on a new tone. And I received a telephone call that was to change my life and enrich it forever after.

The telephone call was from director Mervyn LeRoy, who told me an actress working on one of his pictures needed my help. The young woman, Nancy Davis, was extremely upset because the name of another actress identified as Nancy Davis had appeared on the membership rosters of several Communist front groups and she was receiving notices of their meetings in her mail. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, I did a little research and found out that there was more than one Nancy Davis connected with show business - in fact there were several - and it took me only a few minutes to establish that Mervyn's Nancy Davis was not the one who belonged to several Communist front groups. Mervyn called back and said his assurances hadn't been enough to satisfy the young lady. "She's a worrier," he said. "She's still worried that people are going to think she's a Communist. Why don't you give her a call? I think she will take it better from you than from me. Just take her out to dinner and tell her the whole story yourself."

I took her to a restaurant on the Sunset Strip and soon realized that Mervyn hadn't been exaggerating when he'd said she was really steamed up over having been confused with someone else. Pretty soon, we weren't talking any more about her problem, but about her mother, who had been a Broadway actress, and her father, a prominent surgeon, and our lives in general. Although we'd agreed to call it an early night, I didn't want the evening to end, so I said: "Have you ever seen Sophie Tucker?" She's singing at Ciro's just down the street. Why don't we go see the first show?" Well, she'd never heard Sophie Tucker before so we went to Ciro's to catch the first show. Then we stayed for the second show and we got home about three o'clock in the morning. I invited her to dinner the following night and we went to the Malibu Inn.

After that, we dated occasionally, but both of us continued to date other people, and now and then our paths would cross while we were out with someone else. This had been going on for several months when I found myself booked for a speech to the Junior League Convention at the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego. I wanted to share the ride with someone and wondered who I should ask to join me. Then it suddenly occurred to me there was really only one person I wanted to share it with - Nancy Davis. I called her and she accepted and said she was a member of the Junior League in Chicago. Pretty soon, Nancy was the only one I was calling for dates. And one night over dinner as we sat at a table for two, I said, "Let's get married."

She deserved a more romantic proposal than that, but - bless her - she put her hand on mine, looked into my eyes, and said, "Let's." I have spent many hours of my life giving speeches and expressing my opinions. But it is almost impossible for me to express fully how deeply I love Nancy and how much she has filled my life. From the start, our marriage was like an adolescent's dream of what a marriage should be. It was rich and full from the beginning, and it has gotten more so with each passing day. Nancy moved into my heart and replaced an emptiness that I'd been trying to ignore for a long time. Coming home to her is like coming out of the cold into a warm, firelit room. I miss her if she just steps out of the room.

Although I was pleased with several of the pictures that I made as a free lance, there were two or three that I wish I hadn't said yes to - and after a while I began worrying a little about the direction my career and Hollywood in general were taking. After Nancy and I talked it over, I decided to begin turning down roles in bad pictures and holding out until something really good came along. Our first child, Patricia Ann, had been born, and she had added lots of joy to the Reagan household. But financially, they were pretty lean and sometimes difficult times. In 1954, the General Electric Company was in the market for a new television program, and proposed a weekly dramatic anthology in which I would only act several times a season but serve as the host every week.

I liked the idea because it offered me a chance to share in the growing financial prosperity of television while avoiding the kind of typecasting that acting in the same role week after week in a regular series brought with it. My new job called upon me to play a supporting role in an extraordinary experiment by American industry. Until then, most of America's industrial giants had tended to function under a strong central management within a single geographic region - United States Steel in Pittsburgh and General Motors in Detroit, for instance. But Ralph Cordiner, General Electric's chairman, a remarkable and foresighted businessman, believed GE would grow more dynamically if he dispersed its manufacturing operations around the country. Smaller divisions headed by strong local managers who had considerable autonomy over their products and manufacturing operations, he thought, ought to be more competitive and more responsive to the marketplace than a large, unwieldy organization dominated by a powerful head office, and I think he was right.

Cordiner implemented his vision on a grand scale, establishing 139 GE plants in thirty-nine states. As an adjunct to my job on the television show, he asked me to travel to GE plants around the country as a kind of goodwill ambassador from the home office. Sending the host of the GE Theater to the far-flung plants, he thought, would demonstrate that the New York office cared about company employees no matter where they were and would also help forge a closer link between the plants and the communities where they were located. Local managers were instructed to take me to local events. About a year or two after the tours began, the GE representative who always accompanied me told me I was scheduled to speak to a group of company employees who had been working on a local charity fund-raising project. I think everybody expected me to get up and tell a few Hollywood stories as usual and then sit down. But instead, I decided to give a speech about the pride of giving and the importance of doing things without waiting for the government to do it for you. I pointed out that when individuals or private groups were involved in helping the needy, none of the contributions were spent on overhead or administrative costs, unlike government relief programs where $2 was often spent on overhead for every $1 that went to needy people. When I sat down, my remarks got a huge ovation.

Well, that changed everything. From then on, whenever I went to a GE plant, in addition to meeting workers, they'd schedule a speech or two for me to a local organization like the United Fund or Chamber of Commerce; before long, the company began to get requests for me to speak before larger audiences - state conventions of service organizations and groups like the Executives Club in Chicago and the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Initially, my speeches were only about the picture business, but after a while I began trying to make them a kind of warning to others. This is what had happened in Hollywood; it they weren't careful, people in other occupations might soon find themselves in the same fix as those of us in Hollywood and be denied fair treatment by the government. Those GE tours became almost a postgraduate course in political science for me. I was seeing how government really operated and affected people in America, not how it was taught in school.

From hundreds of people in every part of the country, I heard complaints about how the ever-expanding federal government was encroaching on liberties we'd always taken for granted. As time went on, the portion of my speech about government began to grow longer and I began to shorten the Hollywood part. Pretty soon, it became basically a warning to people about the threat of government. Finally, the Hollywood part just got lost and I was out there beating the bushes for private enterprise. No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size - and that, in a way, became my theme. In 1958, our second child, Ron, was born, bringing more joy into our lives. In 1960, after leading the Screen Actors Guild in its first major strike in history in my fifth term as president, I resigned after becoming a partner in a production company, and therefore, from the union's point of view, I was no longer a working stiff but a producer.

In Hollywood, I'd found more than I'd ever expected life to give me. For many, many reasons, these were very happy years for Nancy and me.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster