A Little Historical Context

Big Dupes at Big Peace: Ronald Reagan – From Liberal Dupe to Conservative Cold Warrior

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.