Ronald Reagan: Liar, FBI snitch

[exlrrp]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl.../MNCFINTRO.DTL


While I was gone, the SF Chronicle ran an interesting series of articles on our former governor, Ronald reagan, taken right out of FBI files at the address above. It took the Chronicle 17 years of lawsuits to force the FBI to release them. You can see why it took so long. The lawsuits started back when he was president. This info would have tanked his career at any stage.
Here?s what the articles prove: Ronald Reagan was a frequent FBI snitch who unquestionably lied on a security clearance.. J Edgar Hoover, who LOVED Reagan, ILLEGALLY fed him dubious information about his opponents so he could slander them. The FBI also covered up the fact that he lied on a security clearance, denying he had been a member of two organizations denounced as subversive (Reagan started out a liberal Democrat)
But here?s the vilest thing of all: Reagan, the union-bustingest president ever, who used to brag about being a union president ratted people in his own union to the FBI on a frequent basis WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT OF THE UNION. This information, based on Reagan?s merest suspicions, was used to blacklist several people (their specific names are given) and ruin their careers?all without benefit of any kind of trial.
This is true conservatism in action, as far as I?m concerned, ratting people to the secret police, which the FBI was at the time and ruining their lives on suspicions.. Its just good business for conservatives, who want to bury all unions. This was the early 50s dynamic for the Republican Party, Macarthy being its leader at the time. I can?t think of ANYTHING Clinton ever did as vile, despicable and downright UNAMERICAN as that.
Conservatives will applaud such vile tactics of course but any working man who joined a union will know what kind of betrayal that is, the real stab in the back. And they want to chisel his bust on Mt rushmore?it says all about their characters, as do these articles

Some quotes:


?But the FBI had a problem.
As governor, Reagan would have access to UC's atomic research data. The Atomic Energy Act required the FBI to conduct a comprehensive background investigation of him.
The process started on Dec. 18, 1966, when Reagan filled out a Personnel Security Questionnaire that asked, among other questions:
"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of any organization which has been designated by the United States Attorney General as required under the provisions of Executive Order 10450?
"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of any foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group, or combination of persons which is totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive . . . ?"
Applicants were required to list any such groups and the dates they were involved with them.
Reagan answered "no" to both questions on the form, which contained a warning that "any false statement herein may be punished as a felony."
Reagan received shining recommendations from everyone the FBI interviewed.
But files of the Los Angeles FBI office showed that in 1946 Reagan had been a sponsor and director of the Committee for a Democratic Far East Policy, which had been designated as subversive by the U.S. Attorney General under Executive Order 10450.
The records also showed that also in 1946 Reagan had been a member of the American Veterans Committee, the California section of which had been cited in a report by the predecessor of the Burns committee as "communist dominated and (as) a vociferous, decadent minority in national AVC affairs."
But Grapp, head of the L.A. office, approved a report that conformed to Reagan's Personnel Security Questionnaire -- omitting Reagan's association with the two groups officially deemed subversive.
When FBI officials in the bureau's headquarters read Grapp's report, they ordered him to amend the document to include Reagan's role in the groups.
The bureau could not risk the omission. Hundreds of people in the late 1940s and early 1950s had faced hearings and sometimes dismissals from federal employment for failing to disclose memberships in groups deemed subversive.
But the final report to the Atomic Energy Commission, prepared by FBI headquarters, did not mention Reagan's false statement that he had never belonged to a subversive organization, which by law could itself be reason to deny a security clearance.
Battaglia said he did not recall Reagan's security clearance application?


?Those documents described an April 10, 1947, meeting between FBI agents, Reagan, then SAG president, and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman at the Reagans' Hollywood home, where they identified colleagues "who they suspected were carrying on Communist Party work."
Newly released FBI records obtained by The Chronicle reveal that the actors named by Reagan and Wyman that day included Larry Parks ("The Jolson Story"), Howard Da Silva ("The Lost Weekend") and Alexander Knox ("Wilson"). Each was later called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and blacklisted from working in Hollywood.
And over the years, the new documents show, Reagan's contacts with the bureau were far more extensive than he acknowledged or has been reported.
In May 1947, Reagan gave the FBI the name of another actor involved in liberal causes (the actor's name is deleted in the FBI documents).
That October, Reagan went to Washington, D.C., to testify as a friendly witness at a HUAC hearing on communism in the movie business. At a dinner attended by Hoover, Reagan remarked that Quentin Reynolds, a prominent journalist who had criticized the HUAC hearing, was "said to be a communist."
Reagan continued to periodically phone the FBI to report people he suspected were communists, based, apparently, on his brief encounters with them.
One was a young starlet who at a 1959 Hollywood soiree disagreed with blacklisting actors who had refused to testify against their colleagues. (The FBI deleted her name in the records.)
Another was an unnamed Los Angeles college student who questioned Reagan after he gave a 1960 speech on behalf of Democrats for Nixon. The student, Reagan told the FBI, asked questions "right down the commie line."
In an interview, Edwin Meese III said Reagan and the FBI had "back and forth" contact during this period. "He felt that the contacts with the bureau were very helpful to him during that period."


James Worth

Happy just to be alive