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Ronald Reagan: Cold War
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Reagan was widely critized in 1985 for a few incidents in East and West Germany. First, he announced he would not visit a concentration camp in West Germany because there were "very few alive that remember even the war, and certainly none of them who were adults and participating in any way." On April 11, the White House announced that Reagan would be visiting the Bitburg, West Germany military cemetery, to lay a wreath in honor of the Americans and Nazis buried there. There are no U.S. soldiers buried in Bitburg.
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After the war, television was beginning its infiltration of American culture, and Reagan was right there on the ground floor. He landed a contract with General Electric, hosting the company's weekly television program and serving as a general-purpose "celebrity spokesman," promoting the GE agenda wherever he was sent.
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While these actions supported Reagan's image as a defender of the free world, it was not until Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to General Secretary of the Communist Party that Reagan had a real chance of ending the Cold War. Coming to power in 1985, three years after the death of Leonid Breshnev, Gorbachev faced an economy in ruins and Eastern Bloc countries weary of Communist rule.
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Reagan was first elected to the Board of Directors of the Screen Actors Guild in 1941, serving as an alternate. Following World War II, he resumed service and became 3rd Vice president in 1946.[26] The adoption of conflict-of-interest bylaws in 1947 led the SAG president and six board members to resign; Reagan was nominated in a special election for the position of president and was elected.[26] He would subsequently be chosen by the membership to seven additional one-year terms, from 1947 to 1952 and in 1959.[26] Reagan led SAG through eventful years that were marked by labor-management disputes, the Taft-Hartley Act, House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings and the Hollywood blacklist era.[26]
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In 1983 and again in 1984, Reagan was heard to say he personally filmed the Auschwitz death camps; he was in a film unit in Hollywood that processed raw footage for newsreels, but he was not in Europe during the war. [16]
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Born Feb. 6, 1911, in Tampico, Ill., Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and worked as a radio sportscaster in the Midwest before being discovered by a Hollywood agent and being signed by Warner Bros. He made his acting debut in "Love Is in the Air" in 1937, made Air Force training films during World War II, and went on to make 52 movies. Reagan ... served as a spokesman for the General Electric Company, hosted and acted on the General Electric Theater television series, and was also host of the television series, "Death Valley Days."
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