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Ronald Reagan: Ronald Reagan Building
built 628 days ago
By 1947, motion picture actor and leading man Ronald Reagan was in transition. Despite having made three dozen movies in the previous ten years, his career was beginning to wind down. That year, his baby girl, born four months premature, died after surviving a single day. His marriage to actress Jane Wyman (Falcon Crest) dissolved soon after.
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Ronald Reagan was the only President of the United States of America to have led a labor union at any time in his life. The 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers he summarily fired in 1981 probably don't think this Fascinating Fact is very Funny.
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Ronald Reagan had no claim to be considered an intellectual, and for a long time the elites in Washington and other world capitals found it hard to take the former actor seriously. He fell asleep during an audience with the Pope, gave himself a famously light workload, culled jokes and anecdotes from the Reader's Digest and even in interviews tended to be lost without his "cue cards". Once, believing a radio microphone was switched off, he jokingly announced that "the bombing begins in five minutes", and late in his presidency it was revealed that his wife Nancy had consulted an astrologer about propitious dates for major policy ventures.
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Ronald Reagan began his political life as a Democrat, supporting Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal. He gradually became a staunch social and fiscal conservative. He embarked upon the path that led him to a career in politics during his tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) from 1947 until 1952, and then again from 1959 to 1960. In this position he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Communist influence in Hollywood. He ... kept tabs on actors he considered "disloyal" and informed on them to the FBI under the code name "Agent T-10," but he would not implicate them publicly to HUAC. He supported the practice of blacklisting in Hollywood, defending it in a letter to Hugh Hefner because he claimed he would help anyone wrongly accused "avail himself of machinery to solve this problem."
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As Ronald Reagan loved to remark, "There they go again." WWF, the corporate-funded environmental giant often accused of taking greenbacks in return for greenwashing its corporate benefactors, has a new partner. WWF and the Coca-Cola Company proclaimed a "bold partnership" that has Coke paying WWF US$20 million. WWF touts the deal on its website. A full-page New York Times advertisement announcing the deal is headlined "This is our drop," a phrase that Coke has trademarked. For Coke, $20 million is just a drop in the bucket, a cheap fee for the PR boost from its WWF partnership.
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President of the United States from 1981-1989, Ronald Reagan was known as a staunch conservative, a cheery optimist, and an implacable foe of Soviet communism. Reagan began his career as a sports announcer on radio, then moved to Hollywood and became a movie star. Reagan made over fifty movies as a reliable supporting actor or benign leading man, but his real calling seemed to be in politics. He served as the governor of California (1967-75) and then in 1980 defeated Democrat Jimmy Carter to become the 40th U.S. president. He advocated lower taxes and higher defense spending, and aggressively challenged the Soviet Union. The final years of his administration were clouded by a back-door scheme to fund anti-communist forces in Central America -- the so-called Iran Contra affair -- but the popular president emerged from the scandal unscathed.
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