Free Reagan: The Life by H. W. Brands Page B

representative there. The company responded by closing its German distribution office. As individuals, Jack andHarry Warner embraced the cause of European Jews, supporting Jewish refugees from Germany and speaking out against Hitler.
    Yet even the Warners hesitated to use their most compelling platform, the pictures their studio made. Harry Warner blasted Hitler in speeches but was cautious in approving film ideas. “Are we making it because we’re Jews or because it can make a good movie?” he asked of one potentially controversial project. In this they aligned withAdolph Zukor, the head of Paramount, who carefully distinguished politics from entertainment. “I don’t think Hollywood should deal with anything but entertainment,” Zukor said. “The newsreels take care of current events. To make films of political significance is a mistake.” Audiences could find their politics elsewhere. “When they go to a theatre they want to forget.”
    R EAGAN ’ S ROLE as George Gipp was the one that would be remembered the longest, but the part he was proudest of was Drake McHugh in
Kings Row
. The film, based on a best-selling novel of the same name, almost didn’t get made. The novel was steamy, involving incest and nymphomania in addition to more-pedestrian extramarital sex and physical violence. Industry and outside censors at first tried to block its conversion to film, then settled for its bowdlerization. Yet the dramatic centerpiece of the story remained for Reagan’s character, when the disapproving surgeon father of his romantic interest takes the opportunity of a rail-yard accident to gratuitously amputate his legs. “I started preparing for this scene days before it was filmed,” Reagan recalled. He imagined what it would be like to wake up from the anesthesia and discover that his legs were gone. Even so, he wasn’t ready for the shock he received when he mounted the special bed the propmen had constructed for him, with holes for his legs to disappear through. He looked down and for a moment imagined he had suffered the fate of his character. “I just stayed there looking at where my body ended. The horror didn’t ease up.” He told the director to forgo a rehearsal take. “Just shoot it,” he said. The cameras rolled; Reagan opened his eyes, reached down to where his legs had been, and screamed, “Where is the rest of me?!”
    Of all his film roles this was the one Reagan thought might have won him an Academy Award nomination. ButWarner Brothers put its weight behind James Cagney, who starred that same year in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
, and Reagan was left out. Warner nonetheless gave him a raise and a new contract and expressed unbounded confidence in his future.

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    R EAGAN WOULD LATER derive great benefit from lucky timing, from being in the right place at the right time. But in the early 1940s his timing could hardly have been worse. While
Kings Row
was in production, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, exploding the premise on which Americanisolationism had traditionally been based. The oceans no longer afforded protection; the world’s problems—the ambitions of aggressors, the struggles for empire and influence—were America’s problems, whether Americans liked it or not. Until that fateful day—December 7, 1941—the parting counselGeorge Washington had given his countrymen about avoiding foreign entanglements had provided a plausible basis for American policy; in the flames of Pearl Harbor, the Father of His Country’s hoary counsel became stunningly obsolete.
    Franklin Roosevelt had anticipated the moment, though not the locale. For many months tension had been rising between the United States and Japan. Tokyo was determined to gain predominance in East Asia and the western Pacific; Roosevelt was equally determined to keep this from happening. He warned the Japanese diplomatically; when his warnings failed, he ordered a halt to shipments of American oil and steel to Japan. The Japanese interpreted