Reagan “Names Names” to the FBI
Actor and future president Ronald Reagan, along with his wife Jane Wyman, provided the FBI with a list of names of Screen Actors Guild members they believed were or had been Communists.
Reagan developed a close and private relationship with the FBI in the 1940s, which continued while he was Governor of California in the 1960s and early 1970s (see his pledge to drive “anarchists” off University of California campuses on January 7, 1969).
In a separate action, Reagan publicly testified before HUAC on October 23, 1947, but did not name names on that occasion.
The 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California a Berkeley was the seminal event of 1960s campus protests (n support of civil rights; against the Vietnam War; and more). Learn more about the FSM: October 1, 1964 and December 2, 1964. The best book on the FBI, student radicals, and Reagan is Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives (see below)
Read about Reagan’s Hollywood years: Marc Eliot, Reagan: The Hollywood Years (2006)
Learn more about Reagan’s relationship with the FBI: Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power (2012)
Learn more about “naming names:” Victor Navasky, Naming Names (1980)
Read the interview with author Seth Rosenfeld on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/16/212381996/student-subversives-and-the-fbis-dirty-tricks