Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow Read Free Book Online Page B

security clearance. Way back in 1937, Reagan had done the patriotic thing and signed up as a reserve officer in the US Army Cavalry. Because of the actor’s debilitating nearsightedness, the Reserves had deemed Reagan capable of only “limited duty.” But then, after Pearl Harbor, and just as his movie career seemed finally to be taking off, the cavalry unceremoniously plucked him out of his $5,000-a-week job as a contract player at Warner Bros. and sent him to a San Francisco supply depot loading ships bound for Australia. Lt. Reagan never complained. His country was at war and this was what he’d signed on for.
    The Army physical didn’t do much for Reagan’s self-esteem, as he described it in one of his autobiographies: “One of the doctors who was administering the test told me after checking my eyes that if they sent me overseas, I’d shoot a general. The other doctor said, ‘Yes, and you’d miss him.’ My report read: ‘Confined to the continental limits, eligible for corps area service command or War Department overhead only.’ ” He’d be good for pushing paper, in other words, and that was about it.
    As luck would have it, Reagan’s old studio boss, Jack Warner, had just been sworn into the Army as a lieutenant colonel, though unlike Lt. Reagan, Warner got to keep drawing his civilian salary. Warner’s orders were to stand up a movie-making team within the Army Air Corps. The First Motion Picture Unit, Fum-Poo in Army acronym speak, would be responsible for the Air Corps’ total celluloid output, from combat photography of bombing runs to full-blown rah-rah morale-building motion pictures to training films for pilots and their crews such as
Aircraft Wood Repair: Parts 1 thru 4; Uncrating and Assembly of the Thunderbolt Airplane; Oil Fires, Their Prevention and Extinguishment;
and
Land and Live in the Jungle
and its sequels
Land and Live in the Desert
and
How to Survive in the Arctic
.
    Warner needed men familiar with movie production. So two months into his tour at the port in San Francisco, Reagan received orders to report to the old Hal Roach Studios in Culver City for his new job as Fum-Poo’s personnel officer, where he could also moonlight as needed as an actor and narrator for the unit films. His commander in San Francisco, a career officer from Virginia Military Institute, was flabbergasted by Reagan’s new assignment. The Army had a long history of mismatching men and jobs, but Reagan’s assignment to the Army’s in-house movie studio was a move of exquisite logic and thoroughgoing good sense. “In thirty-four years, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the Army make sense,” said the colonel. “This is putting a square peg in a square hole.” Reagan might not have had great potential as a soldier, but few men were better equipped to perform the role of a soul-stirring make-believe soldier.
    Reagan could be amused by the goings-on at Fort Roach—“a completely unofficial title, and one, I think, that was not intended to be complimentary,” he wrote in his autobiography. He always got a chuckle out of seeing some visiting regularArmy colonel saluting an actor-private who was costumed as a general. But the mission of Fum-Poo was no joke to Reagan. Even the simplest training films required mastery of both the craft of filmmaking and the technical know-how of flying and maintaining America’s expensive new weapons—an array of advanced high-altitude bombers and aerobatic fighter planes with the latest electronic control systems.
    But the real Hollywood magic was reserved, in the dark days after Pearl Harbor, for the Big Sell. At the beginning of the war, Army Air Corps chief Hap Arnold figured he needed fifty thousand pilots and maybe triple that number of crewmen. The general needed a recruiting tool, and wanted movies with heart-thumping scenes of the “full inspirational splendor of roaring engines,” he said, “of tight bomber formations gliding through the clouds,” to