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What occupied Reagan in the postwar years was Hollywood union politics. "I was a near hopeless hemophilic liberal," Reagan said later. "I bled for causes. I had voted Democratic, following my father, in every election. I had followed F.D.R. blindly ... " By 1947 he was president of the Screen Actors Guild and found himself embroiled in the union wars ravaging Hollywood. Reagan came to believe that the bitter strikes in 1945 and 1946 by stagehands of the Conference of Studio Unions represented a communist attempt to take over Hollywood, and that belief changed his political views forever. In the subsequent era of the blacklists, Reagan not only cooperated in the purging of suspected communists but also served as an undercover FBI informant. Speaking to TIME's Laurence Barrett three decades later about his recollection of the leftists' tactics, he said with unusual bitterness, "I discovered it firsthand--the cynicism, the brutality, the complete lack of morality in their positions, and the cold-bloodedness of their attempt, at any cost, to gain control of that industry."
Reagan felt with some justification that his union activity damaged his career as an actor. After more than 50 films, he was getting no offers of good parts. By 1953 he was reduced to doing a nightclub routine in Las Vegas, where he introduced various singers and dancers and made apologetic jokes about his own inability to either sing or dance. Was the optimist discouraged? Hardly. He was soon offered a new job that was to change his whole life. For $125,000 a year, he would act as host and occasional star of a weekly television drama series for General Electric; for 10 weeks each year he would also act as a kind of goodwill ambassador to GE plants around the nation.
As one of the first prominent Hollywood actors to defect to the much scorned new medium of TV, Reagan revived his acting career. The General Electric Theater, with Reagan as host from 1954 to 1962, dominated the Sunday-night ratings. But what changed Reagan was his tours of the GE plants. Later, Reagan's opponents often underestimated him, dismissing him as "just an actor," an amateur lacking political experience. What they failed to see was that although Reagan had not spent much time in conventional politics, he had gained both skill and experience in what was to become the politics of the TV age, the politics of electronic images and symbols. Reagan once figured that in his eight years at GE, he had visited every one of the company's 139 plants, met more than 250,000 employees, spent 4,000 hours talking to them and "enjoyed every whizzing minute of it." He polished his delivery, the intimate confiding tone, the air of sincerity, the wry chuckle, the well-timed burst of fervor.