ABSTRACT
Ronald Reagan the candidate seemed to be a gung-ho leader, an energetic and confident and intense and determined person who would issue his orders to his subordinates and demand that they make those orders actually happen. Reagan was a passive-positive, linked through his extraordinary rhetorical style to a public ready, for the moment, for just such a hopeful and reassuring personality. Politics played little part in Reagan life then, but a seed was planted: in 1938 an actress got him to join a union, The Screen Actors Guild, which after years of effort was establishing itself as a protection against the troglodyte feudal barons who dominated the movie industry in the Depression. Reagan's rhetoric of the early 1960s and the Goldwater connection would help many an ideological conservative see Reagan, later on, as one of them, as a true believer in a revolutionary conservative ideology.
