You really think "The Way We Were" was Soviet propaganda? Wow.
Of course, there have been plenty of Hollywood films sympathetic to various figures on the left. ("Reds" obviously comes to mind, among others.) But there have also been plenty (many more, I'd say) that turned Communists into cartoon bad guys ("Rambo", anyone?). Not that I have a problem with that -- only Nazis outrank Communists as ideal candidates for cartoon bad guys in movies -- but I think anyone who seriously argues that Hollywood was a source of Red propaganda after WWII is seriously misguided.
When the USSR fell, there was a flood of documents from the KGB and other sources made available that we never had access to before. These documents named names and dollar amounts and objectives and that sort of thing. The Rosenbergs were guilty. Alger Hiss absolutely was a spy. There were many others as well. In Hollywood, the CPA (Communist Party) was outright funded by the USSR and Communist International (CommInt) with the express mission of spreading propaganda. Again, these Soviet/Stalin era documents show it, as well as Stalin's belief in using propaganda. The propaganda was specifically ordered to both promote the USSR and to be anti-american. There are numerous examples of each (M*A*S*H for example, written by Ring Lardner Jr.) that were produced or written by those blacklisted. In fact, the McCarthy and HUAC committees put those blacklisted in a position where the Russians/Communists left them exposed with zero support.
There are modern examples, too, including Gore's film and Michael Moore's films, that are anti-caplitalist and anti-american (at least some of us see them that way). I wouldn't say these guys are actual communists (or sympathizers), though they are likely to have been influenced by earlier works by those that were.
There were pro-american films, as well, but all the early ones were extremely low budget and poorly produced (deliberately). The writers had the ability to squash these kinds of things.
I'm not at all saying McCarthyism was a good thing or that he was a good guy. It's just a myth that he was wrong about it all.
As for JFK, I think his hawkish anticommunism was very much of a piece with Reagan's. But I don't think their tax politics had much in common, even though they both cut taxes. There's a big difference between cutting taxes when the top marginal rate to 70% and cutting it to 28%. And JFK's tax cuts didn't only accrue to the top 20%.
SR
It wasn't an Obama style tax cut, "targetted" at the middle and lower classes. He, like Reagan, cut ALL the tax rates, including the top bracket (for the rich!).
http://www.slate.com/id/2093947/
Many liberals disliked Kennedy's plan on grounds of equity. Leon Keyserling, an economist who had served Harry Truman, lamented that the richest 12 percent of Americans would get 45 percent of the benefits. Michael Harrington, the scholar of poverty, called the plan "reactionary Keynesianism." The AFL-CIO came out against it.
http://www.amazon.com/Red-Star-Over-Hollywood-Colonys/dp/1893554961
Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left (Hardcover)
The McCarthy era is generally portrayed as one of the darkest times in American history, and those who faced blacklisting in Hollywood have been lauded as heroes. Through ground-breaking new research and the reliance on original source materials, the Radoshes have compiled a thorough re-examination of the enchantment by some in the film industry with the Communist Party, and their betrayal by that very same party.
The Radoshes describe the infatuation of "the Hollywood Party" from its roots in the 1930s, when several visited the Soviet Union. They demonstrate that, far from being innocent, the "Hollywood Ten" were committed Communists, who used and abused free-speech supporters (like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) for their own ends. The Communist Party, in turn, cynically used the "Ten" for its own ends -- trotting them out to speak at unrelated left-wing events for years, which prevented the Ten from individually rehabilitating their images and obtaining work. The authors also describe the way the CP line was inserted in several films, most notoriously, "Mission to Moscow." This film, designed to turn the views of a skeptical American public toward the USSR during World War II, whitewashes Stalin's purge trials of the 1930s, where many truly innocent were tortured into confessing and executed. Perhaps most interesting is the difficult path faced by those who broke with the Party and either "named names" or walked a fine line to avoid naming names. For many, being seen as an informer was worse than preventing and exposing genuine Communist infiltration.
If I have any criticisms of the book, it is that the Radoshes did not take their exploration of the film colony's long romance with the left through the Vietnam War years and today. While the blacklist years were seminal, many in Hollywood contine to lean left even after the fall of the USSR, and take almost reflexively anti-Bush positions today. We are left to wonder what the leftist fathers passed on to their sons. Perhaps the authors will address this issue in a subsequent book. In the meantime, "Red Star Over Hollywood" is well worth reading.
