Reagan's Rosebud lived at the end of a dirt road in Canoga Park

Roy Brewer, the Hollywood labor leader who died in 2006, is remembered by victims of the anti-Communust blacklisting such as Clancy Sigal as "in the great line of Hollywood hysterics who spend their lives snooping, for 'dirty' sex, or dope, or Communists...[his] real function was economic, to destroy any left-leaning or independent, honest trade unions in the film industry." John Meroney, the Ronald Reagan researcher and writer for the Atlantic, sees Brewer more favorably as a formative figure in the future president's years as a liberal union organizer in Hollywood and in his determination to destroy Communism that marked Reagan's political career.

Meroney hooked up with Brewer at his home in the West Valley and picked his memory and his 75 boxes of archives — "private correspondence, speeches, congressional documents, Communist Party newspapers, transcripts of testimony from executive sessions and minutes from closed union meetings—the total of which provides a new view of the most enigmatic president in recent memory." In a story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Meroney writes:

Brewer saved everything from his life in Hollywood, and as it turns out, his papers form a remarkable portrait of Reagan’s life as a movie star, liberal Democrat and union man....

The documents are a time machine to Hollywood in the Cold War, revealing something that has eluded us for decades: Reagan’s Rosebud. Brewer’s role was to be the magical helper who provided the unlikely protagonist advice and training.

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Figures like Brewer are the reason people go into journalism. They are the keepers of the past. A gritty, often misunderstood character, Brewer was a tough union man, yet he would almost weep when quoting Scarlett O’Hara’s “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again” line from Gone with the Wind. The line spoke to his personal determination, New Deal loyalties and socialist leanings. A portrait of FDR hung on his wall. He regarded Joseph McCarthy as a demagogue. (In the archive, I found far-right McCarthyite propaganda smearing Brewer as soft on Communism and castigating Reagan as a “flagrant Red.”) Politically, Brewer supported Reagan in all his campaigns, but in the Florida recounts, he backed Al Gore. He didn’t like George W. Bush.

Meroney speaks in a six-minute video with the story. He is writing a book, "Ronald Reagan in the Hollywood Wars."