A recently released exchange of letters between Ronald Reagan and an older Soviet émigré, Lola Kinel Shipman, sheds new light on when and why Reagan shifted from being a supporter of the Popular Front to becoming a strong anti-Communist liberal. After World War II, Reagan wrote:

[I was] blindly and busily joining every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world.

Reagan became a member, and then leader, of two major groups: the American Veterans Committee, and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts (known as HICCASP, which he later said sounded “like the cough of a dying man”). But Reagan -- as my wife and I showed in our book Red Star Over Hollywood -- quickly found that these and other Popular Front groups were dominated by Communist Party members, who eventually took them over and tried to get members to follow a pro-Soviet foreign policy.

The newly found letter, sold by historical documents center RAAB, reveals that Reagan’s strong opposition to communism led him to change his political views to conservatism. ...