I'm John Batcher, visiting with Max Booth, the author of the new book, Reagan, his life and legend.

I believe it's Mike Deaver later in the White House who says television is the presidency.

And we're about to see that demonstrated.

There's a General Electric Theater, there's Borax, the 21 Mule, I remember that vividly, Max, in black and white. Ronald Reagan is a perfect TV presenter.

The movie career is unnecessary. He's earning very good money from GE and from mixing with

corporate leadership in the 50s and early 60s. But we need to get back to politics. Politics can push the audience away.

However, he became attached to what becomes the Goldwater

part of the early Republican conservative movement.

What convinced him, was it talking to GE executives?

Is that why he went from New Dealer to Goldwaterite?

Well, Reagan's own explanation was he often said, I didn't desert my party, my party deserted me,

to imply that the Democratic Party had feared far to the left,

and he had stayed in the center.

And as I show in the book, that's not really accurate

because the Democratic Party, the 1950s was still pretty centrist.

I mean, in 1960, John F. Kennedy actually ran to Richard Nixon's right on defense policy.

So it wasn't the Democrat, so it changed. It was Reagan.

And I traced the transformation beginning in World War II and still as a pretty highly, very highly paid actor,

Ronald Reagan was very unhappy to be paying 90% rates of income taxation during the war.

And then after the war, as we discussed, he became involved in the Red Hunts in Hollywood and became a very hardline anti-communist.

And that his transformation was really complete in the 1950s when he

was a spokesman for General Electric and host of the General Electric Theater. Because in those days,

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