Reagan was a significant player in this drama. As a leader of the Screen Actors Guild and a certified liberal, he could have helped avert the crushing of CSU. However, he was beginning a short journey that would lead him to the right. Why? He believed that CSU was a perfidious “Communist front” bent on exerting the will of Moscow in Hollywood; this was—by his own admission—the major reason that he helped to engineer the crossing of CSU’s picket lines.