Hollywood cold warrior. (Scan).(Roy Brewer)

Roy Brewer is still the toughest anti-communist in Hollywood. During the 1940s and '50s, he and Ronald Reagan worked together to stop the Communist Party insurgency in the film capital, Reagan from his posts at the Screen Actors Guild, and Brewer as the labor chief who ran the Hollywood office of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Today, at 93, Brewer still carries the banner, and is actively campaigning to set the record straight about what really happened during the so-called blacklist era.

"Mostly, we were staunch liberals and passionate champions of labor who became outraged at the way political activists masquerading as artists were trying to use the picture business for their narrow ideology," says Brewer, who started his career as a projectionist in Grand Island, Nebraska.

He can still remember when he first arrived in Los Angeles in 1945 to settle what appeared to be a jurisdictional labor dispute. Instead, Brewer discovered Party operatives wreaking havoc in Hollywood unions, forcing strikes, and trying their best to undermine the American Federation of Labor, which was staunchly anti-communist. The goal was to create their own all-powerful film industry union, a prospect Brewer and Reagan saw as disastrous to the business they loved. "I became aware of the power and dimension of the Communist apparatus," Brewer says. "I realized that the Party wasn't a ragtag group of wild radicals but was operated by talented, highly-trained individuals with amazing power to seduce and manipulate good people."

While Brewer and Reagan ultimately succeeded at keeping communists at bay, Brewer says the prevailing view in this town about those years often makes their victory seem dubious. Recently, at the height of Hollywood's campaign against the war in Iraq, the union representing ...