What's next? Saint Ronald? Everybody, including Mikhail Gorbachev this morning, is recalling just how wonderful the 40th U.S. president was. "I think he understood that it is the peacemakers, above all, who earn a place in history," Gorbachev writes, in a bow not to the Great Communicator so much as the Friendly Persuader.

In the Sunday obituary-cum-eulogy announcing Reagan's death that began on the front page of The New York Times and covered two full pages inside, Marilyn Berger wrote: "He managed to project the optimism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the faith in small-town America of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the vigor of John F. Kennedy."

As a small corrective, it's worth remembering during what appears to be Reagan's secular canonization that in his Red-baiting years in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors Guild he cheerfully helped ruin many lives and that at the heart of the greatest achievement of his presidency lies a deeply sanctimonious hypocrisy.

Consider this small anecdote about Reagan, Gorbachev and the movie "Friendly Persuasion," which starred Gary Cooper as a pacifist during the Civil War and his moral quandary when confronted by violence. In 1957 the movie won the Palme d'Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. As I wrote in "A Talent for Trouble," "at the request of the Soviet Union, and with the approval of the U.S. State Department," William Wyler, who directed the movie, "took it to Moscow in 1960, where he showed it as a symbolic antidote to the Cold War," which was then at its height. In the 1980s, with the beginning of glasnost,

President Ronald Reagan — whose conservative politics Wyler loathed — took a videocassette of "Friendly Persuasion" to Moscow. During a state dinner, he presented it as a personal gift to Soviet premier Gorbachev, devoting a large portion of his toast to the meaning of the film and why he had chosen it.

"The film has sweep and majesty and pathos," the president said. "It shows not just the tragedy of war, but the problems of pacifism, the nobility of patriotism, as well as the love of peace."

When The New York Times printed the text of Reagan's remarks, it occasioned a ripple of remembrance from Michael Wilson's supporters. [Wilson had done an early draft of the screen adaptation and was later blacklisted after taking the 5th in Congressional testimony as to whether he'd been a member of the Communist Party.] Letters to the Times pointed out the irony that a movie written by a so-called "Commie" was now embraced by a saber-rattling right-wing president who had made a career of demonizing people like Wilson.