Reagan’s America: : INNOCENTS AT HOME by Garry Wills (Doubleday: $19.95. 472 pp.)

Although it missed the Christmas book season, Doubleday has lucked into a stunning national scandal for its launch of “Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home,” in which Garry Wills elegantly dissects the first U.S. President to come out of Hollywood’s dream factory.

Aiming a verbal bank of klieg lights at the 75-year-old Reagan, the author illuminates, far beyond what the give-and-take of two presidential (not to mention two gubernatorial) election contests has done, a man whom we could not have imagined squandering so much public good will within a few weeks as the polls on the Iran/ contra affair have recorded. Kid-glove treatment of Reagan for nearly six years by the major media hardly prepared the citizenry for the shock.

“Reagan,” according to author Wills, “does not argue for American values; he embodies them.” But evidently even that situation is subject to revision in the light of events since he wrote the words in his introduction to the book.

“Reagan’s America” is a fascinating biography whose impact is enhanced by techniques of psychological profile and social history. It comes from the author of “Nixon Agonistes,” which analyzed another Californian whose own presidency was consumed by a scandal about 14 years ago.

Wills explains Reagan heavily in terms of his decades in Hollywood, involved in both its fantasy and its Realpolitik. (He was not only a charismatic movie actor but a “star” union leader.)

On one side, the author convincingly shows the effects upon Reagan of being part and parcel of the mythology, especially in portraying World War II heroes. Some of his films were made in Culver City while he was on active duty with the Air Force, a time when Reagan was widely portrayed in fan magazines and gossip columns as “away” on duty--although he went home every night to his first wife, Jane Wyman.

The book tells of Reagan’s absorption of the moral simplicities of his own and other movies into his personal and political philosophy and even into his “memory.” The author notes that even as President, Reagan has been known to recount fictitious events as actual ones. For instance, he told Israeli officials he photographed Nazi death camps for the Signal Corps, although he never left the United States during the war.

“Reagan’s war stories are real to him; his war stories were his war, in part because he was acting a role as a soldier himself, ‘off to war’ while at home,” Wills observes.

But equally pointed--and far less familiar to the American public--are the insights Wills offers from a study of Reagan’s major role in the Hollywood power structure.

This role was crowned by his guiding the Screen Actors Guild to confer on his powerful theatrical agent, MCA, a waiver in 1952 that gave it a crucial advantage over competitors in entering television production as both agent and employer of actors. That came to include Guild chief Reagan when MCA produced a show for General Electric Theater with him as host.

The result was to help MCA achieve immense wealth and domination in the television field even before it acquired the biggest film maker, Universal Studios. The author writes about MCA’s help (along with Reagan’s wealthy boosters) in making Reagan a multimillionaire and backing a political career in the mid-’60s that took him to the California governorship and the presidency.

Wills depicts the future President as an unlikely union officer, who basically saw his cause as an extension of the “altruism” of rich film stars acting in concert for the benefit of lesser actors. Reagan’s Hollywood career included a stint as an FBI informant with the coded identity T-10 while he battled what he has called a “Communist plan to take over the motion picture business” in the late ‘40s. In the same period, he was one of the “friendly witnesses” for the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose Holmlywood hearings were the basis for blacklisting hundreds of actors on political grounds.

Reagan also negotiated a settlement of one major Guild strike in 1960 on such favorable terms to MCA and the industry, the author writes, that it raised anew prior accusations about “sweetheart” agreements.

The new Wills book appears better positioned to achieve wider public interest than another fine one published about some of these matters a few months ago, “Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob.” In that book, reporter-author Dan Moldea focused more narrowly on Reagan’s mutually enriching relationship with monolithic MCA, and on the firm’s allies--especially Sidney Korshak, the attorney with mobster clients and with huge influence in Hollywood labor relations.

A centerpiece of Moldea’s well-documented book was Reagan’s 1962 testimony before a grand jury antitrust investigation of MCA and the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan’s pervasive vagueness in testifying about the events of 10 years earlier (which Wills also points up) are particularly interesting in light of his recent struggle to convince a largely disbelieving populace about much more recent events.

One of the best things about Wills’ book is the arrangement of many diverse facets into a coherent interpretation of this man.

That Wills obtained much of his grist from what has been written about Reagan over the years does not diminish its impact. The author credits sources in scholarly fashion with hundreds of footnotes at the back of the book, displaying a depth of research that is impressive.

Although Wills evidently did not interview Reagan himself, the author liberally uses quotations from Reagan’s 1965 autobiography with writer Richard C. Hubler, “Where’s the Rest of Me?” (which proudly recalls his big post-amputation line in the movie “King’s Row”). Selections from Reagan’s own memory banks are effective in juxtaposing Reagan’s version of some crucial events to others’ accounts. Wills also used to good effect Reagan biographies by Lou Cannon and Bill Boyarsky.

Wills’ book is full of literary, historical and philosophical digressions, which enhanced this reviewer’s enjoyment, though for some readers they may derail the train of thought.

Many of the side streets Wills goes down are delightful for their unexpectedness, wry humor and special insight.

For instance, the author goes into the upper-class institution of “the lady’s charity” as taken up in the White House by a succession of middle-class First Ladies, including Nancy Reagan. Wills at the same time makes reference to Thorstein Veblen’s theory on the leisure class.

Another example: During a thorough discussion of the former Nancy Davis’ movie career, the author observes that she (like other actresses) learned well the use of one of her obvious assets, her widely spaced eyes. “Mrs. Reagan’s famous stare at her husband,” comments the author, “was being born.”

Hollywood aside, Wills’ account includes salient events and influences throughout Reagan’s life and takes pains to recite the things about his persona that have made him an alter ego for much of the public.

The author begins by describing Reagan’s formative experiences during a Midwestern upbringing, including life-saving exploits as a lifeguard. The young Reagan nevertheless is viewed by Wills as the very antithesis of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Mark Twain’s “good bad boys.” Rather, he says, “he is the ‘villain’ of those stories, the model boy.”

The lasting impression created for this reader by “Reagan’s America” is that of a man of sentimentalism and mushy values. Written before the current scandal, the book is timely in its portrayal of Reagan as a perennial naif who is at bottom a “kindly fanatic” and whose grasp of reality has grown more tenuous during his presidency.