Abstract
In January 1985, the White House published a pamphlet describing President Ronald Reagan's “Strategic Defense Initiative” (sdi). The pamphlets key section borrowed its language word for word from Reagan's “Star Wars” speech, made 22 months earlier, in which he had said, “I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons ‘impotent and obsolete.’”
One phrase, though, was different. According to the pamphlet, the project's goal was “rendering ballistic missiles impotent and obsolete.”
This detail isn't mentioned in Frances FitzGerald's new book, Way Out There in the Blue. In fact, FitzGerald—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Vietnam War, Fire in the Lake—occasionally uses the two terms interchangeably. In her very first sentence, she describes Reagan's announcement to embark on an effort “to counter the threat of Soviet ballistic missiles and to make these nuclear weapons ‘impotent and obsolete.’”
“The campaign is going well—except for the ‘recognition factor.’”
This casualness with terms is odd, since otherwise FitzGerald—in her 10-year quest to explain “the direct connection [Reagan] made to the national imagination” with his Star Wars plan— has mastered an enormous amount of data about weaponry, arms-control doctrine, U.S.-Soviet relations, and executive branch policy-making. Though she leans on the memoirs of former officials and the works of earlier chroniclers (notably Lou Cannon, Garry Wills, and Strobe Talbott), she usefully synthesizes this material into a single narrative, one which future historians of the Reagan years will do well to consult. At 500 pages and with its focus on one area of policy, her story unfolds at a leisurely pace. At times it seems to leave no meeting or memo unmentioned; her chapter on the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit—“What Happened at Reykjavik?”—is 30 pages and 130 endnotes old before it actually gets to Reykjavik. (The book as a whole contains a staggering 1,743 endnotes.)
But despite all the detail, FitzGerald misses a few things. Although she recounts the confusion—and in some cases, sheer mis-representation—surrounding SDI, she does so without connecting it to her declared purpose of understanding Reagan or the national “mythology” he seemed to embody. As FitzGerald explains in two derivative but interesting chapters, Reagan channeled a part of America's evangelical past. He managed to harmonize dissident chords of America's religiously inspired self-image, sounding the notes of both “pre-millen-nial” doom-and-gloom and “post-millennial” optimism and hope. Unquestionably these traits are linked to his powerful interest in SDI. But how, exactly? Compared to her detailed history of policy-making, FitzGerald's biographical and cultural analyses seem sketchy—more a prologue than an explanation. They cover mostly familiar ground and still leave Reagan something of a “mystery,” as FitzGerald puts it, despite all her years of studying him.
Better clues might have come from closer attention to language—like the conflation of “missiles” and “weapons.” Nuclear weapons don't have to be delivered by missile; an Oklahoma City-style Ryder truck will do. And since no one has ever claimed that SDI would stop Ryder trucks, it's not clear how it could promise to end the nuclear threat, even in theory. One can talk of shooting down ballistic missiles—though that problem, too, remains unsolved—but the types of attack likely from terrorists and “rogue nations” (the bugaboos of today's missile-defense advocates) may not even be delivered by missile.
It's possible that Reagan simply never grasped distinctions like these. FitzGerald reminds us of Reagan's gift for wish-fulfillment fantasy; taking that point, it's reasonable to assume he imagined that the world could be scoured of nuclearism altogether—and that his program's apostles never told him that such a hope lay beyond even their exaggerated claims.
This leads to another question FitzGerald raises. How could so many people in responsible positions allow themselves to distort, fabricate, and take positions ranging from the intellectually dishonest to the outright fraudulent? Without their willingness to do this, SDI would have died in infancy. FitzGerald never quite gets inside the SDI advocates' heads, though she does say that Reagan's election brought to power a cadre of antiSoviet hardliners—many of them members of the anti-détente Committee on the Present Danger—who were deeply frustrated after two decades out of office and hostile to the whole carefully evolved structure of U.S.-Soviet relations.
“He's got more money than sense.”
As FitzGerald makes clear, Reagan's bizarre detachment from his administration's decision-making process gave ideologues like Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, his assistant Richard Perle, and retired Gen. Daniel O. Graham the political space they needed to harry the Soviets and frustrate the efforts of the early-1980s nuclear-freeze movement. These officials were also a constant problem for administration “pragmatists,” like Secretary of State George Schultz, who favored a more conventional approach to international affairs.
The book's press notes call Reagan the “hero” of his own “black comedy,” but it's really Schultz who comes closest to playing the hero in FitzGerald's account. FitzGerald connects SDI to the failed effort, early in the Reagan years, to come up with a basing scheme that would justify deployment of the MX missile, and thus close the alleged “window of vulnerability”—an idea that hardliners had sold to candidate Reagan. The Soviets argued that both the MX missile and SDI increased the threat of a U.S. first strike; hence, both were continuing irritants and obstacles to progress in arms control. For the ideologues, SDI was like a club—a handy instrument for beating arms-control plowshares back into swords.
FitzGerald presents Schultz, whose viewpoint she most often adopts, as continually battling the WeinbergerPerle faction to hold the U.S.-Soviet relationship together. Eventually he had some success, especially once the Soviet Union's new, reformist leadership realized that there was little reason to oppose a missile defense that didn't exist and was never likely to.
Though Reagan started out as the hardliners' best ally, in his case SDI seems to have been less an extension of Cold War belligerence than a wish to escape from it. Reagan's public statements, to which FitzGerald pays surprisingly little mind, revealed some odd preoccupations—not least a concern for homeland defense, an unusual theme in late twentieth-century politics.
The Red Menace wasn't just in Central America, Reagan told us; it was “two days' drive from Harlingen, Texas.” Reflecting on the nuclear threat, Reagan marveled that “With this great technology of ours, we … cannot stop any of the weapons that are coming at us. I don't think there's been a time in history when there wasn't a defense against some kind of thrust, even back in the old-fashioned days when we had coast artillery that would stop invading ships if they came.” FitzGerald quotes that 1980 interview, correctly finding in it the seedbed of SDI—“coast artillery” for the Space Age—but she neither notes its many parallels nor probes its deeper implications.
Reagan seems to have felt that what was threatened wasn't just the United States, but something more basic: some logic of history itself. The natural order requires that every offense have its corresponding defense, and nuclear scientists had produced the one without the other. So the Star Wars speech would exhort them to “turn,” to put things right again (as in “the old-fashioned days”). For all the talk of futuristic technology, Reagan's dream was nostalgic and restorationist.
For one who set out to study Reagan and the national mythos, FitzGerald spends too much time swimming in the alphabet soup of federal agencies—NSC, ACDA, DARPA, JCS, NSPG, all of whose doings Reagan knew at best from a distance—and too little examining Reagan himself. And despite her subtitle, she doesn't explain the end of the Cold War in terms of Reagan and SDI. In her view, that event was much more Mikhail Gorbachev's work.
FitzGerald does suggest why the end of the superpower rivalry didn't put an end to missile defense. Reagan aside, what SDI really promised for many proponents, she says, was U.S. military control of space. And that dream, apparently, survives—an ideological tail still wagging the defense-policy dog.