The Empire Strikes Out: Why Star Wars Did Not End the Cold War

When it comes to Cold War politics, the early 1980s appear, in retrospect, an embarrassment all around. The American left earnestly warned that with Ronald Reagan in the White House, nuclear annihilation was plausible or even likely. Self-styled Cassandras tried to roust a complacent public with overwrought doomsday polemics such as Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth (recently described by Michael Kinsley as "the silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people") and the TV movie The Day After.

The right acquitted itself no better. Pointing to an alleged U.S. "window of vulnerability," Reaganites ranted as if Soviet world domination were imminent, matching the left's hysteria with their own bombastic rhetoric and films such as Red Dawn in, of all years, 1984. "I believe we are seeing the same situation as when Mr. Chamberlain was tapping the cobblestones of Munich," Reagan said, implausibly, during the 1980 presidential campaign. In dealing with the Soviet Union, both sides ignored John F. Kennedy's advice: the left wanted to negotiate out of fear, while the right feared to negotiate.

Today, thanks to the collapse of the Soviet empire, we know better. The Soviet Union, we have learned, was already in hopeless shape by the 1980s. As Americans aimed to counter what they perceived as expanding Soviet power, the Soviets, although waging war in Afghanistan, were beginning to retrench. In other words, the United States probably need not have let the early 1980s become, as Frances FitzGerald puts it in her new book, Way Out There in the Blue, "the worst period of friction in U.S.-Soviet relations since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962."

Way Out There in the Blue seeks to explain a troubled chapter in American history that now seems surprisingly distant -- tumbling backward as if it had fallen from a speeding truck. FitzGerald, the author of a prizewinning 1973 book about Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, focuses on three touchstones of the era: the role of Ronald Reagan; the debate over his proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars," the plan to develop a laser-based system to protect the United States from nuclear missiles); and finally, the events that led Reagan, on leaving office in January 1989, to declare, "The Cold War is over." FitzGerald's overall view is disdainful. She portrays Reagan as an inept simpleton unqualified for the presidency. She considers Star Wars a silly pipe dream that caught on only because of the arrant cynicism of Reagan's coterie. And, most important, she rejects the now-widespread claim that Reagan's military buildup in general -- and Star Wars in particular -- forced the Soviet Union to bankrupt itself into extinction.

On this last count in particular, FitzGerald is quite right, but only toward the end of this ponderous and muddled tome does she get around to making her case. A historian's duty is to use her perspective on a bygone era to decide which events turned out to be significant and which insignificant, and to include the former and omit the latter. Instead, FitzGerald opts to be encyclopedic. She rehashes, in detail, every argument or story that bears remotely on her topic, from well-known news events such as the Iran-contra affair or David Stockman's travails as Reagan's budget director to sideshows such as the internecine squabbles among second-tier Reagan administration officials. Her approach does have at least one virtue: like a diligent research assistant, FitzGerald has gathered a lode of material (mostly from previously published books and articles) to use in making sense of Reagan, sdi, and the Cold War's passing -- and the modest impact of the first two on the third. The reader leaves Way Out There in the Blue feeling that the vaunted threat that Star Wars posed to Moscow was little more than a phantom menace.

GOING DUTCH

At the center of it all stands Reagan, the gee-whiz Midwestern boy and Hollywood leading man who became a tribune of the new right. For a central character, however, Reagan is a curiously ghostly presence. Like many observers before her, FitzGerald sees Reagan as an insubstantial man, a uniquely passive and disengaged chief executive, an innocent who coasted through life detached not just from policy debates but from reality itself. To support this view, she deftly enlists damning quotations from those who worked with him most closely, including John Sears, David Stockman, Alexander Haig, Michael Deaver, and many others. She quotes Martin Anderson, an economic adviser to the president, comparing Reagan to "an ancient king or Turkish pasha" who "just responded to whatever was brought to his attention and said yes or no, or I'll think about it."

Like previous Reagan-watchers, FitzGerald chalks up the president's detachment from reality to his Hollywood past. As a celebrity, she writes, he lived in "a magical realm somewhere between the real world and fiction." Reagan saw the presidency as one big movie. Again FitzGerald marshals incriminating corroboration from Reagan's associates, such as Chief of Staff Donald Regan, who says that Reagan viewed his daily schedule like a "shooting script" and rarely fretted about his presidential burdens because he had been "learning his lines, composing his facial expression, hitting his toe marks for half a century."