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

All this adds up to an unflattering portrait. Schizoid behavior ranks as a fairly serious defect in a man who purports to lead the free world. FitzGerald shows how Reagan's feeble grasp of policy could jeopardize efforts to achieve important goals and how his childlike penchant for telling frivolous anecdotes in momentous situations could dash his credibility with foreign leaders. During his December 1987 summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, Reagan regaled the Soviet leader with a story, which he had read in People, of a 1,200-pound man who got stuck in a doorway. At another point in the "negotiations," Reagan recited threadbare anti-Soviet wisecracks, prompting Secretary of State George Shultz to chastise him afterward: "Mr. President, that was a disaster. That man is tough. He's prepared. And you can't just sit there telling jokes."

FitzGerald does not consider Reagan capable of generating practical ideas, so his successes, in her telling, occur only by accident. She mocks him for his belief that a summit consists of the two superpowers' leaders sitting down face to face, dispensing with niggling technical minutiae and fashioning common goals. As it happened, though, something like this actually occurred during Reagan's 1985 encounter with Gorbachev in Geneva: the two men left the stalled talks for a walk to a nearby pool-house, forging a bond of trust in the process. The summit yielded little substantive progress, but the psychological breakthrough was dramatic. Presented with this interpretation, FitzGerald cries foul, objecting that the leaders' sashay had been scripted. But so what? Sensing a thaw in the Cold War, the American public indulged in a little optimism and applauded Reagan's new flexibility, thereby generating more of it.

To explain Reagan's successful summitry, FitzGerald trots out a claim often made by his detractors: that the Great Communicator turned failure into triumph by dint of his magisterial public-relations operation. But she ignores the possibility that Reagan's personal approach to summitry turned out to be (at least in this instance) wise. By suggesting that Reagan's achievements were "only" the product of image-making, FitzGerald shortchanges them. Image is often a component of substance. For example, even if the Geneva summit produced no quantifiable gains, the perception of progress warmed the atmosphere between the superpowers, allowing trust to take hold and relations to improve. Such gains were real, not illusory. But those who scorn the role of perceptions in politics -- who think it is less important or legitimate or "real" than the role of, say, policy analysis -- will remain resentful of Reagan's achievements.

LOST IN SPACE

FitzGerald considers Star Wars the perfect issue to understand Reagan's presidency -- not because the program was of great policy consequence but because it makes a rich metaphor. FitzGerald views the notion that a laser-rigged space umbrella might someday protect the United States from nuclear missiles as pure fantasy. Her reasons will be well known to anyone who followed the Star Wars debate in the 1980s. For one thing, she asserts, most scientists believed that no such anti-ballistic missile system could ever be deployed. Further, even a working antimissile system would not render nuclear weapons "obsolete," as Reagan dreamed, since submarines and airplanes could still deliver apocalyptic payloads. Finally, merely considering deploying such weaponry was foolish, since it would upset the delicate balance of mutual assured destruction that had deterred nuclear strikes for 40 years.

These facts did nothing to impede Reagan's quest for such a system because, FitzGerald argues, the president lived in a celluloid dream-world. He had long been enchanted with the notion of a protective shield, despite the devastating scientific and strategic arguments against it, because he had seen it work in the movies -- specifically, in Alfred Hitchcock's 1966 Torn Curtain, in which Paul Newman's character speaks of an antimissile device that "will make all nuclear weapons obsolete and thereby abolish the terror of nuclear warfare." A variation of that very sentence, FitzGerald notes, appeared in the 1983 speech in which Reagan first floated the idea of Star Wars -- another instance of a president hopelessly in thrall to his fantasies.

According to FitzGerald, the 1983 speech "appalled defense experts in and out of the administration." So why did Star Wars go forward? FitzGerald suggests that different administration officials exploited Reagan's enthusiasm for their own purposes. Some, such as Shultz, saw it as a bargaining chip for arms-control talks with the Soviet Union; by abandoning a nascent SDI, the United States could secure more important Soviet concessions. Other officials, mainly at the Pentagon, envisioned not the shelter for the American populace that Reagan imagined but a limited system designed to defend just U.S. missiles (thus preserving the option of a wartime counterattack). Still others, including neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, hoped that SDI would undermine the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which they had always believed foolishly hamstrung the United States. All three groups, FitzGerald suggests, knew Star Wars was a chimera. But like the emperor's subjects afraid to say he had no clothes, each faction proceeded as if a viable system lay within reach because no one wanted to confront the president with the truth.

FitzGerald's explanation is clever, but it overlooks a more plausible reason for the momentum that Star Wars gathered: some people thought Reagan had actually come up with a good idea. In his memoir, An American Life, Reagan articulated his position succinctly: