Up, Up and Away
by Rick Perlstein, In These Times, May 1, 2000 (Spring Books, p. 28)
Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War
by Frances Fitzgerald
Simon & Schuster
592 pages, $30
At page 157 of Frances Fitzgerald's new book, the narrative pulls up to December 1982. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger has just reached an impasse in his shimmering dream of increasing military spending 160 percent in six years come hell, high water or budget-deficit projections in the hundreds of billions; popular support for increased defense spending has gone from 80 percent to 20 percent in two years. Congress is withholding funds from the MX missile until the Pentagon figures out how to keep it from becoming a sitting duck in a theoretical Soviet first strike. (Flying the 70-ton behemoths around 24 hours a day on the backs of 747s has been one suggestion, as has been anchoring them to the ocean floor in modules that would bob up obligingly to the surface when needed.) The economy is in recession. "Under the circumstances," Fitzgerald writes, "Reagan and some of his aides began to think about a missile-defense initiative."
This is the language of a story turning a corner. There's one problem. Fitzgerald already turned this corner before -- on page 146, when, in December 1982, Reagan begins thinking about the missile-defense initiative after a report from a panel of private citizens on the possibilities of using satellite weapons in outer space. A big corner marked "December 1982" appears four more times by page 202. Never, to push the metaphor, does the author reach an intersection, either. This isn't avantgarde literature, or some bold historiographic experiment; rather, it seems Fitzgerald herself might not be exactly sure where her tale is heading.
Readers who know Fitzgerald from her previous three acclaimed books will be disappointed by Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War. They remember her relentless originality: In 1972, Fitzgerald won a Pulitzer for Fire in the Lake, the first history of the Vietnam War that actually took Vietnam's culture and history seriously. And her archly ironic wit: America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1979) begins with a publisher recalling with great exasperation the time when the civil rights revolution swept the nation in a blink of the eye, and "all we had was George Washington Carver in the plates. There's only so much you can do with peanuts." And her marvelous intellectual imagination: Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures (1986) propounded that America was flush with utopian communities, just as it had been in the 1830s -- only now these were retirement communities like Sun City, and neighborhoods like San Francisco's Castro District. But with this latest effort, these gifts have largely abandoned her.
There's a lot you can say about America by attending to the intersection of nuclear strategy, public opinion about nuclear weapons, and the unfathomable mind of Ronald Wilson Reagan. It's just that Fitzgerald says too much (in a 54-page chapter called "What Happened at Reykjavik?" she doesn't even bring her protagonists to Iceland until the 32nd page); and, overwhelming us, ends up saying too little -- even as whole chunks of the story go missing. Where, for example, in a book purporting to explain how $ 60 billion in tax dollars managed to get wasted over 17 years, are the military contractors?
Fitzgerald begins with Reagan's character, and here she isn't bad. In her analysis of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, she points out how we tend to misremember the classic picture: The pure-hearted everyman, somehow acceding to a Senate seat only to be framed for corruption by greedy land-speculators, exonerates himself in a marathon fili-buster that elicits bags full of telegrams of support for his idealism and patriotism. Rent the video: That's not how it happened. In fact his adversary was so demonic that he is able to manipulate public opinion back home so that the telegrams call for Mr. Smith's ouster, not his redemption. That only comes off when the villain, through some inexplicable change of heart, confesses, unbidden, to his crime. The film somehow unites two radically opposed visions of humanity: that people have it within themselves to make their world a perfect place, and that people are irremediably fallen, to be redeemed only by apocalypse. "What made Ronald Reagan exceptional as a politician," she concludes, is that he embodied this same pleasing contradiction.
Thus the Star Wars speech of March 1983. Just like Mr. Smith, few remember the whole thing; in the part before he calls for a magic space shield that will render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," he cries out for a greater military buildup against what he had identified only two weeks before as the "evil empire." The Strategic Defense Initiative was Reagan's most characteristic idea, "for, since it was perfectly ambiguous, it had appeal for both Mr. Smiths: for the pre-millennialist who saw enemies advancing from all quarters and for the post-millennialist who believed that the human spirit could rise to a godlike state of disinterestedness."
If only the rest of the book was so riveting. What comes next is mostly about arms control negotiations. There is no subject more numbingly complex, and Fitzgerald has the bad judgment to give us day-by-day -- and, sometimes, excruciating hour-by-hour -- accounts.
The overall arc of the story, hardly visible to all but the most patient reader, is rather interesting. Through the '70s, the informal assumption that has guided nuclear strategy since the arms race began -- in short, "mutually assured destruction" -- becomes institutionalized in the SALT treaty, which endeavors to set caps on every imaginable variable in the two sides' nuclear programs, less one or the other achieve some "strategic superiority." Part of that process is an Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limits defensive installations to one site per country. For in the cracked logic of nuclear strategy, defense has always been judged a very offensive thing indeed. If the destruction of one side is not assured, who's to say they won't be tempted to use their nuclear weapons after all?
Then lurches onstage, in the waning years of the Carter administration, a fiendish band of conservatives (the "High Frontier" panel, a board of self-styled defense experts consisting mostly of businessmen and Cold War ghouls of older vintage like Paul Nitze and the execrable Edward Teller) and CIA operatives ("Team B," an intelligence claque convened for the specific purpose of somehow discrediting the first CIA team's studied conclusion that the Soviets represent no threat at all) determined to scare the country into believing the Soviets are making preparations to "win" a nuclear war. They convince enough people that the Senate would be naive to ratify the SALT II accord. (It is scuttled.)
Other monsters (who, after 1981, reside in the White House) arrive at the idea that the answer to our prayers is abandoning the whole sturdy notion of deterrence altogether -- and hustling our way out of the ABM treaty's plain meaning. They unscrupulously sell what only could be -- if it could work at all -- a defense of our own missiles (thus useful mostly for "winning" a nuclear war) as a defense of our population. And the idea utterly tickles a certain fantasy-prone chief executive, who refuses to believe anything but the lie that missile defense could "protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from the rain."
The end of this arc is the most fascinating part of all. The general public adores the idea of missile defense (scrupulous experts who say it can't be done are dismissed as the kind of naysayers who said we could never get to the moon). The ghouls have touched a nerve. "It was, it turned out, rather difficult to argue that a defense that was 70 or 80 percent effective was worse than no defense at all," Fitzgerald writes, adding, in one of her best passages, that participating in this "Sisyphean task" was "a sure sign of membership in the establishment . . . a ritual, one perhaps almost as comforting as the words so often used to describe the goal of the effort: 'a stable, predictable' relationship with the Soviet Union and 'prudent defense policy.'"
This is what drove Congress to appropriate all those billions for SDI even as ordinary Americans scorned such programs as the B-1 bomber and the MX missile as wasteful extravagances. (It was also why George Bush, the potentate of prudence, refused, in his first year in office, to accept the idea of anything so unstable and unpredictable as Gorbachev's unilateral disarmament of the USSR.)
Tens of billions of dollars and no usable military hardware later, comes a certain poll-loving president. In 1996, his opponent, Bob Dole, searching for an issue that could differentiate him from Bill Clinton without delivering him into the hands of Gingrich, hits upon the leaky tire of missile defense, which now consists of a few limping research programs. This being Dole in 1996, the voters yawn. But then, that's only because Americans assume we already do have missile defense -- "You couldn't pay me enough to believe you," Fitzgerald quotes an auto engineer informed differently by a pollster. "After all, you see it in the movies."
All the while Republicans press for deployment of some makeshift space-based defense system -- clearly banned by even the most fudging reading of the ABM treaty. They come up with the brilliant idea that we needn't worry about the ABM treaty after all, because what we were really worried about was not our co-signatory but "rogue states" like Iran and North Korea. Lo and behold it is January 1999, and Clinton's impeachment case is taken to the Senate. Thus bloodied, he does something the Democrats had been fighting against for 15 years: Just as he shred the social safety net, he shreds the deterrence safety net (and, by alienating just about every other nuclear power with our unilateral arrogance, the arms-control safety net) by going along with the Republicans.
The missile defense bill sails through the Senate in March 1999 by a vote of 97 to 3; the deployment review is set for this June. Suddenly, the ideas of those wacked-out neocons and spooks are the common sense of the entire political establishment and the law of the land. Rogue states, you see. Poll numbers, you see.
Now there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. It's hegemonica. ("Hegemonica: n. The continuation in perpetuity of programs once the province of the far right, rendered law by the cowing of a president who will do anything for popularity.") "History has shown that big military programs are rarely canceled once Congress and the contractors are on board," one analyst tells Fitzgerald. Another says, "When you put this kind of cash on the table, it becomes a force of nature."
It is really too bad we don't have a good book to explain how we got from there to here.
Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Undoing of the American Consensus, forthcoming next year from Hill & Wang.
GRAPHIC: Picture, From They Drew Fire: Combat Artists of World War II by Brian Lanker and Nicole Newnham, published by TV Books. A companion PBS documentary airs on May 15; Illustration, no caption